Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

The paper discusses different styles of leadership of the social work that have been empirically reconstructed and conceptualized. The consequences of such leadership styles for the professional activity of the social workers are analysed not only regarding the clients but also in the context of empowerment of the workers. Considerations are made concerning the influence of social work to the identity and the distribution.

The article is devoted to the role of military activities in socio-political developments in Latvia during the Late Iron Age (tenth to 12th centuries). The topics of weapons as prestige items, warrior burials and their relation to the retinue, as well as military symbolism and warfare as the source of power, are discussed on the basis of archaeological material of the Livs, Curonians*, Semigallians and Latgallians.

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.

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.

Some of the words used in these discourses about multiculturalism, and everyday multicultural practice, such as “culture”, “ethnicity”, and “identity”, are ubiquitous and figure in almost every argument about multiculturalism, or discussion about multicultural practice. What I am going to argue is that, in popular and some scholarly discourses, these words and concepts may be used in ways that may be completely incompatible with our anthropological understandings of them. I am going to focus on three interrelated problems: ethnocentrism, essentialism, and primordialism.