Ethnography, tourism, and music-culture in the Tatra Mountains: Negotiated representations of Polish Gorale ethnicity

In this dissertation, I examine the negotiation of the ethnic boundaries in the Tatra Mountain region of southern Poland called Podhale, a border region between Poland and Slovakia. Gorale are the regional people of Podhale, and their ethnicity was once considered the product of isolation. I challenge this notion of isolation and propose that Gorale ethnicity is historically the product of diverse migrant travelers to Podhale and today is negotiated between Gorale themselves and more recent travelers to Podhale, specifically tourists and ethnographers.; If geographic isolation ever existed in Podhale, it is now replaced by a social and political need for distinction---a conceptual isolation---that is actively maintained by some Gorale with, among other things, music-culture. I demonstrate how the conception of Gorale as a bounded ethnic group parallels the creation of a bounded repertoire I call muzyka podhala (music of Podhale). This repertoire was canonized by musical ethnographers and the local musicians with whom they worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Muzyka podhala today remains a point of departure for representations of Gorale by themselves and by others.; After reviewing the history of Podhale, and the histories of the related activities of tourism and ethnography in Podhale, I examine responses by Gorale to the conceptual constructions of muzyka podhala and Gorale ethnicity. I trace the development of song and dance troupes and folklore festivals in Podhale and show how they maintain a canonized interpretation of Gorale music-culture and identity. I compare the ritualized folklore festival performances to restaurant performances, World Beat musical fusions, and the repertoire performed at funerals. I show that, depending on the context, Gorale musicians today either perform to the expectations of outsiders or they self-consciously thwart those expectations to convey different histories of themselves.; My approach to these issues is interdisciplinary, drawing principally from ethnomusicology, history, Eastern European area studies, folklore and anthropology. The basis of my methodology was extensive fieldwork and archival research in Poland and neighboring countries from 1992 to 1997.