Neringa Klumbytė

I’m an anthropologist and a writer. I was born in Kaunas, in Soviet Lithuania. I experienced occupation, authoritarianism, revolution, and the collapse of the USSR as a child and a teenager. Sociocultural anthropology was banned as a discipline in the Soviet Union and only by accident I discovered that what interested me actually has a name and is taught at universities abroad. I chose it as my career and a life path. My work has explored history of authoritarian regimes and violence, the Holocaust and other genocides, historical justice and memory, occupation and sovereignty regimes, political satire and humor, among other topics.

Current Projects

Testimonies of everyday life under occupation in Ukraine

Holocaust and post-genocide memory in Lithuania

Recent Books

Winner of the 2024 BASEES (British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies) Women’s Forum Book Prize.

Authoritarian Laughter explores the political history of the satire and humor magazine Broom published in Soviet Lithuania. Artists, writers, and journalists were required to create state-sponsored Soviet humor and serve the Communist Party after Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. Neringa Klumbytė investigates official attempts to shape citizens into Soviet subjects and engage them through a culture of popular humor.

Broom was multidirectional—it both facilitated Communist Party agendas and expressed opposition toward the Soviet regime. Official satire and humor in Soviet Lithuania increasingly created dystopian visions of Soviet modernity and were a forum for critical ideas and nationalist sentiments that were mobilized in anti-Soviet revolutionary laughter in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Authoritarian Laughter illustrates that Soviet Western peripheries were unstable and their governance was limited. While authoritarian states engage in a statecraft of the everyday and seek to engineer intimate lives, authoritarianism is defied not only in revolutions, but in the many stories people tell each other about themselves in jokes, cartoons, and satires.