Aet Annist

University of Tartu · Department of Ethnology

The introduction to the special issue of Methis on Estonian environmentalism provides an overview of the phenomenon of environmentalism and its spread across political periods, economic formations, and regions. The essay starts by contextualising the central concepts of the issue, ‘environmentalism’ and its possible translation into Estonian as ‘ke...

This article brings together two sets of data – from rural Estonia and the Estonian diaspora in the UK – to analyse the themes of dispossession and distancing. The article highlights links between the processes of Othering and the continuing significance of the concepts of socialism and post-socialism as explanatory in relation to emerging hierarch...

This article considers the experiences of four groups of young people (from Germany, Estonia, Russia and the UK) whose ‘mode of being’ is reduced or distorted in different ways as a result of misrecognition or stigmatisation. It argues that the responses young people make to this form of social subordination are enabled or constrained by the recogn...

This chapter aims to rethink the relationship between rural authenticity and populism. While the use of idyllic rural images by populist movements has been widely discussed in the literature, we argue that in the context of post-socialist neoliberalisation of regional politics, it is the employment of rural authenticity for regional development pur...

This introductory article offers a theoretical frame for the current special section, discussing protests’ value for analyzing performance, power, expansion, and exclusion, and contributes its own case study from the ongoing anti-logging protests in Estonia. While arising from power imbalances, protests hold powerful tools for achieving their aims....

Cultural heritage and home are not natural givens but construed and bounded in spatial, temporal and emotional terms. This similarity suggests that diasporic movements that disrupt the spatial dimension need closer examination. This article examines how geopolitical shifts affect the connection between people and the source of heritage central to t...

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The chapter discusses the border between Estonia and Russia in the South East Estonian Seto region as a rupture, rather than accepted and welcome political separation, the particular responses to which display cultural, ethnic and political identity. The study offers an ethnographic account of various borders in Seto country (state border, municipa...

This chapter will discuss informality in a way that is the reverse of other chapters in this book. While most cases in the book cover the ubiquity of informal subversions of rules and formally arranged interactions in the post-socialist world, my data demonstrates that in some cases informality is more an assumption than reality. It is not necessar...

Based on anthropological fieldwork in the southeastern Estonian Seto region, the article studies the construed image of the authentic past enacted, used, and institutionalized in the present. Heritage creation is a process embedded in past and present regional, national, and international events and activities. Using Foucault’s concept of heterotop...

The article offers an overview of the history of Estonian ethnology in juxtaposition with simultaneous developments in anthropology, a discipline recently established on the Estonian academic scene. The article explores the context and implications of early differences, as well as the recent rapprochement of the two disciplines, and the institution...

The book explores the community-building initiatives of a British-funded participatory development programme in centralised villages in southeastern Estonia and people’s daily experiences of co-existence in those villages. The data was gathered in 2002-2004 for my PhD thesis (University College London, 2007) with multisited fieldwork in two Estonia...

The following article compares the Soviet and post-Soviet processes of hegemony creation. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I describe how in Estonia, where highly formalised cultural sphere was a norm already in the 19th century, Soviet cultural hegemony was never properly established. The Soviet system of blanket-funding unintentionally...

Multi-sited ethnographic research results presented in this article allow in-depth analysis of how developmental cultures evolve through a complicated set of interests and agendas as well as the concerns of various stakeholders. The article examines the evaluation process of project applications at the stage where the programme’s general ideology i...