Tiltai

Theophany is the manifestation of a deity, an act of revelation to the world. Traces of theophany (a visit or activity of the gods) are left in stone and dendromorphic features. Therefore, theophany is possible at any time, or at least at some point, for example, in the event of an accident or illness. Sites of theophany are visited in the hope of recovering or preserving health, to carry out therapeutic procedures, or perform ritual actions. This paper analyses data on stone and dendromorphic theophany in 15th to 18th-century written sources, and identifies reflections of it in 19th to 21st-century therapeutic methods of folk medicine, on the basis of archival records and the author’s records of healing beliefs.

In the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, an opposition between official medicine and folk medicine, partly based on ethnic aspects, formed in Lithuania. The article analyses the alternation in the ‘self-other’ opposition in the choice of treatment. Folk medicine traditions existed alongside standard medicine in the town of Aukštadvaris, which was characterised as multi-confessional in the first half of the 20th century (despite the tensions, Lithuanians, Poles, Jews and Tartars lived together harmoniously). Faith healers with extraordinary qualities or powers were classified as ‘other’. So the choice of treatment reveals two aspects: the concept of ethnicity, and mythical perception (when dealing with those engaged in other activities). Studies have shown that in a disaster or illness, the ‘self-other’ opposition declines. An opposition between official medicine and folk medicine did not form in the Aukštadvaris area.

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 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.

To conduct an ethnographic research means to do a job of investigating something, which is always geographically located in a particular place: a village, a city, a country, or an area. A map is the first attribute of an ethnographer. But anytime we, as ethnographers, take the map and choose an ethnographic site to study it becomes immediately filled up in our imagination with the discourses already existing in historical, political, social, cultural, or local contexts. Then the question emerges about how does the view of a priori about the place come together with the ‘practise’ of fieldwork? The empirical ground of this article is my experience as of a researcher at the international EU project ‘Public Understanding of Genetics: A Cross-Cultural and Ethnographic Study of the “New Genetics” and Social Identity (2002–2004)’. Thus in the article I would like to discuss the role of ethnographic research in the construction of images about the place. I would return to the initial idea that region is a conventional category. Place-names and maps like natural symbols crystallize and justify the essence of its identity.