Locating crosses in Lithuania

ENThis 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 p aired interconnections of interior and exterior, center and periphery, m ateriality and spirituality, self and com m unity, that were crucial structuring structures through w hich figures of the nation interpenetrated both m ental and m aterial representations of selves and situations as they came into being in both space and tim e, bringing the nation into phenomenological and epistem ological existence. Definitions and articulations of interiorized ethnic sentim ent w ere contested on diverse m aterial grounds; the hum an form, the architectural landscape, the worked space of agriculture, monuments, and these different spatial occupations, territorial, architectural and embodied, interacted almost constantly. 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 num erous occupying forces and m oved betw een num erous governm ents.Lithuanian Vilniečiai's disjointed moves tow ards 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 m odernity, called on the constitutive im agery of location - the placem ent of boundaries, the distinction betw een core and periphery, the definition of the marginal, the discernm ent of an interior - to serve as fixed grounds for cultural action. In doing so in a place that has, over tim e, served as both a center and an outer limit for various political, economic, religious, ethnic and cultural m ovements, and in calling on historical and experiential constructions of the city's m ultiplidtous past, these Lithuanians' actions brought into question larger anthropological concerns w ith the ways that spatial location is part of the cultural production of national identification.