Klaipėdos universitetas

The glance at the classical anthropological perspectives implies that the concept of ‘region’ was often tied to the environment and used mainly as a comparison unit and there were fewer intentions to try to discover the internal aspects of a ‘region’. The ideas of the contemporary scholars give a new room for the discussions about the connections between different territories, regions, concepts of local/global, homogeneity/heterogeneity, place, space/time etc. Generally, the article strives to prefigure possible ‘framework’ for the concept of ‘region’ and main elements as well as problems of its definition, and its application possibilities in the anthropological studies. The term ‘region’ is often occurring both in everyday and academic languages. But the question is, if it is possible to describe what kind of content is framed within the word ‘region’, because it does not have its own exact definition. Still it is usual to relate the term ‘region’ with geographical terms of various kinds of territories, for example, area, place, site, city etc. The scholarly discussions about globalization, its elements and processes influence perceptions of different territorial units and start questioning their stability and fixity.

To conduct an ethnographic research means to do a job of investigating something, which is always geographically located in a particular place: a village, a city, a country, or an area. A map is the first attribute of an ethnographer. But anytime we, as ethnographers, take the map and choose an ethnographic site to study it becomes immediately filled up in our imagination with the discourses already existing in historical, political, social, cultural, or local contexts. Then the question emerges about how does the view of a priori about the place come together with the ‘practise’ of fieldwork? The empirical ground of this article is my experience as of a researcher at the international EU project ‘Public Understanding of Genetics: A Cross-Cultural and Ethnographic Study of the “New Genetics” and Social Identity (2002–2004)’. Thus in the article I would like to discuss the role of ethnographic research in the construction of images about the place. I would return to the initial idea that region is a conventional category. Place-names and maps like natural symbols crystallize and justify the essence of its identity.

Author of presented here article joined, as the only social anthropologist, an inter-disciplinary research team, formed in 1996, and dominated by historians, but also including an economist, a geographer, a literary scholar and a political scientist. The team members were recruited from research institutions located in Austria, Italy and Slovenia – all were personally familiar with the region, and their objective was to investigate the “causes and consequences of the division of a region by nation-states.” The work of this group emphasized documentation of the past. The contemporary situation – it accounted for lives lived in the region today also was examined. Three leading questions guided our work: How have the institutions of modern bureaucratic states manifested themselves in the life-worlds of people who came to populate a state frontier. How has the presence of the modern bureaucratic state in this borderland transformed local communities? How has the ideology of nationalism intervened in local lives as social facts? Investigation strategy used in such inter-state research project may serve as a positive example of inter-disciplinary collaboration model.

This article addresses some methodological problems related to the mapping out of cultural data and more specifically those related to so-called cultural borders and boundaries in space. The second part of the article is devoted to the Mediterranean region. For half a century, this region has been the locus of much anthropological fieldwork, and has also provoked much debate on the topic of the region surrounding a closed sea as a conceptual entity. As both the Baltic and the Mediterranean seas have been spaces of intense human relations rather than obstacles for exchange, a future anthropological comparison between these two areas may prove stimulating.