Klaipėdos universitetas

With the breakdown of the USSR the daily life in the rural areas of Lithuania went through radical changes. The entire system of collective farming was replaced by another system, based on the right to private property. Lithuania´s collective farms and land were divided and distributed among the former members and private farms were emerging all over the country. In this article I look at the situation from a farm level. By using material from my fieldwork in a Lithuanian village I shall present how the Small Farmers here cope in spite the lack of resources. In the first place I will offer some background information for the distribution of land which took place in the early 1990s. I argue that the distribution of land left many villagers with so scarce resources that they could only be individual farmers by expanding the resources of the farms through co-operation. In the second place I will look at the co-operative economical system they have employed in order to make ends meet. I will argue that only the people who lack re-sources within their household employed strategies of reciprocity, whereas people who have sufficient re-sources by themselves do not engage in this system. Thereby there is a correlation between property rights and property relations. Bourdieu has classified these two kinds of sale as a ‘village/market dichotomy’. The article is based on my fieldwork in a Southwest Lithuanian village in 2004.

A serious argument against the reach of Hamburgian Culture to the eastern Vistula is the position of material from areas to the east of the Vistula, the lack of any radiocarbon dates and the unclear geochronological context.

In the course of transition to market economy, political and economical structures of Lithuanian society changed generally. Many people lost financial capital, social positions and even cultural categories necessary for the orientation in society. In the course of this fundamental transformation the necessity to negotiate new cultural categories became obvious. In the context of these redefinition processes, consumption and consumer goods constituted important means for the creation of new social differences and their symbolic representations. What visions and images of a ‘good life’, of ‘wealth’ and ‘success’ exist in to-day’s Lithuania? How are consumption-oriented patterns of behaviour provided with symbolic meaning? How are identities constructed and represented through ways and objects of consumption as well as particular lifestyles? Research on these questions may contribute to an understanding about processes of cultural redefinition and differentiation in a specific Lithuanian social context and, starting out from this understanding, it allows making plausible interferences about broader social relations and local visions related to global change.