ABSTRACT
The Kulturvolker/Naturvolker distinction broke down only in the twentieth century, when a younger generation that included Leo Frobenius attacked the universalist idealism of Adolf Bastian and Rudolf Virchow. Reinfuss’s pioneering work has been continued by younger generations of Polish ethnographers and sociologists. Reinfuss and other national ethnographers all over Eastern Europe were perfecting the scholarly art of ethnic cartography until the rules and conditions of the game were dramatically altered by the events of the 1940s. Jerzy Czajkowski, the long-serving head of the region’s principal open-air museum at Sanok, in his afterword to his recent reissue of Reinfuss’s key text, explicitly encouraged “root-seeking” and the (re)discovery of Lemko culture. The concept of culture shifted during the twentieth century from the singular to the plural to become the foundational concept of anthropology. The Boasian usage of culture was in many ways progressive and emancipatory.
