Klaipėdos universitetas

The tradition of the European maritime culture is directly related to development of spiritual and mental horizons of the personality. The most prominent factors of the maritime development are as follows: Arabic origins of the maritime navigation and astrophysics; Greek mythology and philosophy raising sea symbols; maritime missions, which have been encouraged from the Judeo-Christian mentality and manifested on new geographic and ethnographic discoveries. The decisive role of this mentality appeared in formation of European states and institutional culture, in development of literacy and rising of universities from monastic libraries (X–XI c.) and first Portuguese maritime schools (XV c.). Aim of the research is a revelation of moments of a transcendental ideal of the European maritime self-concept as an important cultural leap. Tasks of the research are as follows: analysis of a pagan basis of the maritime self-concept, and discussion of a valuable direction of the Judeo-Christian maritime self-concept. The research type is theoretically descriptive. There were used such research methods: retrospective, comparative, heuristic analysis of scientific literature, interpretation, systemization and synthesis. Methodological attitude is neotomism that refers to the transcendental ideal of the European culture identity formation in long-term prospect.

Research into individual archaeological shoe finds allows us to make assumptions concerning the differentiation of shoes according to social strata during the Renaissance period. A more complex and higher-quality shoe construction is a characteristic feature of shoes worn by people of a higher social standing.

This short paper presents some aspects of regionalisation in France in the light of different ideological contexts since the 1789 revolution and especially the permanent struggle between centralism and ‘décentralisation’. This historic perspective evokes the changing sociopolitical attitudes in France in regard to regions and their cultural diversity. In a second part, the author proposes some reflections about the conceptual use of the idea of region in Europe today in the light of its use during the French nation-building process. The paper concludes by suggesting that the region as an intermediary spatial category always appears to the anthropologist as a necessarily ambivalent category of belonging between wider inclusive and smaller included identities.

In this article we shall put forward a typology of the various expressions of political regionalism in Europe grounded in the assumption of the existence of two basic yet, surprisingly enough, not fully divergent forms; i.e. ethnic regionalism and transnational regionalism. In the first case, we paradoxically encounter a scaled down replica of the national State (Catalonia, Basque Country, “Padania” etc.) while in the second case, apparently with a post-ethnic connotation, just as paradoxically we are dealing with transnational yet not entirely non-ethnic projects (Black Sea Region, Tatarstan etc.).