The Forester as a Figure
… between communism and nationalism in Europe’s last primeval forest
Eunice Blavascunas
Whitman College, Washington
Friday October 11, 12 pm – 1 pm
FSC 1221, Forest Sciences Centre
Light lunch for the first 60.
Please bring your own beverage
The Białowieża Forest in north eastern Poland is frequently touted as “Europe’s last primeval forest.” The forest complex is split between a strictly preserved national park and a larger timber producing forest. In an ethnographic and historical analysis this lecture explores the figure of the forester, a figure that is entangled in both nationalist and communist pasts.
As a figure, the forester is more than a civil servant working neutrally for the common good or the state. In a part of the world which experienced violent twentieth century histories, forest aesthetics and historical truths appear to emerge when local residents conjure the forester.
Eunice Blavascunas is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She completed her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz and has taught at the University of Washington’s Program on the Environment, and held a Fulbright fellowship in addition to fellowships at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, and at the Leibniz Institut GWZO in Leipzig. For more than 20 years she has been researching and writing about conservation politics in nature preserves in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland’s Białowieża Forest. Her forthcoming book, “Of Forests and Time” will be published with Indiana University Press in 2019.
