The Myth of the Tower of Babel and its consequences : the indigenous grammars of the mixed world. A contribution to the anthropology of borderlands (based on research in Belarusian-Lithuanian borderlands)

The article is based on the results of ethnographic field research which the author has conducted over the last 20 years in multi-lingual and multi-faith villages of Belarusian-Lithuanian borderlands in the Grodno region in Belarus. The residents of kolkhoz villages of the region turned out to be unfamiliar with the scholarly term "borderlands". They describe their pluralistic social and cultural reality by means of an underlying metaphor (conceptual archetype) of a mixed world. This emic (subjective) category of describing the social world is subjected in the article to an anthropological analysis and interpretation. The author considers also the emic conceptualisation of the significant differences between "ethnic" groups.