Klaipėdos universitetas

We will analyse the cultural phenomenon as a product created by human genius. We will ask how works the interaction of culture and human life today and how cultural transformation influences the process of modelling perceptions of man himself. We will analyse how the cultural perception of what is “normal” or what is “value” is replaced by what is pleasant and useful. How a new concept of normality and value is created. We are creating a society on the foundation of exceptions without borders or a respectful and tolerant society?

The aim of the article is to explore how the migrant identity (especially, of the first generation) is changing under the influence of migration. Accordingly in the first part of the article the transnationalism and the concept of transmigration in relation to migratory experience are discussed, the second part is focused on the questions of identity and its boundaries, and the third part is based on the interpretation of empirical data from anthropological fieldwork by paying attention to the background, language and festivals of the immigrants as particular markers of the identity construction of the Lithuanian migrants in Northern Ireland.

Author of presented here article joined, as the only social anthropologist, an inter-disciplinary research team, formed in 1996, and dominated by historians, but also including an economist, a geographer, a literary scholar and a political scientist. The team members were recruited from research institutions located in Austria, Italy and Slovenia – all were personally familiar with the region, and their objective was to investigate the “causes and consequences of the division of a region by nation-states.” The work of this group emphasized documentation of the past. The contemporary situation – it accounted for lives lived in the region today also was examined. Three leading questions guided our work: How have the institutions of modern bureaucratic states manifested themselves in the life-worlds of people who came to populate a state frontier. How has the presence of the modern bureaucratic state in this borderland transformed local communities? How has the ideology of nationalism intervened in local lives as social facts? Investigation strategy used in such inter-state research project may serve as a positive example of inter-disciplinary collaboration model.

This article addresses some methodological problems related to the mapping out of cultural data and more specifically those related to so-called cultural borders and boundaries in space. The second part of the article is devoted to the Mediterranean region. For half a century, this region has been the locus of much anthropological fieldwork, and has also provoked much debate on the topic of the region surrounding a closed sea as a conceptual entity. As both the Baltic and the Mediterranean seas have been spaces of intense human relations rather than obstacles for exchange, a future anthropological comparison between these two areas may prove stimulating.