Klaipėdos universitetas

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.

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.

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.

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 aim of this paper is to analyse the growing concern over the treatment of multilingualism in the main cities of Lithuania (Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipėda) with the focus on the population’s national identity and self-consciousness identifying the prospects of preserving the language-related national identity. The main problem seems to be deciding on which language of instruction would be most beneficial to balanced communication. This is a task requiring thoughtful planning and is surrounded by debate. Somebody prefer instruction only in the official language, but some aim to foster linguistic and thus social diversity by encouraging teaching in several languages, emphatically amplifying the English.

Some of the Russian-speaking teachers in minority schools in Latvia have to teach bilingually. That is, they are required to use both Latvian and Russian within the scope of one lesson. However, due to insufficient knowledge of Latvian they often cannot do that properly. In this study I describe the strategies they use to solve this problem. Problem-oriented interviews with teachers, participant observation and personal experience were used to collect information. I have discovered five strategies for the teaching. Each strategy involves different ratio of Russian and Latvian within a lesson. Three of them also imply a significant amount of cheating and pretence. Four strategies used for document handling in Latvian were discovered as well.

Christiania is the name of a Danish alternative community. In this article I investigate how Christianites, members of Christiania, deal with internal tensions and conflicts. My empirical data suggests that Christianites have developed social mechanisms and practices, in which conflicts accumulate without being resolved. I suggest that these practices are related to the dominant position of community old-timers. In my discussion I employ situational analysis as means to presenting one crisis situation in Christiania. The crisis situation occurred during my fieldwork in Christiania in 2005 and 2006. The first part of my article is about the general features of social life in Christiania. In the second part, one ethnographic example will show how old-timers operate in a specific crisis situation. I use Max Weber’s ideas on traditional authority to explain the dominant position of community old-timers.

The attitude of Klaipėda Jewish community towards survival, alternation and continuity of community is being analyzed in the present article. Klaipėda Jewish community is regenerated in independent Lithuania, and it unifies few members. As a rule, they are Russian speaking elderly people, having little knowledge in its nation history and customs. It was expected, that Klaipėda Jewish community will naturally vanish, and young people will emigrate. In a fact we see at present, that this community is still lively, active and integrated one. A short excursion to the history of Klaipėda Jewish community, regarding the issues of its survival, alternation and continuity is presented hereby, and attention towards Klaipėda, as cross-border region, is pointed out.