Invented Traditions: Primitivist Narrative and Design in the Polish Fin de Siècle

Abstract

Around 1900, Poland saw the outgrowth of a nativist primitivism, one that consciously redefined the periphery as a site of cultural resistance. Primitivism, as Colin Rhodes points out, “does not designate an organized group of artists, or even an identifiable style arising at a particular historical moment, but rather brings together artists’ various reactions to ideas of the primitive.” Within the subject ethnicities of central Europe at the turn of the century, “ideas of the primitive” that were taking shape in the then stillemerging discipline of anthropology were influencing various constructions of national and regional identity. The nationalist imperative of the new discipline was emphasized by Jan Karlowicz, who, writing in 1906, argued that “a people certain of its own existence may calmly study its own folklore from a purely scientific point of view. Tribes deprived of their independence and living in endless fear of suppression and decay, however, must, while reflecting upon the nature and conditions of folkloric tradition, consider practical questions as part of such inquiries. For whenever reference is made to national peculiarities and attributes, there constantly arises the question: to be or not to be.” Karlowicz's remarks point toward a deeply subjective primitivist discourse whose articulations, in critical writing about the applied arts as well as literary representations of rural popular culture, form part of what Eric Hobsbawm terms the “invention of tradition.”