The Myth of the tower of babel and its consequences: the indigenous grammar of the mixed world. A contribution to the anthropology of bordelands (based on research in Belarusian-Lithuanian borderlands)
ENThe article is based on the results of ethnographic fi eld research which the author has conducted over the last 20 years in multi-lingual and multi-faith villages of Belarusian-Lithuanian borderlands in the Grodno region in Belarus. The residents of kolkhoz villages of the region turned out to be unfamiliar with the scholarly term “borderlands”. They describe their pluralistic social and cultural reality by means of an underlying metaphor (conceptual archetype) of a mixed world. This emic (subjective) category of describing the social world is subjected in the article to an anthropological analysis and interpretation. The author considers also the emic conceptualisation of the signifi cant differences between “ethnic” groups. Moreover, the article touches upon such aspect of the mixed world as a specifi c map of the faith-nations that function in the area, together with their associated languages, the local concept of the mixed speech and the phenomenon of the “new mixing”, that is, new changes which manifest in departing from the old rule of endogamy (mixed marriages) and shifting from religious categories to nation-state categories in terms of group identifi cation. It presents the mixed world of the residents of the borderlands as an inclusive and multipolar universe. Key words: borderlands, Belarus, Lithuania, emic/ethic, multilingualism, nationality.
