Klaipėdos universitetas

During my anthropological fieldwork in Estonia in 1996–97 I approached various folkloristic traditions and practices at several occasions. My meeting with folklorists and their practices can be described as a ‘clash’ between academic disciplines. As an anthropology student I obviously reacted to how folklorists related to their research material. It is probably often so when people from different disciplines meet, that disagreements will arise about how research is done and fieldwork material is interpreted. Somehow we have to accept these differences, but sometimes it is also inspiring to get to know what people from other disciplines think about your own discipline. I want to give an account of folkloristic practices as seen through the eyes of an anthropologist. And it is related to a particular time and place: Estonia in the 1990ties at the time of my fieldwork. I guess, and I know, that changes have occurred since then, but I still hope that these reflections can be of interest.

The site of Rostislavl is located on the right high bank of the Oka river near the town of Ozyory (Moscow region). Tanged points from the Rostislavl site are similar to the ones spread in the Alleröd-Dryas III period on the sites of northern Germany, Poland, the Upper Volga (Podol III and Ust-Tudovka I), and in the Upper Dnieper (Anosovo I) regions etc. This fact allows us to assume, at this stage of research, the Final Palaeolithic age of the Rostislavl site as the most probable.

The human beings use to ascribe themselves and others to certain groups and dividing world for ‘them’ and ‘us’. We should rethink the role played by ethnicity concept in social sciences, common sense knowledge and practice in contemporary world. But the turn from ethnic or national identities to other ones is just the first step in my opinion. The second step in the same direction is to try to answer the question: does it really make sense for sociologists and anthropologists to investigate identities or we rather have to investigate people’s action and their behaviour? Moreover, if only we agree on these points we have to re-think the role that scholars play in the process of interpretation of the world by modern people, because the interpretations that we produce as ‘experts’ do not exist only in an ‘academic world’. They are in use by ordinary people as well as by politicians, and that is why those interpretations have visible practical consequences. Hereby I would like to discuss possible alternatives to ethnically based understandings of the issues of the ‘ethnicity’, ‘identity’ and ‘multiculturalism’. I’ll start with the description of the research experience that made me concerned about the issues pointed out.

Transversal arrowheads (trapezia) are a characteristic type of hunting implement of some Final Palaeolithic-Early Mesolithic cultures of Eastern Europe. These cultures were studied in the Volga-Oka basin (Ienevo Culture), the Middle Dnieper-Desna basin (Pisochny Riv Culture), the Lower Dnieper-Donets region (Zimivnyki Culture) and the Volga-Kama confluence (Oust-Kamskaya Culture). Issues of origin and fate still remain debatable. An interest in the formation and interaction of Volga-Dnieper cultures with transversal arrowheads in their inventory is induced by their specific geographical position as well as a permanent increase in data. Discussions of the genesis of these trapezium complexes has tended to focus on two variants: 1) within Post-Ahrensburgian industries due to some factors (natural or social); 2) from west Asian-Caucasian cultures with geometric tools. Probably the first variant is most likely to be attributed to Ienevo and Pisochny Riv, and the second is preferable for Zimivnyki and Oust-Kamskaya. Cultures in the Dnieper-Donets and Middle Volga basins, on the basis of the great variety of trapezia, are assumed to represent an area of crossing of cultural tradition. The forms of this crossing need to be concretised in the course of further research.

The epithet Euro-American is ubiquitous in contemporary social science research. There is a tendency, however, for the concept to suffer from a ‘misplaced concreteness’: it is variously used to refer to a population, a place, or even a culture. The collaborative study on which I report here was entitled ‘Public Understanding of Genetics (PUG): a cross-cultural and ethnographic study of the ‘new genetics’ and social identity’. The aim was include, within the same framework, a range of publics, including lay and expert, as well as the media and legislation, and to investigate whether developments in genetic science and the use of genetic and reproductive technologies were impinging (or not) on people’s understandings of kin-ship. We were able to focus, to some extent, on the interface between normative and popular understandings of genetics. In juxtaposing policy and popular discourse our aim was to discern the points at which they converge and diverge. In PUG we were interested, then, in the similarities and differences in kinship thinking across the European sites in which we worked. We attempted to apprehend cultural understandings of kinship through the prism of genetics, and we were using new reproductive and genetic technologies as an ethnographic window through which to explore kinship across Europe.

The analysis of palynological, radiocarbon and geological methods dating of archaeological sites of the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene in Central Russia and the revision of available and not numerous dates shows that for mineral grounds these methods require serious correction, and the dates themselves do not correspond in most cases to the typological age of the archaeological materials.

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.