Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Informants
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Persisting Pasts in the Margins of Europe
- Part 1 The Making of Estonian History
- Part 2 The Meaning of Closure
- Part 3 Closure and a Significant Other
- Conclusion: Guardians Of Living History
- List of Informants
- Full Reference List
- Index
Introduction: Persisting Pasts in the Margins of Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Informants
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Persisting Pasts in the Margins of Europe
- Part 1 The Making of Estonian History
- Part 2 The Meaning of Closure
- Part 3 Closure and a Significant Other
- Conclusion: Guardians Of Living History
- List of Informants
- Full Reference List
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The introduction introduces the question of how people that live in a society with an extremely complicated, violent past and only a short history of independence engage with the past, both within their families and as members of a national community. According to the literature, they will long for stability, a strong collective story and closure. The chapter then describes the ‘War of Monuments’; the context of insecurity in which the ethnographic fieldwork took place. Subsequently, it positions the book within the literature on the anthropology of post-communist remembering. Finally the Introduction describes which methods have been used to gather the data and it introduces the social groups the book focuses on.
Keywords: Insecurity, collective memory, closure, war of monuments, ethnography, Estonia
It was autumn 2007, when I found myself in the sauna with Anna (born 1987), at her parents’ place in Rakvere, a small city in the north of Estonia. We had just met in Tartu, where she was studying law. I had been looking for an Estonian language partner, she for a Dutch one. Just a few weeks later she invited me to her place of birth, as she wanted to show me ‘real Estonian life’. She had cooked potatoes, vegetables, minced meat sauce, and had offered pickled mushrooms that the family had gathered during the summer, accompanied by the usual black bread and sour cream. She took me to the garden of the house and told me what grew where. She took me on a tour through the house, showing me how her father had built this house himself, sharing stories about every room we passed. Then she took me to the room with the library, a source of pride in every Estonian household, and began to show me Estonian history by handing books over to me, one by one.
In the sauna later that evening Anna felt like sharing stories about her family. ‘My grandmother tells me stories about how Estonians were deported,’ she said respectfully. Suddenly, she began to complain about the Russian minority which does not want to learn the Estonian language: ‘I was once in Tallinn in a shop and wanted to buy white bread. The cashier was not able to understand me.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Guardians of Living HistoryAn Ethnography of Post-Soviet Memory Making in Estonia, pp. 19 - 64Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020