"Brasil a la polonaise" "The Contemporary Cultural Landscape of Areas Settled by Polish Immigrants in Brazil. The Case Study of Cruz Machado Region" TOBIASZ ORZEŁ Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Faculty of History Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, ul. Gołębia 9, 31-007 Kraków e-mail: tobiaszorzel@gmail.com Forno - a charcoal kiln - a good way to make money (5a Vicinal Iguaçu)

Description popularizing the research project

Open-air museums and ethnographic parks have their unmistakeable charm. The rooms smelling of old wood are filled with objects known from illustrations in history books and, much more seldom, from grandparents' stories. It often turns out that different nations decorated similar items in different way. That is how ethnographers distinguish communities which lived in the past as neighbours but in a completely different way. Basing on the artefacts, photographs, buildings, it is possible to pinpoint old diasporas surrounded by native communities. The most precious are meetings with descendants of the settlers. They often treasure precious heirloom , documents, old photographs, costumes and items of sentimental value which characterise their ethnicity.
Not such a long time ago, it had been 100 years since Polish settlers arrived in Cruz Machado in Parana, founding their own community, existing to this day. In the meantime the generations changed, yet there is still the area where you can expect cultural distinctiveness, from religion to farming. Ethnographic expeditions look for the distinctiveness or its signs. Researchers follow the same steps as in reconstructing an abandoned village: collect items, catalogue and analyze old photographs and documents. They talk to indigenous residents and descendants of settlers, checking how much the cultural landscape, initiated by the arrival of first immigrants, changed over the century. It looks that some of the traditional evidence of the occurring changes: photographs or documents, the researchers will not find in old creaking wooden trunks any more. Looking for them, it is necessary to search the Internet where now blogs and posts on social media often provide equally precious data as parish registers or museum archives long ago.
Each community leaves some trace where they live, like a fingerprint: both in real world and virtual world of global web. Hence, both areas are now ethnographic research material: one available with one click at the desk, and the other which requires an exciting journey to a Polish settlement in Parana, Brazil.

Abstract

Human beings are characterized by the desire to tame the space where they are located. When a human selects an area of the settlement, they modify the natural landscape to suit their needs. This phenomenon is clearly-seen in the case of colonization "in cruda radice" - the territory without any traces of human presence. We had to deal with this type of process in the case of populating the interior of Brazil in the 19th and 20th century. Polish peasants migrating from their fathers' land in search of prosperous and free life were an important "colonization ele-ment" . Since 1911 emigrants from Lublin, Chelm, Zamosc and the southern region of Podlasie came to the newly founded federal colony Cruz Machado in Parana. The aim of the study is to document indicated cultural landscape, today - more than a hundred years after the arrival of the first immigrants. Research questions arise. Does the area currently stand out from neigh-bouring areas? If so, what is it? Is it noticeable only in the material elements? How important are non-material aspects of the space (names, beliefs and practices)? It is truly the idea of the "Little Poland" hidden in the area of subtropical climate? The research is based on the method of fieldwork (two expeditions: 2013-14 and 2015), which are characteristic for ethnography. They rely mainly on the recording selected stretches of space: the architectural objects (houses, farms, churches, roadside crosses, buildings; industrial, rural, and commercial premises and services, buildings of social institutions, etc.), together with the lands transformed for agri-breeding, as well as places culturally or historically important for the local Polish community. More information about the topography is provided by the residents of the area in the inter-views when they name, explain and present their spatial ideas. An important element of the research is to observe the behaviour in space. When analyzing the cultural landscape the exist-ing sources: archival photographs, museum exhibits, artistic productions, are helpful . Today, there is no way to ignore materials placed on the Net (websites of local institutions, blogs, film records, activity on social media profiles).

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