Author(s): Gintautas Mažeikis / Language(s): Lithuanian
Issue: 1-2/2008
The article is devoted to the problem of alternative citizenship in the sphere of policy
on the basis of subcultural and community analysis. People without feeling of strong
essence haven’t motivation for missionary actions and prefer creative construction of
their identities and symbolical worlds. However, they also need to resist unification,
routine, total ideologies and permanent national identities. They change their identities
and need intercultural communication skills and attitudes, advocate public interests,
debate them, compete with other subcultures. Modern Lithuanian philosophers as well
as world philosophical movement prepare conditions for social, cultural legitimizing
of the Other. First of all it is the ethnic, gender and subcultural Other. Legitimation of
subcultural public interests and their needs could be interpreted not only in the horizon
of cultural diversity, but also as a plurality of citizenship and policy. Different ideologies,
parties, political and local communities, types of interests, NGO, imagined communities,
subcultures develop various public demands, identity needs, a diversity of world
feelings and interpretations. This means that modern society contributes to alternative
civic activities, and modern public intellectuals prepare discourses on it. The Other’s
civic expressions destroy the routine, the mainstream discourses.
The Other today is the representative of the subculture alternative and independent
community or just a transgressive subject. Unfortunately, many of representatives of
state government, local municipalities, traditional parties try to neglect or forbid the
activities to increase Otherness. However, the modern economic, cultural process of
subculturalization presupposes development or even production of Otherness. It is the
reason to call the citizenship of the Other as an alternative citizenship.
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