As Paul Robert Magocsi writes in the brief Introduction to the monumental work under discussion, he has on numerous occasions visited my institution in Halle, Germany and played the role of “historian-in-residence” in a community of social anthropologists. We have always learned a great deal from him. I feel both gratified and flattered that the first draft of the lectures that led to With Their Backs to the Mountains was written at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, which he describes as an “intellectually stimulating and peaceful environment” (Magocsi Reference Magocsi2015: xx).

I have known the author personally for over a quarter of a century. We have always disagreed on some rather basic issues concerning ethnicity and what makes a nation or nationality.Footnote ¹ As I read his latest opus magnum, I conclude that we are destined forever to do so. For me, the epistemological status of nationality, or “people” is something to be constantly interrogated from the sort of unsettling “constructivist” perspective that I think John-Paul Himka was advocating in the contribution we just heard. It follows that the neat opposition drawn by Magocsi between an “ideal” and an underlying “reality” is misconceived.

Having said that, let me stress how much I have learned from Magocsi’s academic work, even before getting to know him in person. It is surely healthy in this day and age that differences of opinion on scholarly issues need not be an obstacle to collegiality and friendship. He remains for me the gold standard in all matters Rusyn and I cite him often. Citation practices are certainly not symmetrical: I do not think that Magocsi mentions my ethnographic monograph of the village of Wisłok Wielki (based on fieldwork in 1979–1981) in this new book. But then why should he? My book (Hann Reference Hann1985) is primarily a study of the poor Polish peasants who were resettled in the valley of the Wisłok River after the deportations of almost all the indigenous inhabitants in the years 1945–1947. The fact that I worked in that particular village was fortuitous (it might have been anywhere in Galicia). Yet this was my personal point of entry to the debates concerning the people “with their backs to the mountains,” and it has shaped my approach from the beginning. The only East Slavs in Wisłok at the time of my work were a few returnees from the north and west of Poland, desperate to return to the environment they loved. When (having prepared by reading the studies of Roman Reinfuss and other Polish ethnographers of the pre-socialist era) I broached the subject of their Lemko identity, these village informants scoffed. They were Ukrainians, they said, even if they admitted finding the Lemko dialect page of the newspaper of the Ukrainian Socio-Cultural Society Nashe slovo easier to read than the remainder of this official organ, which was written in a literary Ukrainian that sometimes challenged them.

Later, in the archives in Sanok, I discovered that while this town in the foothills of the mountains had undoubtedly played a significant role in Lemko cultural developments of the interwar period, the village of Wisłok Wielki had aligned itself with Ukrainian nationalists in the wake of the First World War. In conversations in Komańcza and other villages of the nearby Osława valley, I gradually realized that the efforts of Reinfuss and other ethnographers to draw a sharp boundary here between the Łemkowie (Lemkos) and Bojkowie (Boikos) were deeply questionable. Unlike the clear ethnolinguistic boundary that separated Lemkos from their Roman Catholic neighbours, the boundary demarcating them from other East Slavic groups was always fuzzy—a great challenge to cartographers, even to the most sophisticated such as Magocsi. Did they constitute groups at all? This population continues to present a challenge to taken-for-granted theories of collective identification, both inside and outside academia.

I have been asked by the convenors of this roundtable discussion to say something about these Carpathian communities from 1945 until today. This implies forming an opinion about the socialist era and its aftermath. Let us begin in the West. There is clearly a basic difference between Slovakia and Poland, since only in the latter were communities (such as Wisłok) physically torn apart in the 1940s, with their inhabitants scattered across western Ukraine and the territories that postwar Poland acquired from Germany. The destruction of countless wooden churches was the most serious loss in terms of material culture; these churches were “other” in both an ethnic and an ideological sense for Polish communists. It goes without saying that this traumatic history has continued to mark processes of cultural identification and the collective memory down to the present day. Let us not forget that the Lemko-Ukrainian revival, notably the annual Watra festivals, began well before the end of Polish socialism. All these developments (including the friction between different groupings, which in my view has sometimes been accentuated by the Polish government’s policies) are expertly chronicled by Magocsi in With Their Backs to the Mountains.

In Slovakia there was no such dramatic external intervention and fewer churches were lost. Yet the sociological consequences of the socialist modernization of the countryside were not so very different: as soon as remote villages become accessible by all-weather roads and are serviced by daily buses, young people leave in search of a better future in towns. The phenomenon of Landflucht is known not only all over Europe, but indeed just about everywhere in the world. In this case, as with so many other indigenous peoples, rural-urban migration by its very definition means departure from the homeland. The relatively encouraging census trends of recent decades concerning self-declaration as Rusyn should not blind us to the impact of this “development.” The consequence is assimilation. In his closing chapters, Magocsi does not conceal the fact that even very enlightened policies of ethnic recognition, such as those employed in Hungary since the 1990s, with their elaborate provision for “minority self-governments,” can lead to rather spurious, artificial increases in self-declaration, motivated by crude “instrumental” factors, namely the availability of resources. In short, the people who used to have their backs to the mountains have been overwhelmingly absorbed into the civilizations of the lowlands and the diasporas. Processes of “modernization” have had consequences similar to those found all over the planet, as indigenous “culture” is packaged, put on the stage (often literally), and marketed to tourists.

I have not visited Wisłok Wielki regularly since my first fieldwork. My last brief visit was in 2006, when the main change I registered was the fact that even this tiny community of some 60 households now has a resident Roman Catholic priest. His church is still the old Greek Catholic cerkiew/tserkov dedicated to St. Onufrii, but the parish long ago started a new cemetery for its Roman Catholics, and no one tends the old Ukrainian graves. Further west in the Lemko zone, in her recent study of hierarchy and pluralism in the community she calls Rozstaje, Agnieszka Pasieka (Reference Pasieka2015) has documented the limitations of ethno-national recognition “on the ground” in a country that is dominated by one ethnic group and one ecclesiastical institution.

To note some negative consequences of the fact that Central Europe has evolved into a region of highly homogenized nation states is not to argue against the legal recognition of minority rights. This brings me to the main fly in the ointment: to the fact that the largest concentration of Carpatho-Rusyns, as documented in “real” time and space by Magocsi, still does not enjoy the rights available to minorities in one form or another in the European Union (EU) member states to the west and south. It is deeply paradoxical that recent developments in Ukraine, hailed by some observers as evidence of an opening to “Western civil society,” should bring no progress as far as the “Rusyn question” is concerned. On the contrary, “political Rusynism” becomes even more suspect whenever Ukrainian nationalism surges. Given these fraught conditions, it is hardly surprising that “ordinary people” prefer to avoid potentially risky commitments and declarations. As Magocsi notes, the great majority of Ukraine’s citizens in Transcarpathia have experienced a decline in living standards, and it is hardly surprising that they prioritize questions of livelihood and survival.

In this context, I have been impressed by the recent field research of another Polish social anthropologist, Agnieszka Halemba. Her book Negotiating Marian Apparitions (Reference Halemba2015a) examined, among other things, the nationalization of religion at a pilgrimage site called Dzhublyk, located in the Greek Catholic deanery of Irshava. Apart from the attention he gives to the impact of evangelical Protestantism (placing today’s churches in a long-term context, 373–377), Magocsi’s review of religious trends in the post-socialist years is surprisingly brief. Yet tensions with Orthodoxy combined with internal divisions have riven the Greek Catholic Church. Many—not all—of the priests of the Mukachevo eparchy favor a union with L’viv to form a single jurisdiction for the whole country, despite the decision of the Vatican in 2007 to continue the status quo. This is the context in which the Virgin Mary, during her appearance to the young village girls in Dzhublyk, told them that she expected the local priests to adopt standard modern Ukrainian as their liturgical language. This nationalist vision of Mary might constitute a more formidable threat to a distinctive regional identity than the modernization policies of Communist atheists in a previous generation. Yet for the time being even the word of the Virgin is insufficient to transcend the historical divisions that over centuries separated the Greek Catholics of Galicia from those of Transcarpathia.

Halemba has found that Ukrainian identification in Transcarpathia was greatly stimulated by the triumph of the Euromaidan revolution in 2013–2014, but that a renewed pragmatism has set in since. These Rusyns would like to enjoy the freedoms available to their co-ethnics inside the EU, but they are more concerned with labor market opportunities than with minority rights. They do not have the passion or conviction of being Carpatho-Rusyn that would be the “ideal” of Magocsi but remain, to use the term of Halemba, curiously “anational” (Reference Halemba2015b). I conclude that the national awakening that has so fascinated Magocsi since the beginning of his scholarly career in the 1970s has yet to impact substantively on the majority of the population in its Transcarpathian homeland. Sadly, I rather doubt that it ever will, even if Ukraine were to be miraculously admitted to the EU in the near future.

I conclude that the case of the people “with their backs to the mountains” is a highly instructive one in the large literature on ethnicity/nationality. No one has done more to advance the study of this region and its inhabitants than Paul Robert Magocsi. It is a tribute to his scholarship that he leaves his readers the freedom to disagree in their interpretations of the encyclopaedic knowledge that he lays out before them.