MUSICAL SELF-IMAGE AND CULTURAL-CHANGE - LITHUANIAN MINORITY IN POLAND CASE-STUDY

The paper deals with living systems at the social and individual level s of analysis. We examine the individual's perception of membership in an ethnically defined social group, in particular the hypotheses rega rding 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 hypothe ses were tested on the material collected from evaluations of Lithuani an folk songs from various regions by Lithuanian minority in Poland. I n addition to the results being generalizable to other ethnic groups, and to perception not restricted to songs but also concerning other as pects of culture (allowing mostly categorical judgments), the results are of interest because of the statistical methodology used, which inv olves resampling techniques for categorical data.