Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

The article discusses honor issues in everyday practice with specific reference to Sicily. In the frame of analysis, honor refers to the politics of institutionalization of domination. The presented case studies on honor issues deal with the legitimization of superiority during the social interaction between two males, defined as the machismo game. The demolition of the established symbolical or actual hierarchy is the main goal and reason to provoke and/or enter the machismo game. Although a female is usually not a central factor in the male’s strategy for power, she may be a substantial contributing factor, even crucial to the outcome of the male’s game. Cultural context displays only the language and in what way the recognition of dominance is achieved in the social game does not alter its essence.

The concept of contemporary identity guides to exclusiveness of culture’s role and history as well. Queen Luisa is not only an attractive symbol while talking about fatal period for Europe and Prussia in the years 1806–1815, but also interesting is her personality while looking for parallels between identities of Memel (Klaipėda), the small province town of the German empire, and Klaipėda, the largest contemporary Western Lithuanian city. Present inhabitants of Klaipėda pay a lot of attention to Queen Luisa’s merits for development of education and culture in the city and in the region. The fact that in newest discussions about Klaipėda’s vision of cultural politics, the need to integrate cultural heritage into consciousness of citizens and formation of identity is highlighted, testifies about signs of new quality in region’s identity structure of Western Lithuania. Research is based on historical sources and literature.

Contemporary humanities and social sciences often use to focus on mutual relationship between an individual and community for the search for “oneself” and attempts to understand “the other”, as well as on comparison of identities encountering each other. New research in the fields of ethnology claims that we should look for definitions of the contemporary national identities in Europe in their correlation with ethnicity. On the other hand, many interdisciplinary studies proved that it is increasingly more complicated to define ethnicity in the context of globalization. The goal of the paper is to analyze the local Klaipėda Region communities’ attitudes towards nationality in comparative perspective. It will focus on encounters in between dominant/state and local/regional discourses and identity politics.

This article discusses the verba (palm; Palm Sunday flowers), one of the most important religious symbols throughout the second part of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century in eastern Lithuania and western Belarus. The tasks of this study are: to analyze the form and content of verba so as to reveal the relationships between regional, ethnic and confessional particularities, and to look at how the symbol becomes an important factor in the formation of the inhabitants’ ethnic and religious identity. The main source for this study is material gathered during field expeditions in eastern Lithuania and western Belarus at the beginning of the 21st century.