Participants:
<< Due to Danish privacy
regulations, names and emails of participants have been deleted. >>
First description of the project:
After the fall of the Soviet Empire and the following secession
of Lithuania, both political, economical and social changes have had influence
both on the way people live their daily lives and on how they see themselves.
We want to look
into a group of Lithuanians who have been given new opportunities to develop and
change both their lives and their selfperception in different ways.
Lithuania has a class of nobles dating back to the 13th century. In the period 1928 to 1940, during which Lithuania was an independent republic, these nobles where organised in a network called ’The Lithuanian Bajoru Society’. During the Soviet Regime nobility was not a recognised identity and all properties of the former nobility were confiscated by the state. After the breakdown of the Soviet Regime these properties have been given back to their former owners and nobility is again a protected title. In 1994 Lithuanian nobles (including groups living abroad) founded the ’Society of Lithuanian Nobles’ (LBKS i.e. Lietuvos Bajoru Karaliskoji Sajunga) as a legal successor of the before mentioned organisation. The Society has aproximately 700 hundred members.
What are the aims of the organisation? How do they propose to fulfill these?
What kind of role(s) in society does LBKS see them self occupying? How do other groups in society look at LBKS? What is LBKS’s relation to the state (if any)?
What does it mean to have an identity as a noble – what ’parameters’ are neccesary in constituting this identity?
What ideas and concepts of culture, nation (nationalism), power and state does LBKS make use of?