Memory on Fire: Re-membering the Lithuanian Body (Politic)

ABSTRACT

On the first day of November, ordinary commerce in Lithuania comes to a halt. Stores and offices are shuttered, while roads and cemeteries in cities and small villages come alive with the movement of families traversing the country to lay flowers and light candles at the graves of parents, grandparents, godparents, children, aunts, uncles, friends, and teachers. Velines is not a boisterous occasion like the Day of the Dead in Mexico, but it is not morose either. The cemetery is transformed into a place of reunion and remembrance as the gathered community exchanges greetings and gossip while cleaning cemetery plots, arranging flowers, and lighting candles atop the graves. Little children wander between the legs of adults; elderly men and women find resting places on benches and stones; vendors hawk candles at the entrances; and people steadily stream in and out through the gates. When the sun sets the candles flicker to life to form a cemetery on fire.

These Lithuanian Velines practices, though notable in their high level of participation, are not unique. To varying degrees All Saints' and All Souls' Day pilgrimage to cemeteries is common in many parts of what we now map as Europe. Yet these practices have a distinctive and powerful importance in Lithuania. The pervasiveness of death, suffering, loss, exile, and dislocation is a prominent aspect of the Lithuanian experience in the modern era. Significant as well is Lithuania's geographic location in a region fraught with the dynamics of the modern projects of empire, colonialism, and nationalism in all its varying forms. A central concern of the dissertation is the significance of Velines cemeteries and Velines practices for Lithuanians seeking to survive and find a way forward in the midst of the violence and upheaval of the past century, the attendant trauma, and the confusion and contestation over cultural memory that has followed.

Utilizing ethnographic method I explore Lithuanian Velines practices from the perspective of practical theology and material culture. Within Catholic liturgical theology All Saints' and All Souls' Day practices herald a powerful claim of participation in the communion of saints, an invocation of future eschatological hope, and for some, a promise of communion with those who are dead. Yet doctrinal and liturgical theology alone do not explain what is happening in these cemeteries. Rather, these cemetery spaces are framed by and shimmer with shards of Christian traditions while also hosting complex realities of human experience. Over the years these practices have been adapted and modified to construct and express important aspects of family, cultural identity, national belonging, and memory.

The dissertation is essentially a thick description of Velines and a theological inquiry into its power and significance. After the initial introduction the dissertation is divided into three parts, each part containing three chapters. Part I describes the people, places, and practices of Velines with chapters on history, cemeteries, and practices. Part II addresses the structures of social order that intertwine with and affect Velines practices in chapters on family, church, and state. Part III of the dissertation engages structures of spiritual struggle and includes chapters on trauma, memory, and hope.