History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia

Sigrid Rausing describes the changing world of the Estonians living on a former collective farm, and the ways in which their identity was constructed within the various ideologies that have dominated this region since the late nineteenth century. In particular, she is concerned with the latest of these changes: the post-Soviet attempt to restore the culture of the Estonian Swedes, a minority population present in the area until the Second World War. She touches on a wide range of issues and debates: the relationship between ideology and form, nationalist and Soviet notions of ethnicity and traditional culture, and historically framed notions of an imagined normality. The ethnographic location for these discussions is a former collective farm in the immediate period after privatisation, 1993-4, the Estonian nation-building project, and new relationships of dependency with Sweden. One of the author's central arguments is that these changes reflect a conscious attempt to re-form culture and the world of goods in order to match that of the local image of the West, but that the location of ethnic culture and many of the operative concepts still reflect the ideology and world-view of the Soviet era.


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