Together and apart: ethnology and its knowledge milieu(s) in interwar Vilnius (1922–1939)

ENThis chapter critically explores how a multinational ethnological knowledge milieu functioned in the heterogeneous city of Vilnius, which between 1922 and 1939 was a part of the Second Polish Republic and is now the capital of Lithuania. It focuses on the local conditions and context of the production and transfer of knowledge or, in other words, on ‘the construction, representation, and use of ethnological knowledge within specific social and political settings’ (Fenske and Davidovic- Walther 2010: 2). According to Hande Birkalan-Gedik, who highlights the localized character of knowledge production, ‘knowledge milieus’ ‘are imagined and enacted spaces of the political, social and economic surroundings and the contexts that impact the production and circulation of anthropological knowledge’. They reveal ‘the roles of social actors in gathering anthropological knowledge as well as their institutional connections, relationships and networks through which they also disseminate such knowledge’ (Birkalan-Gedik, Introduction to this volume).