Klaipėdos universitetas

The article presents a research study on fashion, social rivalry and identity of nobility in Polish-Lithuanian Republic in the 18th Century. Research is based on the data obtained from widely drawn up inventories of movables allows us to give a social depth to the view constructed upon iconography and literature. The number of inventories, their social representation, connection to specified social group and period enable us to look at the history of fashion and other aspects of material culture considering different social, economic and cultural realities. Registers from the 18th century draw our greatest interest because of their number, reliability and quite equal spread over time.

The human beings use to ascribe themselves and others to certain groups and dividing world for ‘them’ and ‘us’. We should rethink the role played by ethnicity concept in social sciences, common sense knowledge and practice in contemporary world. But the turn from ethnic or national identities to other ones is just the first step in my opinion. The second step in the same direction is to try to answer the question: does it really make sense for sociologists and anthropologists to investigate identities or we rather have to investigate people’s action and their behaviour? Moreover, if only we agree on these points we have to re-think the role that scholars play in the process of interpretation of the world by modern people, because the interpretations that we produce as ‘experts’ do not exist only in an ‘academic world’. They are in use by ordinary people as well as by politicians, and that is why those interpretations have visible practical consequences. Hereby I would like to discuss possible alternatives to ethnically based understandings of the issues of the ‘ethnicity’, ‘identity’ and ‘multiculturalism’. I’ll start with the description of the research experience that made me concerned about the issues pointed out.