Marcelijaus Martinai io poezijos antropologi kumas | Anthropological poetry of Marcelijus Martinaitis

Artists, philosophers, and cultural anthropologists claim that a human being is defined by the innate ability and aptitude to represent the world and oneself symbolically; this opens up an exclusive possibility of self-reflection, perception of the world, and creation of meanings. Clifford Geertz draws attention to the fact how a human being himself explicates and comments his culture – a net of meanings and their relationships spun by himself, where, as if suspended in a web, a man lives, speaks, bleeds, wages wars, loves, jokes, and creates poems. The method of the interpretation of culture “thick description” by Geertz “is focused not on the recording of external parameters, but namely on that far more sophisticated net of relationships of meanings and perceptive structures upon the grasping whereof one could approximate to the “essence” – i.e. a system of meanings, world outlook, and culture of the other. This article analyses the creation of Marcelijus Martinaitis, a narrator, one of the most famous Lithuanian poets of the “outgoing generation”, descendant and successor of the declining ethnic community culture, increasingly distancing from the experience of a modern man in terms of cross-disciplinary literature anthropology. Also, a model of experimental anthropology, the so-called anthropological poetics that has not yet been discussed in Lithuanian, is presented. It treats poetry as an interpretation of ambivalent, complicated experience of an anthropologist. The article states that he is a peculiar cultural anthropologist, a witness, an intermediary of experience, whereas his poetry acts as Geertz’s “thick description”. Essayistic works of Martinaitis are read as an articulation of his ethnographic self-creation covering personality formation, testimony, and transfer of cultural meanings.