Kultura Wileńszczyzny — „spojrzenie z oddali”
Culture of the Vilnius region: A “view from a far”

Summary/Abstract: The article is an attempt to look from a distance, “from afar” at the culture of the Vilnius region, especially its two characteristic phenomena, i.e. multilingualism and relatively common cases of the so-called mixed marriages. This analysis draws on the theses and generalisations to be found in two texts by Claude Lévi-Strauss: Race and History and Race and Culture. The use of the approach I have chosen is justified by the fact that the French scholar, when writing about the relations determining the development and stability of cultures, takes into account especially those categories of human behaviour that should be linked to the notions of “language” and “relations within marriage”. From this perspective the culture of the Vilnius region appears not so much as a sphere of conflict, but rather as a model of human behaviour conducive to, for example, high physical fitness level of the population functioning within it.

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