Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

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.

Anthropology as a discipline is largely concerned with understanding human beings on a local and inter-national scale. As the subject has evolved, a number of sub-disciplines have come to the fore, the most prominent being biological, archaeological, linguistic, social and cultural. Political anthropology is generally placed as a sub-specialism within the context of social and cultural anthropology. This essay argues for greater significance for political anthropology as a sub-discipline of anthropology generally and especially within the Baltic States. Following an initial review of political anthropology in and of Europe, the essay outlines some of the key issues to which the Baltic States can make particularly unique contributions. The Baltic States already have a well-developed tradition of European Ethnology. This essay emphasises that they are also in a unique position to contribute to the development of political anthropology as an important sub-discipline which has acquired a new relevance in the context of an ever-changing EU. In a Europe that has witnessed many political changes over the past half-century and the emergence of new borders is going, insights into the political process can hardly be acquired through the disciplines of politics or sociology alone. The Eastern enlargement of the EU gives an urgency to our thinking about 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.

The debate about the public role of ethnology and folklore has been ongoing for some time, and has its parallel in the current debate about an ‘applied anthropology’. In Great Britain folklore and ethnology are, at least in institutional terms, virtually absent from higher education institutions. An author set pointers for the future – concentrating on the need for the study of culture to focus on lived experience as well as, and perhaps before, text; the need to revisit the political roots of the discipline in a critical but constructive spirit; and, the need to reconceptualise the region as the theatre of ethnological fieldwork – with a view to developing an ethically aware, evidence-based, policy-oriented and culture-critical European ethnology. Within this broad framework, we need to explore further the issues surrounding cultural mediation as a process for applying, but also generating, cultural knowledge and understanding, and the role(s) that ethnologists do, could, should, and perhaps should not play in that process.