Understanding a discipline and its object or the unheroic history of ethnology and anthropology in Lithuania

Anthropological practices are local in craft, intellectual and disciplinary tradition, and they are just as different. The article will discuss the ways in which ethnology and anthropology are understood, constitute their identity in Lithuania in historical retrospection and among the spectrum of scientific domains, and which aspects appear signifi cant in the process of their institutionalization. It highlights the historical roots of ethnology and anthropology in Lithuania traced to the intellectual environment of Vilnius University of the late 18th century and early 19th century; emphasizes the influences of cultural evolutionism and the Vienna school; discusses the efforts to institutionalize the disciplines within the contemporary politics of science in Lithuania; and claims of the disciplines for the future. The article concludes with an emphasis on the methodological value of ethnography that witnesses the vitality of ethnological and anthropological thought in Lithuania, and affi rms the paradigmatic uniqueness of ethnology and anthropology among the spectrum of sciences