Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

For a long time the interest of many scholars has been focused on issues of the Viking (Varangian, Norman) presence in the Balkans. However, a series of strategic and tactical changes happened in warfare after the raids undertaken by the Russian-Varangian Knyaz (Prince) Sviatoslav in Bulgaria in the late tenth century AD. Therefore, special attention could be given to a series of new artefacts of north European (or Scandinavian) origin, which consists mainly of weapons and military equipment.

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.

I explore the state’s presence by looking at people’s understanding/experience of authority and power. I argue that ‘cynicism’ is the common structure of feeling embedded in perceptions and experiences of the state. It entails negativity, distance, and irony, rather than resistance towards the state. Cynicism has an effect on the lives people live and the communication they carry out with the ‘state’ whether in everyday conversations or at elections. Cynicism encapsulates criticism of the state officials, seeing them as self-interested, immoral, and unjust. It also manifests distrust of authorities and difference between the people and the power elites. Cynicism derives from various contexts: the experience of power as omnipresent, immutable, and threatening prevalent in the socialist period, beliefs in equality and loyalty to a collective which no longer inform social relations, mysterious post-socialist circulations of wealth from which people feel completely or partly excluded, experience of destatization and subalternity. This article rests on the research conducted in three village communities and the cities of Vilnius and Kaunas in 2003–2004.

The complex research works on Klaipėda Region Lutheran Psalms singing traditions has started at the Institute of Baltic Sea Region History and Archaeology, Klaipėda University some years ago, as a part of integrated studies on whole historical Lithuania Minor history and culture investigations. The main goal of such research project is to unify efforts of ethnomusicologists, historians, culturologists, linguists, confessional researchers and cultural anthropologists, interviewing local Lutheran people with special questionnaires, and this way collecting actual information about this culture phenomenon. The aim of this re-search is to find out the sources of vitality, local forms and intercultural (German-Lithuanian) relations of local Lutheran Psalm singing tradition, as well as its perspectives at present and for the future. The second aim was to find out and to elaborate generally wider research methods, possible not just for specialised (linguistic, ethnomusicological, etc.) investigations, but usable for complex interdisciplinary explorations. We have a great hope for interdisciplinary and socio-cultural anthropological perspectives here at present and in all the future.

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.