Musical self-image and cultural change: Lithuanian minority in poland case study

Abstract

The paper deals with living systems at the social and individual levels of analysis. We examine the individual's perception of membership in an ethnically defined social group, in particular the hypotheses regarding the implicit definitions of one's own social group elicited from the negatives of perceived differences from members of other groups. The specific hypotheses concern the relationship between the perceived differences and the geographical distance to the group. These hypotheses were tested on the material collected from evaluations of Lithuanian folk songs from various regions by Lithuanian minority in Poland. In addition to the results being generalizable to other ethnic groups, and to perception not restricted to songs but also concerning other aspects of culture (allowing mostly categorical judgments), the results are of interest because of the statistical methodology used, which involves resampling techniques for categorical data.