Klaipėdos universitetas

The article focuses on the state of the old cemeteries in Klaipėda Region and their place in the system of the local culture heritage. All that shall be revealed by actualizing the issue as an outcome of World War 2, when the Region lost almost all local population who were substituted for by settlers with the culture and religion alien to the land. The historical-confessional characteristics of legal evolution of the old cemeteries of the region are discussed by disclosing the transfer of their legal-administrative subordination from church to municipal jurisdiction. General characteristics and problems of the relationship of the new settlers with the old heritage are discussed. The value of the cemeteries in terms of heritage protection is emphasized.

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.