Gediminas Lankauskas is Associate Professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Regina. His research focuses on processes of “modernizing” change, religion, morality, ritual, as well as nationalism and the state in Eastern Europe. He is also interested in the remembrance of the socialist past in that part of the world, as expressed through consumer practices, visual imagery, discourse, performance, and material objects. His work has been published in several languages in numerous journals and edited volumes, and he is the author of a monograph titled The Land of Weddings and Rain: Nation and Modernity in Post-Socialist Lithuania (University of Toronto Press, 2015). 

Memory, Oblivion, and Soviet Statuary in Lithuania

This project is concerned with discarded Soviet-era effigies as material artifacts that can shed valuable light on the relationship between remembering and forgetting of socialism in Lithuania and elsewhere in the European East. Although officially cast off as unmemorable waste, this Marxist-Leninist legacy lingers on in the public realm, refusing to be consigned to oblivion. Using ethnographic methods, the project investigates the ways in which the ambiguous presence of socialist statuary becomes implicated in intergenerational moral debates concerning the integrity of national selfhood and “correct” representations of history. These statues are approached as artifacts with potential to reveal how Lithuanians apprehend the current moment of neoliberal change, as they strive to envision their nation’s future. At a deeper level, this research inquires into how social recall of an extinct authoritarian regime, activated by its enduring materiality, comes to shape people’s experiences of self, nationhood, as well as space and time in contemporary Eastern Europe. A podcast and a book on these themes are among the intended outcomes of this project.