Gediminas Lankauskas, "The Land of Weddings and Rain: Nation and Modernity in Post-Socialist Lithuania" (U Toronto Press, 2015)

New Books in Sociology · Jan 10, 2020 · 1h 24m

Gediminas Lankauskas’ new book The Land of Weddings and Rain: Nation and Modernity in Post-Socialist Lithuania (University of Toronto Press, 2015) is “an ethnography concerned with the ambiguities, paradoxes, ruptures and incongruities of social life brought about by processes of global 'modernization' in a periphery of post-socialist Eastern Europe” (5). In the book, Lankauskas explores Lithuanians’ pursuit of “modernity”, combining archival and ethnographic data. Anthropological theory problematizes both the perceived universal character of Western modernity and the expected, linear…