Comparative aspects of the Song and Dance Celebration of the Baltic countries in the context of nation-branding processes

Abstract

Traditions rooted in cultural heritage are a key element behind the well-known motto of the European Union, 'Unity in Diversity'. The year 2018 was designated as the European Year of Cultural Heritage, with the aim to raise awareness about the uniqueness and richness of national, regional and local heritage, while stressing its significance in overcoming modern global challenges such as demographic and climate changes, natural or man-made disasters, community isolationism, and serious violations of the values of freedom, tolerance and democracy on which European societies are based. The European Cultural Heritage Strategy for the twenty-first century stresses that it is 'a key factor for the refocusing of our societies on the basis of dialogue between cultures, respect for identities and diversity, and a feeling of belonging to a community of values' (Council of Europe 2017). Both tangible and intangible forms of cultural heritage are considered as equally important in the this Strategy. The forms of intangible cultural heritage include several elements, among them the oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals and festive events. In this chapter, festival events are presented as one of the most popular and accessible formats of cultural performative practices. Not only do they serve the purpose of constructing national identity and presenting the peculiarities of culture, but they also perform the function of the so-called soft power (Nye 2004: x), often referred to as one of the most

Modeling the spatiotemporal spread of beneficial alleles using ancient genomes

“…To numerically solve the differential equations and obtain maximum likelihood estimates, we used the libraries deSolve ( Soetaert et al, 2010 ), ReacTran ( Soetaert and Meysman, 2012 ), and bbmle ( Bolker, 2020 ). Scripts containing the code used in this article are available on GitHub: https://github.com/RasaMukti/stepadna , (copy archived at swh:1:rev:d024767648d873f329a8e17fcaf6034c99157120 ; Muktupavela, 2021 ).…”