The issue of women’s surnames after marriage is virtually absent from Polish academic research. This article attempts to analyse the phenomenon of women changing (or not changing) their surnames after marriage from an interdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on their own sociological research, the authors interpret the moment of surname change as an example of a rite of passage in accordance with Arnold van Gennep’s theory, understood as a symbolic crossing of a boundary (threshold). In the article, they reflect on a woman’s surname after marriage in the context of the power of tradition, transformations in social identity, and women’s perception of the boundaries of individuality.

Research into the clothing worn by rural inhabitants in various regions of Poland has long been an important branch of national ethnography. Over the years, interviews have been used to collect numerous statements about how people dressed and when. This information was often treated as an objective description of the past. This article aims to propose an alternative method of analysis based on tools developed by folklorists. It should be remembered that stories about the past are a communal good constructed in the present, and are therefore adapted to the context and current needs. When we examine only what clothing looked like in the past, such statements may seem useless or even misleading. However, they are valuable from the perspective of folkloristic narrative analysis, as they testify to how our interlocutors perceived the world and how they categorised the phenomena they encountered. The presented analysis is based on many years of field research in Wilamowice and on the border between Silesia and Lesser Poland.

This article examines cultural identity among the inhabitants of the Polish-Ukrainian border region near Leżajsk prior to 1945. The analysis is based on field interviews conducted by staff of the Museum of Folk Culture in Kolbuszowa with individuals born in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s who, as children, experienced life in mixed Polish-Ukrainian villages as well as the events of World War II and the immediate postwar years. Analysis of these accounts indicates that before the war, national differences were often barely noticeable in everyday life, and the main determinants of identity were language and religion. Mixed families and bilingualism were common in the studied area, and residents participated in the feast days and religious practices of both communities. It was only the experiences of German occupation, violence, and postwar displacement that led to a clear polarization of identity and the emergence of strategies to conceal Ukrainian roots. The informants’ testimonies allows us to grasp the fluidity of national and religious categories and the complexity of social relations in the borderland, and consequently challenges simplified, binary interpretations of Polish-Ukrainian relations in the Nadsanie region.