The Storytelling human: Lithuanian folk tradition today

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Tautosaka; Tautosaka; Tradicijos; Pasakojimas; Baltų kultūra; Posovietinis laikotarpis; Folklore; Folk Traditions; Storytelling; Baltic culture; Postsoviet period.

ENThis collection of articles offers an outline of the ways that folklore exists in Lithuania today - how different facets of tradition have developed, have been transformed, and have adapted in a society increasingly dependent on technologies and media. At the same time, this publication reflects the determination of todays Lithuanian folklore studies to consider their subjects and their disciplines limits and goals within a world that, over several decades, has fundamentally changed. When Lithuania, together with the other Central European countries, emerged from behind the ripped open Iron Curtain three decades ago, the first wave of euphoria at having regained freedom was soon replaced by the realisation that the country now found itself in a completely new environment - one in which it would have to play by different, unfamiliar rules. This was also the case for post-Soviet academic communities, especially those related to the humanities. On the one hand, once they had shaken off the constraints of the Soviet era, researchers saw new horizons open up before them; on the other hand, a good deal of their earlier work began to seem irrelevant, dated, and not useful. But folklore studies in Lithuania, as in most of the European countries whose national ideologies were shaped in the late nineteenth century and under the sway of Romanticism, have deep and significant roots. The creators of the modern Lithuanian state - including the "nations patriarch" Jonas Basanavičius - paid great attention to vernacular culture, national traditions, folklore, language, and so on, because they believed these things to be the very basis of the nations identity and the key to its survival.When history's spiral made one more turn with the Soviet occupation, Lithuanian folklore and folklore studies continued to be important in a similar way: for many, the folkloric movement and attention to national folk traditions became a counterbalance to the ideologised Soviet culture imposed by the occupiers and the ideology of "friendship between nations," which thinly veiled an aggressive policy of national oppresion. During this period, the folkloric movement both directly and figuratively laid the foundation for the "singing revolutions" in Lithuania and the other Baltic countries and the subsequent restoration of their independence. But because newly independent Lithuanian society and state faced different challenges -globalisation, building European identity, developing a free market, and so forth - folklore that had grown out of Lithuanian agrarian culture suddenly lost its former function of promoting national identity. Folklore researchers now felt that they had neither an appropriate, relevant subject nor the methodological tools for studying it. There was also (and continues to be!) considerable pressure from society to stop "worshipping clogs and ploughs" and to begin speaking in modern language about relevant, contemporary matters. After 1990, all of this resulted in a deep and fundamental crisis in the discipline, one that lasted more than a decade. It took considerable intellectual effort and a turning toward the experiences of foreign colleagues to begin to dig ourselves out of the ditch, to gradually give up the Romantic view of folklore, to redefine folklore as an aspect of a universal, but continually shifting culture, and to grasp the importance of studying it and its place in the modern world. [...]. [From the Foreword]