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Based on detailed ethnographic material, “New Lithuania in Old Hands” analyzes the impact that European Union accession has had upon the country’s aging smallscale farmers, and describes how the reality of Lithuania’s EU membership has been a far cry from the scenarios of wealth and overabundance once promised. The text reveals that, in many instances, membership has resulted in a return to subsistence production, increased insecurity and a reinforcement of kinship obligations. Thus instead of treating the European Union as an elite project and voicing the support of various other segments of the population, this volume shows how broad parts of the rural population have been affected by and engaged in processes of change following Lithuania’s accession – changes that threaten to have a large impact upon the future of the country’s family structures and its farming demographic.
‘[An] enlightening account of the interplay of the Soviet and European Unions in the Lithuanian countryside. […This] study successfully challenges the official narrative of “New Lithuania” and the view of an integrated European Union in which each member state effectively mirrors every other in terms of policies and their implementation.’ —Anton Masterovoy, ‘Anthropology of East Europe Review’
Acknowledgments; Lithuania: An Overview; List of Tables and Figures; Chapter 1. Introduction; Chapter 2. Small-Scale Farmers at the Geopolitical Return to Europe, 1990–2004; Chapter 3. Paradoxes of Aging: On Aging Farmers and Aging Politicians; Chapter 4. Effects of and Responses to the EU Programs in the Countryside; Chapter 5. The Insiders and the Outsiders: EUropeanization of Products and People in the Marketplace; Chapter 6. “If you wish your son bad luck, give him your land”: EUropeanization, Demographic Change and Social Security; Chapter 7. “They told us we would be getting up on the high mountain”: Concluding Remarks; Bibliography; Index