Power, State and Nationalism in East/Central Europe

An internet-assisted course

Finn Sivert Nielsen (Copenhagen) & Kristina Sliavaite (Vilnius)

Second draft for group 4

The Society of Lituanian Nobles

Course page - Home

In our first draft we posed the following questions:

• 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?

The main question that all the others relate to and evolve around is the question of the identity as a noble. From reading through the extensive material on the internet (LBKS has about 100 pages on the internet) we have found that it is the same keywords that keep popping up: words like nation, culture, language and history. Over and over the LBKS state that they are concerned about promoting the nation-building of Lithuania. They see themselves as the arbiters of true 'Lithuanian-ness', and through their activities they aim to inspire (especially young) people to live up to the Lithuanian virtues and values such as modesty, honesty, dignity, responsibility and unselfishness.

The above indicates that the LBKS's understanding of the nation/nationalism and their understanding of the individual are connected. Also it is clear that their project is in many ways political even though this is a fact they do not themselves state.

With this in mind we want to ask the following questions:

1. How exactly does the LBKS conceptualize the kind of nation and individual that they strive towards?
2. What are the LBKS's strategies for working towards this kind of nation and individual?
3. What kinds of 'capital' (cultural, economic, symbolic etc.) do they have/make use of for these purposes?
4. Do they have any 'allies' or 'opponents' in this 'game' (e.g. the New Rich, the conservative politicians, the liberal politicians, NGOs etc.)?

The re-establishment of LBKS, made possible by the collapse of the Soviet Regime, has led to changes both in the daily lives of the nobles and in the ways they perceive themselves. Analytically we hope to approch this tension between the everyday life (the 'lifeworld') and the perceptions (the 'worldview') of the nobles by using different and complementary methods in the field.

For investigating the 'lifeworld' of the nobles we are inspired by phenomenological methods, we want to look at their practices, narratives and bodily experience. Concerning the 'worldview' of the nobles we are planning to draw on insights from discourse analysis looking at the strategies and'fight' for defining oneself and for establishing (hegemonic) discourses about, in this case, the individual and the nation.