Ethnic culture of Joniškis region

Ethnology investigates people’s ways of life in the community in the past and the present. The main aspects of the research are of social, material and intellectual cultural value. Their expression is investigated with respect to time and (or) territory, focusing on larger or smaller social structures (local community, village, city, nation, etc.), giving priority to different social groups (age, gender, occupation, religion, ethnicity, etc.) research analysis. In ethnological sense, the concept of ethnology was used in Lithuania during the pre-war period and the concept of ethnography during the Soviet times. Ethnography is now perceived as the necessary data for ethnological research. Lithuanian ethnologists studied mainly traditional, rural culture passed from generation to generation. Further details about it are from the 19th century. The most comprehensively researched was the Lithuanian life; wider ethnographic research of national minorities (many Jews, Latvians, Germans and people of other nationalities lived in Joniškis) has started only in recent years. Joniškis region’s economic development determined the relatively intense expression of modern culture elements in everyday life compared with other regions of Lithuania, so there was recorded less ethnographic material than, for example, in Dzūkija, the old culture of which in the 20th century attracted more attention of ethnologists and other ethnic culture researchers