The Making of the Consumer? Risk and Consumption in Europeanized Lithuania

Abstract

This article explores how larger geo-political changes are mirrored in the consumption habits in both rural and urban Lithuania. While the dominating European Union discourse emphasizes health, safety, and hygiene in food production, a counter-discourse has emerged where “authenticity” and “tradition” are embraced in the re-evocation of Lithuanian farm products. Based on ethnographic material, I suggest that the coexisting ambivalent and often contradicting feelings toward the West in present-day Lithuania have resulted in both a desire for and refusal of western products, as well as in a revival of the local cuisine.

Keywords:

• EU enlargement
• standard regimes
• risk
• production
• consumption

Notes

¹. Pseudonym. All other names of informants in this article are likewise pseudonyms.

2. When I use the concepts the “West” and “western” it is to be seen as a general reference to western Europe and the USA, and as a way to stay loyal to my informants’ general references to the same regions.

3. As I carried out fieldwork at the marketplace in Marijampolė both during my first stay in Lithuania from January to July 2004 and again during my second stay from October 2006 to October 2007, I am able to draw on field data from both periods of research.

Additional information

Funding

Research was funded by EU and Marie Curie Programme for Social Anthropology.

Notes on contributors

Ida Harboe Knudsen

Ida Harboe Knudsen is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, a position financed by the Danish Independent Research Council, Culture and Communication (Det Frie Forskningsråd, Kultur og Kommunikation [FKK]). She obtained her PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, in 2010 and has written on topics including agriculture, EU enlargement, and dairy production, as well as on illegal work and mafia affiliations in Lithuania.