Klaipėdos universitetas

Anthropology as a discipline is largely concerned with understanding human beings on a local and inter-national scale. As the subject has evolved, a number of sub-disciplines have come to the fore, the most prominent being biological, archaeological, linguistic, social and cultural. Political anthropology is generally placed as a sub-specialism within the context of social and cultural anthropology. This essay argues for greater significance for political anthropology as a sub-discipline of anthropology generally and especially within the Baltic States. Following an initial review of political anthropology in and of Europe, the essay outlines some of the key issues to which the Baltic States can make particularly unique contributions. The Baltic States already have a well-developed tradition of European Ethnology. This essay emphasises that they are also in a unique position to contribute to the development of political anthropology as an important sub-discipline which has acquired a new relevance in the context of an ever-changing EU. In a Europe that has witnessed many political changes over the past half-century and the emergence of new borders is going, insights into the political process can hardly be acquired through the disciplines of politics or sociology alone. The Eastern enlargement of the EU gives an urgency to our thinking about Europe.

The Swiders of Ukrainian Polissya used mainly local raw materials. The final preparation of pre-core for usage was forming the platform and the working surface. The main Swiderian type of core of Ukrainian Polissya is double opposite platform cores with one working surface. A typical form of Swiderian pressure cores of Ukrainian Polissya is cone-shaped and pencil-shaped. Microblades were made to be inserts into arrowheads of organic material. The joining of organic and stone elements for producing narrow-slot points is not traditional for Swiderian technology in Ukrainian Polissya. The technology, which fuses organic materials with stone elements for producing narrow-slot points, is typical of Steppe cultures. This tradition is from Kukrek Culture.

Scant attention has been paid in the social sciences to the problem of defining units of analysis. The problem of using culture as a unit of analysis is that culture is not a unit of analysis like a jury is a unit of analysis. It is also a more ambiguous unit of analysis than religion, ethnicity or gender, units which are possible to identify and define. It is concluded that the individual is the least problematic unit for analysis. The limitations of using the individual as the unit of analysis are that group characteristics and behaviors can only be measured indirectly and studies are prone to the ‘individual differences fallacy.’ It is dubious that one can generalize from individuals beyond the community. There are no ultimate primitive units of culture and whatever unit for analysis the researcher selects depends on the questions asked. Always however, a unit of analysis must be clearly defined, it cannot be used as a variable rather variables are extracted from the unit of analysis. Most importantly, there should always be a theory of analysis that justifies the choice of the units for analysis.

This article addresses the complicated issues of the primary population of the forest zone in Eastern Europe at the turn of the Pleistocene-Holocene and the forms of its occupation by humans.

Social or Cultural Anthropology, in the Western sense, is little known territory in parts of contemporary East Europe. It is the case in Lithuania where biological anthropology traditionally claims the term anthropology for itself. Lithuanian ethnology and sociology partially fill the void normally covered by anthropology. There were definite political, academic and practical factors that stunted the growth of anthropology in Lithuania. The aim of this article is to identify these factors, and to define the sphere and the field of research and instruction, that should be allocated to anthropology. I seek also to present the case for an urgent need of the discipline to be established in the educational, research and applied frontiers of contemporary Lithuanian society. It has been even more complicated to establish the importance and capability of socio-cultural anthropology as a separate field of endeavour vis-à-vis Lithuanian ethnology. While socio-cultural anthropology in the West examined the other and otherness, there was no political interest for a newly independent nation-state in a discipline with a wrong focus.

This article will explore and explain the effects of the beer law introduced by the Supreme Administrative Court of Republic of Lithuania in July, 2001. I will argue that the new law has been adopted as a result of the strategic calculation and manipulation of the legal system by the municipality of Vilnius. As a result of global finance flows and tourism the law and authoritative voices of the city council seeks to redefine moral, social and physical boundaries within the city space and introduce a new moral public behaviour in the centre of Vilnius. The article suggests that common citizens, unable to participate in the decision-making process, undertake acts of resistance: tactical manoeuvres and creative acts of hidden transcripts of how to subvert and challenge the law. The materials for the article were collected during my three months field works in the community of beer drinkers, as well as 10 partly structuralised interviews with policeman, also 1 interview with high administrative person at Vilnius city municipality.

The aim of this article is to deconstruct the notions of blood and blood-kinship or Lithuanian descent, as it is understood in state institutions that apply the Lithuanian Law on Citizenship in practice. In particular the article will discuss how the state classifies people, how it fixes or destroys its relations towards different ethnic groups, and what ideas and criteria are employed in fixing this relationship. The starting point of this study is the Law on Citizenship, which creates or destroys the relationship of the state toward individuals and communities. I will not only deal with the textual representations of the Law on Citizenship, but will also take a look at the discussions in the Seimas (Parliament) of Lithuania while the Law of Citizenship has been processed and will present the opinions of politicians who were active in passing it. I will also try to show the instrumentality of the ideas around the notion of descent which in my point is more cultural rather than biological.

Today four different expressive versions of local Epigravettian industries represented by groups of sites can be defined in the Middle Dnieper basin: Mezinian, Ovruchian, Mezhirichian and Yudinovian industries. In addition, two other quite specific ones are represented by single collections: Eliseevichi 1 and Zhuravka.

The aim of the article is to discuss the origins and issues of neo-tribalist and neo-pagan movements and their cultural, political, educational, international effect in Lithuania. The main object of our investigations is activities of modern neo-Semigallians (žiemgaliai) and Samogitians (žemaičiai). The main problem for analysis is the kind of impact Lithuanian ethnology has on supporting new imagined identities and modern consumer demands support for making new cultural, social, and historical identities.