Drifting borders, anchored community: re-reading narratives in the semiotic landscape with ethnic Lithuanians living at the Polish borderland

ABSTRACT

Everyday lives at the borders have lately been of interest in academic research. Drawing on visual elicitation interviews, this study analyses how ethnic Lithuanians living on the Polish borderland interpret images of the landscape which they inhabit. The aim of this analysis is to understand how these borderlanders position themselves vis-à-vis socio-spatial borderland realities, and how visual materials can instigate extensive plotted narratives. The results demonstrate that the Lithuanian minority in Poland not only challenges or accepts the public narratives, but that they also use them as props to create a unified narrative about their identification and belonging, which transgresses time, place and situated events.

KEYWORDS:

• Borders
• borderland minorities
• border narratives
• narrative identities
• visual elicitation
• semiotic landscape

Introduction

The perspective that one important way to analyse borders is by looking at border(ing) practices ‘from below’ has been well established in border studies (Paasi 1998; Donnan and Wilson 1999; Newman 2006). Research which draws on such a view often relies on life stories and identity constructions of borderland inhabitants (Kaiser and Nikiforova 2006; Rogova 2009; Prokkola 2009; Pfoser 2014; Lynnebakke 2020). Such studies question the dominant and pave the way for more critical understandings of borders as ‘multiscalar’, both material and symbolic, dynamic, multidimensional constructs, which have different meanings for different actors in different situations and times (Laine 2016). Less often, scholars make use of what is available outside of the interview settings (in particular, images taken on the borderland) to prompt the interviewees’ narratives (see, for example, Meinhof and Galasiński 2000, 2002). Dwellers are invited to reflect on their lived spaces and to comprehend how socio-spatial realities shape their ways of being. Building on this approach, this article reports on the findings of visual elicitation interviews with borderland inhabitants as respondents and informants, using images from the borderland as prompts.

The respondents of this case study are national Lithuanian minority members living at the Polish borderland, neighbouring Lithuania. This borderland contains an inner European (EU) and Schengen border. The Polish side of the borderland has a distinguishable Lithuanian minority, and the Lithuanian language is prevalent on the Polish side (however, this is not the case vice-versa on this borderland specifically) (Kudžmaitė and Juffermans 2020).

By showing a carefully selected set of images of this border landscape as stimuli to the participants, this study reports on how they position themselves vis-à-vis borderland realities, evident in the landscape. After documenting aspects of the landscape and introducing them to the inhabitants, two levels of reflexive narratives are elicited: narratives about the landscape (facts, history, opinions) and narrative identities (narratives explaining the identification and self-positioning of the participants).

This article begins with an introduction to the Lithuanian minority living on the Polish borderland. This is followed by a discussion of existing research on borderland spaces and their inhabitants. Then, the article turns to introducing narrativity as the theoretical and methodological lens of this study. It continues with the analysis of the interviews. The article concludes that looking at the borderland realities from the narrativity perspective allows us to problematize the dichotomy of public (publicly available) and personal (identity) narratives, where borderland inhabitants simply explain, oppose or agree with the multiscalar borderland design. (Visible) public narratives from the borderland evoke narrative identities, and inhabitants use these public narratives to support and fuel their versions of reality in various much more complex ways.

The Lithuanian minority on the Polish borderland

The Lithuanian national minority in Poland most densely inhabits Puńsk and Sejny gminas (the smallest administrational units), close to the border. These Lithuanians are indigenous to this region, that is, the movements of the state borders forced the inhabitants of the area to ‘change their national status without changing the place of living’ (Namiotko and Konaszewski 2017, 75).

The lands on the current Polish side of the Polish-Lithuanian borderland were part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the 6^th century until 1795. From 1569 to 1795, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania formed a political confederation with the Kingdom of Poland, so the two countries had close political and cultural ties and influenced each other for centuries. Between 1795 and 1919, the lands in question moved back and forth between Lithuania and Poland. In 1919, multiple border demarcations caused fights across the border, called the Sejny Uprising. Poland won the fights and attached the area, in which Lithuanians formed a prominent national minority.

After World War II, Poland was a communist country and Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union. In Poland, efforts were made to homogenize the population and to repatriate minorities to their kin states (Kisielowska-Lipman 2002, 138). The Lithuanian minority resisted to be displaced from their homeland in Poland to Soviet Lithuania, and, as other minorities, it experienced assimilation through repressive state politics (Stravinskienė 2004).

In the communist era in Poland, intra-group activities were reduced and censorship was imposed (Stravinskienė 2004, 28). The Lithuanians in Poland at that time were freer of expression and foreign contacts than the Lithuanians in Soviet Lithuania, but being geopolitically separated, they have gradually formed an idealistic view of Lithuania (Stravinskienė 2004, 67).

After the dissolution of communism in Poland in 1989 and the country’s integration in NATO (1999), the EU (2004) and the Schengen Area (2007), national minorities have become a subject of the national and local governmental politics (Borowska 2003, 146). But the relationships between Poles and members of ethnic minorities became inflamed by contradicting ethnic narratives: ‘one group’s “heroes” were another’s “oppressors”’ (Kisielowska-Lipman 2002, 142).

The currently most important Polish document concerning regional and national minorities, the Act of 6 January 2005 on National and Ethnic Minorities and the Regional Languages, offers to use minority languages as ‘auxiliary languages’ in gminas with a minimum of 20% of inhabitants affiliated with a national minority (Barwiński and Leśniewska 2014). It allows official bilingualism at municipal offices, as well as using additional names of towns, villages and other physiographical objects alongside Polish; there are 30 bilingual Polish-Lithuanian town and village names in the gmina of Puńsk (Barwiński and Leśniewska 2014).

Borderlands, identification and semiotic realities as multiscalar complexities

The case study presented in this article is rooted in research on borderlands, borderland communities, and semiotic border landscapes as multiscalar socio-spatial realities. Previous research has reported that borderlands can be dialogical places with different levels of connectivity between the two sides. Rogova (2009) has illustrated how individual border crossings and cross-border settlements of Russians in neighbouring Norway have transformed the borderland into a fluid ‘familiar’ place for Russians. Kaiser and Nikiforova (2006) have shown that multiscalar narratives of and on the controversial Seto borderland between Estonia and Russia clearly define ‘the interiority and exteriority of place and identity’ of their inhabitants (Kaiser and Nikiforova 2006, 931; see also Laine 2016).

Research has also shed light on the identification of borderland inhabitants. Some authors have suggested that borderland inhabitants do not necessarily have a unique ‘borderland identity’ (Haase 2005). However, research has also illustrated the complexity of borderland identities. Prokkola (2009) has reported that Finnish-Swedish borderland inhabitants often feel that they have a different (multicultural) identity from those living in the mainland. However, she also emphasizes that borderland identities are not fixed and vary from individual to individual. Pfoser (2014), building on her research in the Estonian city of Narva, has suggested that borderland inhabitants not only negotiate the state-imposed versions of the past and present, but that they also employ their own past and present experiences to create unique borderland realities. Thus, understanding one’s own position at the borderland connects many levels of experiences from different times and places and is not entirely situated in the here-and-now of the borderland.

The argument of multiscalar complexity also echoes in research of semiotic border landscapes. A semiotic landscape is ‘any (public) space with visible inscription made through deliberate human intervention and meaning making’ (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010, 2–3). Public spaces are often shaped ‘from above’, but they are also canvases for resistance and agency ‘from below’. Certain discourses shape the semiotic border landscape, defining which languages and signs are accepted and circulate in the borderland freely, which ethnic groups are supported, which symbolism is used, or how the ‘other’ behind the border is treated. But these attempts are met by local efforts to shape the landscape according to the lived experiences of locals (see, for example, Muth 2014; Kudžmaitė and Juffermans 2020).

Lynnebakke (2020) has introduced another level of complexity at borderlands, showing that, when considering different aspects of the border at different historical moments, the same borderlanders at the same time can have multiplex identities, and give different meanings to the same border, its landscape, as well as the neighbouring community. This is consistent with the theory of narrativization of identity and place defined in the next section.

Narratives as a theoretical and methodological tool to explore borderlands

Narratives are considered as theoretical and methodological cornerstones in this study. This section first briefly discusses the narrative approach as a theoretical anchor in border studies and beyond. A crucial link is then made between narratives and identification (the so called ‘narrative identities’).

Border studies, among other research fields, have explored the twofold character of the ‘narrative realities’. On the one hand, they are created from socially constructed discourses on which social institutions and systems are based (see Paasi 1998). Narratives circulate in social interactions, during which people ‘check whether they share stories to be told about the world they live in’ (Eder 2006, 257) and which guide their actions (Somers 1994, 613–614). On the other hand, border narratives stem from personal life stories of individuals (see Newman 2006; Prokkola 2009). As such, the relationship between people’s individual narratives and their narrative environments is maintained: ‘the constant back and forth between narratives and identities (between living and telling), on the one hand, allows people to adjust stories to fit their own “identities” and, conversely, permits them to tailor “reality” to fit their stories’ (Vila 1997, 155). These narratives which actors use to think about themselves in relation to others and to broader social narratives are often called ‘narrative identities’ (Vila 1997). Similar narrative identities of different individuals exist when their personal narratives and their interpretations of social narratives at hand (which are limited in number) intersect (see Somers 1994; Prokkola 2009).

The method

I first engaged in visually documenting the semiotic landscape while driving at the borderland from Lithuania to Poland and back to Lithuania in July 2019. This trip was a revisitation of the borderland where I previously conducted extensive linguistic and semiotic landscape research (Kudžmaitė and Juffermans 2020).

Fourteen images were selected and grouped into four sets, three of which will be discussed in this article. The selection of the most representative images is anchored in the previous study, choosing images which represent the noticed prominent aspects of the borderland. Many questions could not be answered from the semiotic landscape alone. This highlights the complexity of our lived realities – in borderlands and beyond – and advocates for the triangulation of data and research methods.

The images of the first set (Figures 1 and 2) represented different border infrastructures, Figure 1 showing how the Polish-Lithuanian border looks now and Figure 2 depicting a border relic.

Figure 1. The Polish-Lithuanian border crossing with the visible entrance to Lithuania, the official sign ‘the Republic of Lithuania’ on the left and the sign of the EU on the right of the road. © [Gintarė Kudžmaitė].

Figure 2. A relic of the Polish-Lithuanian border fence, called the ‘Iron Curtain’. Nowadays it is a cultural heritage site on the Lithuanian side. © [Gintarė Kudžmaitė].

The second group of images contained unofficial multi-(but mostly bi-)lingual billboards meant for advertising local products and services, and cultural activities or places (Figures 3 and 4).

Figure 3. A bilingual (Polish above, Lithuanian below) billboard advertising a slaughterhouse and meat producer in Poland. © [Gintarė Kudžmaitė].

Figure 4. Duplicated monolingual advertisements in Lithuanian (left) and Polish (right) of a Lithuanian national celebration in Sejny. © [Gintarė Kudžmaitė].

The third set of images depicted official mono- and bilingual billboards (the names and the maps of the towns) in Puńsk and Sejny (Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5. A bilingual (Polish above, Lithuanian below) official town name billboard of Puńsk. © [Gintarė Kudžmaitė].

Figure 6. A monolingual (Polish) official town name billboard of Sejny. © [Gintarė Kudžmaitė].

The positionality of the researcher must be noted as potentially influencing the findings. As a Lithuanian by origin, I chose to interview the Lithuanian national minority in Poland due to the linguistic access to and knowledge about this community. In the process, I understood that my being a Lithuanian also influenced the level of openness of the participants in the interviews and to certain extent their answers. Notwithstanding its socially constructed and, in Anderson’s (2006) words, ‘imagined’ nature, me and the participants share the same ethno-linguistic background (the participants spoke repeatedly about their ethnic Lithuanian roots). I felt that the participants formed a level of trust in me due to their implicit understanding of our shared core values and interpretations of history. In return, I opted to listen to their stories with an open mind and a level of trained reflexivity. However, I had to be extra careful to remain critical and to not to impose my own perspectives on the participants. It is almost undoubtful that I would have received very different answers and attitudes if I approached the Poles living on the same borderland, and that my positionality would have had a completely different meaning in such a study.

Ten participants were recruited in the Polish towns of Sejny and Puńsk, first via the existing local contacts and then using a snowball method. The interviews were mostly taken at homes and workplaces. The average length of the interviews was half an hour. The age of the participants ranged from their forties to eighties. The interviews were carried out in Lithuanian and the excerpts used in the article were translated to English by me. The excerpts below are selected from both geographic locations and all age groups. This selection represents the recurrent motives central in this article without singling out any specificities based on participants’ demographies.

The age of the participants is one of the criteria which may have had a specific impact on research findings. Young ethnic minority members are often more adaptive to the perspectives of the majority, while older people with memories and traumas from the past often resist to accept ethnolinguistic varieties or are unwilling to blend into the majority (see Haase 2005, 223). The findings of this study thus might have been different if I also interviewed younger participants.

This article is part of a project that received a ‘final positive clearance’ from the independent Ethics Committee for Social Sciences and Humanities (University of Antwerp). The interviews were audio-recorded, and then transcribed and analysed using NVivo qualitative data analysis software. The interviewees signed an informed consent and received an information sheet about the aims and procedures of the study. No names were retained during the transcription, analysis and presentation of the results.

Participants were interviewed using a visual elicitation technique. In this study, researcher-generated images (taken by the researcher) were used, aiming to create links between a semiotic landscape study, in which the researcher systematically takes and analyses images of the landscape, and a visual study, which – in the form of visual elicitation – involves participants as respondents to those images. Compared to participants’ own visual materials used in other variants of visual elicitation interviews, researcher-generated images are unexpected stimuli for the interviewees and the creation of meaning happens ‘in situ’. Using a carefully selected set of researcher-generated images, such a design elicits unanticipated (both to the researcher and the interviewees) enlightening outcomes which facilitate narrativity. This proves essential in researching complex multiscalar (identity) narratives, because visuals help connect inner life with external manifestations of society, culture and history, and they elicit progressive talking about such complex matters as identification, which is seldom easily visibly or verbally communicated (see Harper 2002, 13, 18). Concrete visual stimuli from local physical surroundings also allow participants to gradually build, dis- and re-assemble multiple levels of their memories and impressions, and to create spatiotemporal movement in and among these narratives, as comes into light in what follows.

Analysis of the narratives of the Lithuanian minority borderland inhabitants in Poland

The careful reading and analysis of the interviews revealed that images from the semiotic border landscape evoke different types of narratives. First, these narratives are related to how participants interpret their surrounding spatial elements. Second, the evoked narratives are also part of their narrative identities, in which memories, experiences and feelings intersect to create a plotted story while reacting to external stimuli (images) to initiate or fill-in the stories. These stories often expand to times, places and events not necessarily bound to the current border situation. The interview excerpts below show these different narrative formations.

Narratives about the borderland

Prompted by Figures 1 and 2, the participants mostly spoke about a direct and a symbolic meaning of the border. The direct meaning is about geopolitical borders between countries, while the symbolic aspect involves boundaries between people. When talking about borders, participants also vividly created a plotted narrative, which either moved from the previous closed border regime to the current open border, or vice-versa. Even though the participants were presented with still images of the border, they created narratives based on the movement across time (see Meinhof and Galasiński 2000, 334). This confirms Pfoser’s (2014) idea that memories and current events shape each other in the creation of a unified narrative. This also shows the significance of (static) visual stimuli in evoking plotted narratives.

Figure 3 and the photos alike were recognized as depicting billboards targeting frequent Lithuanian cross-border shoppers (prices have been lower in Poland than in Lithuania, especially after Lithuania introduced the Euro in 2015). The participants observed negative consequences for the local borderland inhabitants, because the prices have increased after a vast number of Lithuanians started shopping on the Polish borderland.

Several photos representing bilingual billboards informing about cultural activities (such as Figure 4) generally prompted reactions about Lithuanian events and language use on the borderland of Poland and considerations about the relationship between the local Lithuanians and the local Poles. Several interviewees admitted that when hearing or seeing the Lithuanian language in public, they feel ‘so good, so easy’. This echoes the findings of Borowska (2003, 137) and Kalnius (2006, 60), confirming that the Lithuanian language knowledge is the expression of the identification of Lithuanians in Poland. Further, the interviewees stated that the Lithuanian cultural events are advertised in both languages because Lithuanians want to keep good relationships with Poles. This confirms the finding of Kalnius (2006, 61) that through cultural activities the Lithuanians in Poland try to become more appealing to Poles.

However, the same images also triggered memories about negatively charged past relationships between the two ethnic groups. The participants vividly remembered that right after the dissolution of the communist regime in Poland, the local Lithuanians were neglected, while their national symbolism and language were desecrated. This is in line with Stravinskienė (2004, 101) report that the local relationship at the Polish borderland between the local Poles and Lithuanians was tensed due to the different interpretations of certain past events (particularly the questions of the Sejny Uprising and the Vilnius region). Social identification especially comes to the fore when it is threatened (Eriksen 1993, 68), which is confirmed by the interviewees’ narratives.

Images depicting official billboards of town names (Figures 5 and 6) inspired very interesting considerations about the different conditions in the two gminas of Puńsk and Sejny. While official billboards in Sejny are monolingual (Polish) due to a smaller number of local ethnic Lithuanians, the geographically smaller Puńsk gmina with more ethnic Lithuanian inhabitants enjoys the right to bilingual official signage. Some of the interviewees reported that for local Lithuanians, Lithuanian on bilingual billboards is superfluous, because they all speak Polish (and the Lithuanian towns’ names often differ only very slightly from the Polish ones). When the majority ‘stresses cultural differences and turns them into virtues, minority members may feel that they are being actively discriminated against’ (Eriksen 1993, 142). Separating the Lithuanian minority from the Polish majority by introducing Lithuanian inscriptions might have (unintentionally) caused old wounds to reopen. According to the participants, the bilingual town names only inspire controversies locally, for example, vandalism outbursts. Moreover, the negative consequences also extend internationally, having a direct impact on the heated discussion on the official Polish language use in the Vilnius region in Lithuania. The Polish ethnic minority living there then also feels entitled to similar language rights, which are not granted because of different language laws in Lithuania. This is a clear example of how the public narratives reflected in the semiotic landscape differ from how they are interpreted by the borderland inhabitants, and how these inhabitants expand their narratives to other times and places to build an intact narrative.

The narrative identities of the participants

Emerging dichotomies: us, our brothers and our neighbours

Borderland inhabitants very often maintain links and relationships with the people behind the borderline (Donnan and Wilson 1999; Rogova 2009) and they can identify with more than one country, nation or ethnolinguistic group (Prokkola 2009). The narratives of the interviewees from the present study revealed a complex relationship with the Lithuanian nation and the ‘other’ side of the border, while the relation with Poles and Poland was unambiguous.

Only one person overtly and expressively considered himself as a citizen of Poland (even though all participants have a Polish citizenship, it was not emphasized in their stories, which leads us to questioning its inherent importance in their identity construction):

Sometimes [they] compliment [us] that we, as citizens of Poland, are honest people, we respect that country and its laws, we celebrate its festivities.

When talking about the Polish citizenship, this participant uses the pronoun ‘we’ to refer to the Lithuanians of Poland, and he opposes them to Poles. This shows that for this participant, the citizens of Poland differ among themselves, as they form groups based on ethnic belonging. Lithuanians in Poland are a classic example of indigenous Eastern European ethnic groups which define themselves as members of a distinct nation, different from the nation of their fellow citizens, and nationality in such cases is based on ethnicity and not on citizenship (Brubaker 2004, 149). The participant also uses the words ‘that country’ when talking about Poland, which indicates a certain level of detachment.

In all other occasions, Poles were considered as ‘neighbours’ and as different from local Lithuanians, illustrated by the use of the classic ‘us’ and ‘them’ distinction:

Well, we live with Poles, our neighbours are Poles and friends are Poles … We will not avoid them the same as they will not avoid us.

Borders have opened for Lithuania, and everything is [different], the Polish side looks differently at Lithuania; at local Lithuanians, us; let’s say those living here in Sejny and its surroundings.

In the first sentence of the second extract above, the interviewee opposes the ‘Polish side’ and Lithuania, as if talking about the two sides separated by the border. However, in what follows, he specifies that while saying ‘Lithuania’, he also talks about the ‘local’ Lithuanians (‘us’) who live in Sejny. So, he uses the word ‘Lithuania’ to define the Lithuanians living in Poland, who are then opposed to the Polish inhabitants.

The narratives concerning the Lithuanian identity and the links to the Lithuanians behind the border echo Borowska’s (2003) findings that Lithuanians in Poland recognize themselves as group members (Poland’s Lithuanians) as well as part of the Lithuanian nation:

But a border, as we, dzūkai, say ‘rubežius’, is a border … It can be forced to come back every second.

This middle-aged interviewee has identified with dzūkai, the inhabitants of one of the ethnographic regions of Lithuania close to the border with Poland, who have their dialect and use a word for a ‘border’ (‘rubežius’), different from the word of the same meaning in the standard language (‘siena’).

In the following extract, the participant uses the pronoun ‘we’ when he defines who uses the Lithuanian word ‘šliūbas’, which is an old borrowed word for ‘marriage’, not used in the standard language:

And now if there is a funeral or a wedding and anyone wants to have ‘šliūbas’, as we say, [can do it] freely in Lithuanian.

However, the participants equate ethnic Lithuanians on both sides of the border only when they talk about the present. Discussing the past events, participants clearly separate between the Lithuanians in Lithuania and the local Lithuanians in Poland:

Of course, this Iron Curtain as we called it is the reason why we were separated from Lithuania for fifty years even though we have our roots there and our relatives live there. […]. The communication was […] very limited and the entrance to Lithuania was controlled. […] We were separated by the border, and villages were separated and towns and people […].

From these interviewees’ narratives it seems that Lithuanians in Poland find themselves somewhere in the Brubaker’s (1995) triangle which connects them as ethnic minority members with the state in which they live (Poland) and the ‘homeland’ (Lithuania). Kaiser and Nikiforova (2006, 939), however, remind us that this triangular relationship might be too reductionistic in certain cases, and this becomes apparent in the interview excerpts below, where Lithuania emerges on both sides of the border.

The (non)existing border: the territorial identification

Defining how the Lithuanians in Poland see themselves in relation to the local Poles and to the Lithuanians behind the border is one way to discuss how Poland’s Lithuanians identify themselves. Another way is to look at how the border in the participants’ stories defines the lands they live in.

When the geopolitical border between the two states is considered as non-existent or open, the participants feel as if they live in Lithuania:

But for us Lithuanians living here I think there is no border anymore, because we feel so at ease and I live as if in Lithuania, still here are Lithuanian ethnic lands.

However, when the border is considered as closed, it disconnects the lands, where the participants live, from mainland Lithuania:

And […] because the border was here established in [19]20, in [20]20 we will sadly celebrate a hundred years since we are detached from the Lithuanian root.

My roots are in Lithuania but as I say since we are now separated … My grandparents lived here, my parents and now my brother. We have lived here for centuries. Here is the homeland.

The Lithuanian ‘roots’ are mentioned in both extracts above. In the first extract, the root is in Lithuania, from which the participant feels detached by the international border. In the second extract, the root is both in Lithuania and ‘here’, in the ‘homeland’. The (existing) geopolitical border between the two states cuts Lithuania ‘here’ from mainland Lithuania. Interestingly, this appears to create two ‘Lithuanias’, which seem to have acquired different elements, depending on the (not necessarily entirely fixed) participants’ understanding of the socio- and spatiotemporal dimensions of their environments.

The Lithuanian language and culture as a taboo and as a priority

Two of the most important criteria of belonging to the Lithuanian nation for the Lithuanians living in Poland are culture and language (Daukšas 2017, 140). Our participants confirmed this by identifying not only with the ethnic group and the land, as in the previous narratives, but also with the Lithuanian language and culture, as illustrated in what follows:

Before it was ‘oh, you speak Lithuanian, better do not, it is forbidden’ but now you see the Poles […] even write advertisements in Lithuanian […]. It was forbidden to speak Lithuanian in public places so [they used to say] ‘why are you speaking [Lithuanian]?’ […] When the Lithuanian Consulate had just opened, the Lithuanian flag was desecrated, eggs were thrown […]. Now you see even the Poles themselves [use the Lithuanian language] and this does not bother them.

The extract above explains how the Lithuanian language on the Polish borderland transformed from underacknowledged to appreciated. The voices of unknown agents (‘oh, you speak Lithuanian, better do not, it is forbidden’, ‘why are you speaking?’) as well as passive verbs (‘It was forbidden’, ‘the Lithuanian flag was desecrated’) are used to illustrate how the Lithuanian language was unappreciated in the past. In this way, the interviewee gives part of the agency to an unknown actor. Alternatively, ‘Poles’ is noticeably used only while describing the present (positive) circumstances, possibly implying good present relationships between the two ethnic groups, and not wanting the old discourses to resurface.

And we as a minority (Lithuanian) in Sejny live happier than the local Poles. They do not have any gatherings. […] we have ensembles from the smallest kindergarteners to the oldest. Maybe because we miss Lithuania, we gather, we remember. […] we are drawn to old songs, this is how we have missed Lithuania. And now in church or somewhere else we [sing] bravely. Because there were all sorts of instances, the bishop in the church pushed us, chased us, did not allow to sing even one psalm, these were the times. And when someone forbids something, you just want it more …

This local in her eighties elaborates on the cultural activities of the Lithuanian minority in Poland. The active cultural life of the Lithuanians is explained by longing for Lithuania. Old Lithuanian songs are presented as markers of Lithuanian-ness. For ethnic membership to be personally important, it must contain something that the individual considers valuable (see Eriksen 1993, 33). Using a lot of personal pronouns (I, we, us), the interviewee presents the Lithuanian culture and language as actively practiced and lived. By contrasting the level of involvement in respective ethno-cultural activities by local Poles and by local Lithuanians, this woman emphasizes the latter being much more culturally active. Ethnicity can be highlighted or minimized to gain resources (Roosens 1989, 158), and this could have been an indirect and inadvertent attempt to compensate for any remaining inequalities or injustice that the participant may still be feeling. Or, this is simply an expression of genuine appreciation of the group she closely identifies and spends a lot of time with.

Conclusions

The aim of this article was to investigate how borderland inhabitants position themselves vis-à-vis borderland realities, visible in the landscape. This study connected the expanding academic research on borderland spaces and their inhabitants’ identification. It has also supported the use of the narrativity lens to research borderlands.

By analysing visual elicitation interviews with the Lithuanian minority borderland inhabitants of Poland, this study has illustrated that when exposed to socio-spatial borderland realities, participants engage in two types of narrativization. First, they opt to explain what they see, based on their knowledge and experience. For example, the border has both a direct (geopolitical) and a symbolic aspect for the interviewees. It is also narrated as dynamic and changing from closed to open. Multiple narratives were given to explain the Lithuanian language prevalence in Poland: the economic (it is profitable for Lithuanians to shop in Poland and the authors of the bilingual billboards make use of that), the cultural (cultural life of the Lithuanian community is advertised bilingually to connect the two ethnolinguistic communities) and the official bilingualism (the official bilingual billboards are problematic and unnecessary).

Second, and more important, the participants’ narrative identities are ‘read’ in and evoked from the surrounding landscape. The participants have used a variety of different stimuli available to them (those shown to them in images from the borderland, but also those not captured in these images) to back-up their prevailing and quite well-established narrative identities. This comes to light in extensive interviewees’ stories about their Lithuanian ‘roots’, homeland and a border which connects the Lithuanian lands. Even though the interviewees have not actually lived in the Lithuanian state (long-term), their complex narratives of their Lithuanian identities are so strong, that they cross time and space and can be evoked by many different manifestations in the surroundings. For example, some interviewees spoke about themselves as Lithuanians. However, when considering the past, they often made a distinction between ‘us’ and the ‘other’ Lithuanians behind the closed border. Another way of narrating their identity was by establishing how they see the border (as opened or closed) and by indicating which lands it separates or connects. The third way of identifying was through narrating their language and culture from their past mistreatment to their current prioritized position. The past events continue to shape the narratives of this moment, even if these narratives are born from mere snapshots in time. The participants do not oppose the current political system and they are generally quite happy with their present situation (Poles accept and accommodate them much more than in the past, and the open European border allows them to keep contact with Lithuania easily). They do not propose any change and they generally do not problematize their present life in Poland, however, they still hold to very strong narratives of the Lithuanian inheritance of their inhabited lands and to past experiences and memories. These narratives recur in many of the interviewees’ stories, and this shows that similar narratives can be maintained by different people in similar situations (see Somers 1994; Prokkola 2009).

The narrativity approach revealed a complex character of borderland realities. The dichotomy between how the landscape is designed and how it is locally used does not exhaust the explanation for borderland complexity. Borderland inhabitants move back-and-forth from available public narratives to their narrative identities, their narratives cross space and time and connect a variety of experiences and memories in a unique network.

Consistent with previous studies, this article demonstrated that the visual elicitation method is a useful tool to investigate the borderland inhabitants’ viewpoints. If we provide the interviewees with the (visual) aspects of the border landscape, we evoke their personal narratives as reactions to them. In this study, the participants used these visual stimuli to develop their individual narratives stretching way beyond of what was seen in the images. This shows the strength of the visual elicitation interviewing technique. It creates space for complex narratives guided by both the documented environment and the interviewees’ inner stories. Only by combining the visible aspects from the borderland with the personal narratives of the borderland inhabitants, we can get a more precise view of how the borderland functions for its dwellers.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the editorial team of the journal and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on how to improve the manuscript. I am also grateful to my kind-hearted participants for sharing their knowledge about the area, their stories, and their hospitality. Finally, many thanks to my small logistics team.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) Research Grant [2018-G025519N].