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.

This article examines the attitudeof young people of age 18 to 30 from Lithuania, Latvia, Finland and Norway towards the national costume. The aim of this article is to analyze and determine how national costume is appreciated by the youth of countries mentioned before. The article briefly presents the preconditions for the emergence and creation of a nationalcostume; it analyzes what kind of information is lacking about national costume. The research was made in 2017-2018. Information was provided by 156 respondents. In conclusion, the worst situation is is between Finnish youth and the deepest traditions of costume‘s wearing has Norway. The results of Lithuanians reveal that national costume is not very important tradition, Latvians show the growing interest in the costume.

This article analyses how the inhabitants of Visaginas construct their past and present. The first part of the article presents the ways the informants talked of the period 1970s-1980s, i.e. when they came to Lithuania, to the construction site of Visaginas (Sniechkus) and the nuclear power plant. The second part of the article discusses how the informants described their and the community’s social, economic situation in the post-Soviet period. The author discusses why the informants tend to construct the Soviet and post-Soviet periods in particular ways and provides parallels with other anthropological works. The article is based on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in Visaginas in 2000-2004.

The article presents a research study on fashion, social rivalry and identity of nobility in Polish-Lithuanian Republic in the 18th Century. Research is based on the data obtained from widely drawn up inventories of movables allows us to give a social depth to the view constructed upon iconography and literature. The number of inventories, their social representation, connection to specified social group and period enable us to look at the history of fashion and other aspects of material culture considering different social, economic and cultural realities. Registers from the 18th century draw our greatest interest because of their number, reliability and quite equal spread over time.

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.