A war frontier in Lithuania was engendered by the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in March of 2014 and the beginning of the undeclared war in eastern Ukraine. This essay explores how ...the new war frontier emerged in Lithuania, becoming an integral part of the public sphere and civic life. I argue that the war frontier is a social institution of sovereign uncertainty, which engenders divisive politics of historical justice, protection of the majority’s rights, and dangers to liberalism. The geopolitical insecurity and sovereign uncertainty that define this Baltic frontier are essential to understand how Lithuania can be a strong ally of NATO and the EU, a proponent of democratic politics and liberalism, a claimant to regional security expertise to lead western countries, and at the same time undermine liberal ideals of tolerance, multiculturalism, and pluralism.
During Lithuania's 2008 parliamentary elections, National Resurrection Party members dressed up as vampires, insane people, criminals, and prostitutes to gain people's votes. They mocked the state ...and laughed at political elites and electoral politics. I argue that the 2008 electoral carnivalesque was a politics of becoming, a fluid and open-ended process that engaged communities of despair and promoted moral citizenship through laughter. It was a form of political opposition, grounded in future-oriented moral and affective reassemblages of social and political fields. This politics of becoming attracted new people to politics, reframed political debates, and challenged state policies, practices, and ideologies.
The Soviet Sausage Renaissance KLUMBYTE, Neringa
American anthropologist,
March 2010, Letnik:
112, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In Lithuania, the first country to secede from the Soviet Union, the term Soviet has been used in public space to refer to the vanished Soviet empire and to experiences of colonization and ...resistance. However, in 1998, the "Soviet" symbol was successfully revived in the Lithuanian consumer food market as a brand name for meat products—primarily sausages. In this article, I argue that the market is a political arena in which values, ideologies, identities, and history are being shaped. The marketing and consumption of "Soviet" sausages is a form of political engagement that negotiates current power relations and inequalities. The meanings and practices surrounding "Soviet" sausages tell an intriguing story about broader processes of change. The "Soviet" sausage renaissance in Lithuania implies a critique of the postsocialist neoliberal state and constitutes an attempt to create an alternative modernity that is both post-Soviet and European.
Authoritarian Laughter
explores the political history of the satire and humor
magazine Broom published in Soviet Lithuania. Artists,
writers, and journalists were required to create state-sponsored
...Soviet humor and serve the Communist Party after Lithuania was
incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. Neringa Klumbytė
investigates official attempts to shape citizens into Soviet
subjects and engage them through a culture of popular humor.
Broom was multidirectional-it both facilitated
Communist Party agendas and expressed opposition toward the Soviet
regime. Official satire and humor in Soviet Lithuania increasingly
created dystopian visions of Soviet modernity and were a forum for
critical ideas and nationalist sentiments that were mobilized in
anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early
1990s.
Authoritarian Laughter illustrates that Soviet Western
peripheries were unstable and their governance was limited. While
authoritarian states engage in a statecraft of the everyday and
seek to engineer intimate lives, authoritarianism is defied not
only in revolutions, but in the many stories people tell each other
about themselves in jokes, cartoons, and satires.
In this article, we review the history of building a post-Soviet sovereign state in Lithuania by institutionalizing social and political difference of some groups in laws, policy, and public ...discourse. We argue that an exclusive inclusion of national (ethnic) minorities and migrants have played an important role in defining political belonging to a post-Soviet sovereign state. Language and citizenship laws and policies have been the major sites through which national minorities and migrants have been categorized and integrated in a post-1991 society. We conclude with the analysis of the politics of historical justice, central in defining political belonging to a post-2014 sovereign state.
This article explores intersections between power, subjectivity, and laughter by focusing on Šluota (The Broom), a humor and satire journal published by the Central Committee of the Lithuanian ...Communist Party during late socialism (1970s to mid-1980s). In Lithuania, while the official newspapers and journals were commonly distrusted, The Broom was perceived as a grassroots media. In this article, the author asks how officially sanctioned socialist humor was translated into readers’ sincere laughter; how sensual and political dialogue was created between state authorities, artists, and readers. The author shows that in the case of the official culture of humor presented in The Broom, laughter cannot be easily classified as performance of resistance or support for the regime. In The Broom, the discourse of power was never monologic and simply oppressive. It was situational, contextual, and changing. Officially sanctioned laughter was infused with and mediated by private emotions and values. Moreover, the journal provided space for artistic creativity and self-expression that reshaped official political aesthetics. Laughter blurred the distinctions between the state and the citizen, the public and the private, the hegemonic and the sincere. The author argues that laughter is an experience and a performance of political intimacy through which various agents imagine a self, society, and the state and reproduce various power orders. Political intimacy refers to coexistence of state authorities and other subjects in fields of social and political comfort, togetherness, and dialogue as well as in the zones of shared meanings and values.
What did it mean to be a Soviet citizen in the 1970s and 1980s? How can we explain the liberalization that preceded the collapse of the USSR? This period in Soviet history is often depicted as ...stagnant with stultified institutions and the oppression of socialist citizens. However, the socialist state was not simply an oppressive institution that dictated how to live and what to think—it also responded to and was shaped by individuals’ needs. In Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–85, Neringa Klumbyte and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova bring together scholarship examining the social and cultural life of the USSR and Eastern Europe from 1964 to 1985. This interdisciplinary and comparative study explores topics such as the Soviet middle class, individualism, sexuality, health, late-socialist ethics, and civic participation. Examining this often overlooked era provides the historical context for all post-socialist political, economic, and social developments.
With a focus on Gintaras Beresnevičius's book The Making of an Empire (2003) and the marketing and consumption of "Soviet" sausages, this article explores the rise of national ideologies that promote ...an "eastern" and "Soviet" identity in Lithuania. Both during the nationalist movement against the Soviet Union and later in the 1990s and 2000s, the west and Europe were seen as sites of prestige, power, and goodness. Recently the reinvented "east" and "Soviet" have become important competing symbols of national history and community. In this article Neringa Klumbytė argues that nationalism has become embedded in the power politics of Europeanization. National ideologies are shaped by differing ideas about ways of being modern and European rather than by simple resistance to European Union expansion. The resulting geopolitics of provinciality, a nationalist politics of space, thus becomes an integral part of the story of European modernity and domination within a global history.
