CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Saras, Emily Daina |
|---|---|
| Title | Sutarkim Gerai: Dialogical Relations of Legitimization Between Lithuanian State Bureaucracy and Political and Cultural Movements through Mechanisms of Folk Music |
| Summary | This anthropological research project investigates the dialogical relationship between two entities: first, the official and expert organs of Lithuanian folk music, including the Lithuanian Executive Branch of Government, the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, and various non-governmental folklore organizations and institutions that monitor and control the folk music genre through programming and funding; and second, the rising neo-Nazi folk youth movement as representative of many radical fringe groups which fall on the extremely conservative end of the political spectrum. The Lithuanian Ministry of Culture has featured the performance of dainos, or folk songs, in much of the country’s state-sponsored arts and culture programming over the last two decades of Lithuania’s independence. In recent years, a new trend of engagement with Lithuanian folk music is emerging among self-identifying neo-Nazi and Skinhead Lithuanians, particularly under the umbrella of youth-centered xenophobic organizations such as the Jaunoji Lietuva (Young Lithuania) radical political party. Their demonstrations and performances – namely, protests, gatherings, and marches that occur in central, public locations in many of Lithuania’s biggest cities – incorporate the singing of modified folk musical material as a strategic part of their events. Within the frame of an ethnographic study based in Vilnius, Lithuania, I aim to collect and order claims towards authenticity, authority, and expertise over folk music material, in so much as they relate to these aforementioned groups. Equipped with this analysis, I will be able to understand the real relations and changing conditions within which authenticity and folk culture are developed and instrumentalized as compared with a historical background that covers the folk music over the past century in Lithuania. This project accesses a deeper understanding of how state apparatuses are engaged in a dialogical relationship with these radical fringe groups that invoke processes of continual, mutual legitimization over time. |
| Supervisor | Vedres, Balazs, Fabiani, Jean-Louis |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/saras_emily.pdf |
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