"Locating Crosses in Lithuania" by Corinna Snyder

Corinna Snyder

Deposited 1997

Abstract
This thesis is an anthropological investigation of the processes of identity definition and delineation that preoccupied the Lithuanian residents of Vilnius, the capital of the nation-state Republic of Lithuania, in the first year following independence from the USSR. I focus on the paired interconnections of interior and exterior, center and periphery, materiality and spirituality, self and community, that were crucial structuring structures through which figures of the nation interpenetrated both mental and material representations of selves and situations as they came into being in both space and time, bringing the nation into phenomenological and epistemological existence.

Definitions and articulations of interiorized ethnic sentiment were contested on diverse material grounds; the human form, the architectural landscape, the worked space of agriculture, monuments. These different spatial occupations, territorial, architectural and embodied, interacted almost constantly in Vilnius. Vilnius has a long multi-ethnic history, and its residents were more ethnically diverse than in any other part of the country. It was a city that had experienced the comings and goings of numerous occupying forces and moved between numerous governments. Lithuanian Vilnieciai's disjointed moves towards a cohesive identity as the Lithuanian residents of the capital city that served not only as the center of the new state, but the center of a new relationship to European post-Soviet modernity, called on the constitutive imagery of location--the placement of boundaries, the distinction between core and periphery, the definition of the marginal, the discernment of an interior--to serve as fixed grounds for cultural action. In doing so in a place that has, over time, served as both a center and an outer limit for various political, economic, religious, ethnic and cultural movements, and in calling on historical and experiential constructions of the city's multiplicitous past, these Lithuanians' actions brought into question larger anthropological concerns with the ways that spatial location is part of the cultural production of national identification.