Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

We are participants of ever changing peripherization. A growing external control over social sciences has been spotted lately in academic community. This inspires to investigate a Lithuanian case on the discourse of regional governance in order to understand the impact of social research methodology in the processes of peripherization. With the intention to deemphasize domination, the article describes eleven stories designed for constituting methodological meanings of regional governance (RG) arrived at while reflecting upon public, academic and legal written texts. Texts were chosen to illustrate variety of international and national discourses, which manage the chain of reasoning on RG. The article ends with some insights on understanding RG and its methodological roots associated with three sets of principles drawn from qualitative research, quantitative research and discourse research.

Symbols, as a certain expression of signs, may be examined when concentrating on social functions of a sign or on logical functions of the same sign. This article deals with the place of signs (gestures) in communication not only in the eyes of the representatives of semiotics but also in the eyes of anthropologists and ethnologists. This article is restricted to the first group of gestures when non-verbal gestures appear as a part of ritual behaviour that is they are used in everyday situation at the moment of greeting. It is a hand-kissing which is the object of research in this article. The aim of the article is to reveal the origin of hand-kissing and follow the development of this gesture in Lithuania in the 20th century. The tasks there are: to examine forms of the expression of hand-kissing; to determine functions of ethical norms which regulate hand-kissing with regard to a sex, age, social status, degree of acquaintance; to show modifica­tions of the expression and normative functions of this gesture in a certain period of time. The work is grounded on the data of field works from the territory of the Republic of Lithuania collected in ethnographical expeditions in 1998-2005 by the author herself, and it is also based on the archive manuscript collections, as well as works on non-verbal communication published by other researchers.

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.

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.