Ethnographic Maps

After the last partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1795, according to Steve Seegel, in “Mapping Europe’s Borderlands” (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012),  it was the explicit policy of Catherine of Russia to eliminate any trace of the Commonwealth from history: Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians all became mere tribes that benefited by Russian acquisition — or even by returning to Russian rule. By the middle and late 19th century, patriotic Poles began erasing the name “Lithuania” from historic maps of the area, referring to it only as “Poland,’ and to Lithuanians as merely one of many tribes within Poland, sometimes with no recognition that they weren’t Slavs. Meanwhile, Russian mapmakers characterized Belarusians as “White” Russians, and Ukrainians as “Little” Russians. Nationalistic Lithuanians picked up the drumbeating the early 19oo’s, and some, even today refer to Belarusians as Lithuanians who have merely forgotten that they are really Lithuanian. And Belarusians? On some contemporary map sites they consider
themselves the true inheritors of the Commonwealth, and claim that the Grand Duchy was, in fact, a Belarusian state. All of which had — and have — consequences for how post World War I countries were delimited, and for contemporary politics, most obviously in Ukraine.

Perhaps the penultimate example of ethnographics leading to outrageous fantasy comes from contemporary North Korea. Here is an excerpt from a 2012 interview with Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Adam Johnson in the Paris Review: “When I went to North Korea I discovered that there’s no irony there at all. To speak on a secondary level of meaning, on an ironic level, is a dangerous thing. One of the first places they took me in Pyongyang was the National Museum of Korean History, and the first exhibit there was an old skull fragment in a Plexiglas box. They informed me that the skull was 4.5 million years old and that it was found on the shores of the Taedong river in Pyongyang. Then they showed us a painting about how humanity had begun in Pyongyang and a diorama of the diaspora with all the arrows moving out of North Korea down into South Korea, up into Asia, across into
Europe, and finally into Africa and America. So I asked our docent — who of course doesn’t have a Ph.D., she was just reciting a speech she’s not allowed to deviate from—didn’t people originate in Africa in the rift valley? She said, “No, Pyongyang.” I said, “So is this a skull fragment from an australopithecine?” She said, “No, Korean.” Then she ended her lecture by informing me that therefore I was Korean. When I ironically agreed, my seven North Korean minders all nodded in approval.”

“Sarmatians”: a nomadic people from southern Russia between the Urals and the Don who eventually migrated to the Ukraine and Moldova, and who were assimilated into Slavic tribes by the fourth century AD. The presence of “Germano-Sarmatia” in the historic Lithuanian area is a romantic fantasy of the 17th – 19th centuries which continues to the present day.