Mieć (bio)władzę: dziewiętnastowieczne narracje o menonitach na ziemiach polskich i ukraińskich

Dariusz Pniewski

doi:10.18290/rh24727.12s

Published : 2025-01-17

Vol. 72 No. 7 Zeszyt specjalny (2024)

To Have (Bio)Power: Nineteenth-Century Narratives About Mennonites in Polish and Ukrainian Lan

Dariusz Pniewski

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9828-5013

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh24727.12s

Abstract

This article focuses on the Mennonite settlers who inhabited the floodplains of the lower Vistula River from the 16th century and the steppes on the Dnieper River from the late 18th century. Their unique hydrological and agricultural knowledge was so useful that it allowed them both to maintain/ preserve their identity in a foreign environment and to secure their economic prosperity. Autobiographical narratives describing the daily life of the settlers in the Żuławy region (memoirs written by external observers) and in the lands of present-day Ukraine (letters and reports of the settlers' leader) unanimously emphasised the most important features of their practices: pragmatism, purposefulness, and efficiency. These settlers were brought to both the Vistula and the Dnieper delta for their knowledge of agriculture and food processing, their skill in animal husbandry, and experience in preparing land for cultivation, as well as their ability to build mills, reinforced canals, dykes, and drainage facilities. Thus, they were able to manage the economy (not only economics, but, more importantly for me, agriculture and water) and, as the recollections of those who had the opportunity to get to know the Mennonite farms indicate, to suggest their ‘style of reception’ (narrative and ideas). In this paper, I examine how knowledge, skills, and experience enabled the Mennonites to exercise different forms of power? In this context, I understand power as a consistent policy and a coherent, multi-domain project that integrates agricultural, technological, social as well as aesthetic (and economic) domains. Therefore, a useful tool to explore this will be the concepts of biopower according to Michel Foucault and Thomas Lemke. Paul Hamilton's concept of literary politics (Realpoetik) and Alexander Etkind’s “laboratory of modernity” will provide an important background for this interpretation.

Keywords:

Mennonites, boipolitics, biopower, Michel Foucault, Thomas Lemke, Paul Hamilton, Alexander Etkind

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