History Memory And Identity In Post Soviet Estonia

Download or read book History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia written by Sigrid Rausing and published by Oxford Studies in Social and C. This book was released on 2004 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sigrid Rausing describes the changing world of the Estonian Swedes, and the way in which this minority identity was constructed in the various ideologies that have dominated the region since the early twentieth century. In particular she is concerned with the latest of these changes: thepost-Soviet attempt to 'restore' Swedish cultural identity. Rausing touches on a wide range of issues, debates, and insights: 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 particular former collective farm, now subject to economic decline, the Estonian nation-building ideological project, and new relationships of dependency with Sweden. One of the author's central arguments is that these changes reflect a consciousattempt to 'reform habitus' so as 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 tropes of the Soviet era.