Res Humanitariae

The press (books, newspapers, magazines, calendars, etc) in the Lithuanian language educated its readers extensively on the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases in the early 20th century. However, the frequent outbreaks of various epidemics from the 1900s to the 1930s raises the question whether this information really reached its target audience, especially when, as folklore sources show, folk medicine was still heavily relied on in the provinces. The article addresses this question by taking cholera as an example. It compares the methods of protection against cholera and its treatment, as presented in Lithuanian periodicals and professional publications, with narratives of folk medicine collected in archives. In the collected material, the author looks for definitions of the folk concept of communicable diseases (limpamos ligos, the name given to infectious diseases at the time), which may have influenced the limits to which people followed the recommendations of medics in the first half of the 20th century.

The article presents the discourse of folk medicine concepts in contexts of historicity, the social environment, and scientificity category interfaces. One of the essential features of folk medicine is its intra-disciplinary nature, necessitating basing the already-mentioned categories on a context analysis of theoretical and practical approaches to folk medicine. The article consists of four parts, which correspond to the approaches of discourse analysis on the concept of folk medicine. The first part presents the anthropological evaluation of folk medicine approaches to the social environment, historicity and scientificity. The second part highlights the context of the historicity of folk medicine, which raises the question whether folk medicine is an endangered legacy or a changing tradition? The third part analyses the expression of folk medicine in approaches to the coverage of the social environment: from village to city, from nation to humanity. The fourth part leads to an evaluation of the interfaces between folk medicine and scientificity as a problem of rationality/irrationality. In conclusion, it is emphasised that by presenting the discourse of folk medicine concepts in the already-mentioned segments (social environment, historicity, scientificity), folk medicine’s theoretical and practical expression is evaluated in contexts of today’s and past experiences.

According to 15th to 18th-century written sources, priests-vaidiluciai, successors to the servants of the cult of the pre-Christian religion, performed various duties, including therapeutic activities. Descriptions in sources indicate that the nature of the therapeutic assistance they provided varied according to the magic activity they performed. The healing activities of vaidiluciai have not been systematically studied. This article extends the analysis of data on the therapeutic activities of different groups of vaidiluciai in 15th to 18th-century written folk sources, and identifies the reflection of these activities in 15th to 18th-century folk medicine based on archive records and healing faith records. The research helps to trace the meaning and origin of some therapeutic methods of folk medicine, and the possible development of traditions.

The article provides an overview of the emergence of the term ethnic culture, analysing how the notion of ethnic culture is understood in the ethnology of Western countries, and how it is interpreted by the creators of ethnos theory. In Lithuania, not only cultural workers but also scholars and researchers understand ethnic culture very differently. In order to dispense with the chaotic and extremely varied understanding of ethnic culture in Lithuania, the author offers several possible ways out: 1) if most ethnologists and cultural workers in Lithuania have accepted the fundamental postulate of ethnos theory, recognising that ethnic culture can be discerned from the entirety of the culture of the nation, then the notion of ethnic culture existing in the theory of ethnos should also be adopted; 2) if this understanding is rejected, then guidance should be taken from the theoretical approach existing in the ethnology of Western countries requiring us not to apply the notion of ethnic culture when discussing cultures of nations.

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.