In the diasporic communities of Roman Catholics in Ukraine (Murafa) and Greek Catholics in Poland (Bialy Bor) religion and the local clergy play a dominant role in the process of constructing new identities. Because of the memory of their ancestors' deportation trauma the Greek Catholics define their Ukrainianness in opposition to their environment. In Roman Catholics' case, the change of the liturgy's language is followed by the Polish tradition's rejection: they feel Ukrainian. The break of the tradition's transmission path divides the community and directs them towards (pop)cultural...

This is the first Polish ethnological monograph to present how biblical themes function in folk culture in the context of rituals, customs and iconographic records and is based on ethnographic sources collected in Polish rural communities from central Poland to diasporas in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine in 1989-96. It shows how biblical plots used to undergo interpretation, at the same time, infiltrating common sense knowledge. The novelty here is the joint analysis of themes from both Testaments, presenting the narrations in accordance to the way the local community perceived its identity....