The Second Lithuanian revival: culture as performance
ENThe central concern here is how culture is involved in current social processes. In a tightly organized traditional society this would be easy to analyze, for then we could describe the structure of the culture and ask whether social events can be understood as an interpretive re-enactment of that culture, in the course of which the culture is changed by acquiring new empirical contents. In the present case, we have not a firmly organized culture, but rather a sense of deforming artificial constraints imposed by the Stalinist system, which by common consent are to be rejected. But there is no general agreement on which one can stand while creating a new culture. Do we join the pluralistic West, reaffirm half-forgotten (or wholly invented) certitudes of our own past, or seek to create a more universal post-totalitarian culture? There is a good deal of fluidity, conflict and contradiction between ends and means, improvisation, bluffing, assertiveness training, imitativeness, etc.
