Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

This article analyses the availability of transport infrastructure objects in the Baltic macroregion. With the help of the cluster and integral assessment methods, the authors differentiate and classify mesoregions of the Baltic macroregion according to the level of development of both individual transport types and the transport system as a whole. The theoretical contribution of the study lies in the revision of the existing integral indices of transport infrastructure object availability, whereas the practical contribution of the study relates to the possibility to apply the results obtained in developing and adjusting regional and industry-specific transport development programmes. An important conclusion of the study is the practical confirmation of the significant underdevelopment of the regions of North-West Russia (within the Baltic region) as to the availability of transport infrastructure objects in comparison to most mesoregions of the Baltic macroregion.

This article draws a comparison between the Stone Age zoomorphic and anthropomorphic images that have been found in present-day Lithuania and similar finds from across the Baltic region. Both the attribution of these artefacts to archaeological cultures and their dating are discussed. The article raises the question whether the different archaeological culture that each article belongs to is reflected in its form and style. The article also questions if the concept of archaeological culture is necessary when writing about Stone Age art.

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.

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.

Author of presented here article joined, as the only social anthropologist, an inter-disciplinary research team, formed in 1996, and dominated by historians, but also including an economist, a geographer, a literary scholar and a political scientist. The team members were recruited from research institutions located in Austria, Italy and Slovenia – all were personally familiar with the region, and their objective was to investigate the “causes and consequences of the division of a region by nation-states.” The work of this group emphasized documentation of the past. The contemporary situation – it accounted for lives lived in the region today also was examined. Three leading questions guided our work: How have the institutions of modern bureaucratic states manifested themselves in the life-worlds of people who came to populate a state frontier. How has the presence of the modern bureaucratic state in this borderland transformed local communities? How has the ideology of nationalism intervened in local lives as social facts? Investigation strategy used in such inter-state research project may serve as a positive example of inter-disciplinary collaboration model.