Tallinn University

Faculty Member, Estonian Institute of Humanities

Social and Cultural Anthropology

Thesis Title: Seeking community in post-Soviet Estonian centralised villages

About

My main interests in anthropology cover  the topics of development institutions and cultural heritage, but also the juxtapositions between post-socialist changes in social mutuality and neo-liberal economy, new technologies of power and identity.

For my PhD (2007), I carried out multisited fieldwork (for 18 months, from 2002 to 2004) in two Estonian villages and amongst the staff of a foreign funded development programme aiming to (re)create communities in the villages. The resulting ethnography bridged the traditions of post-socialist studies and anthropology of development both in theory and methodology and unravelled the "facilitatory mystique" of how and with what effects are locals recruited to development processes and institutions.

With this research I also looked at the effects of the breakdown of Soviet work environments, especially in the Soviet-created centralised villages, and the loss of mutual dependencies resulting from this. The proximity of lives in the Soviet rural apartment blocks, an egalitarian social ideology and the experience of growing inequalities have made distance from other villagers desirable. In such circumstances, village parties and 'cultural events' reinforce rather than overcome the experience of difference and the community-building efforts contributed to such issues.

I am presently researching the topics of cultural/heritage planning, funding and management, and leadership of change in Seto country, a culturally "unique" area traversing the borders of Estonia and Russia. Looking at the role of the cultural "guardians" and facilitators, brokers and translators, as well as nouveau-Setos, Seto diaspora and Seto "fans" in these processes, I am particularly interested in how the new technologies of power affect and steer local activities and enforce cultural politics but also how the locals respond to and adjust these policies and technologies. More recently, I have started to study how the creation of cultural hegemony via local "elites" and state development programmes translate the politics of everyday life in the interaction between groups and individuals in the national periphery and the providing state.

I consider research to have a very important public role. Apart from research publications, I am regularly contributing  anthropological insights to various journalistic publications and try to bring to the fore the needs of rural groups but also environmental and animal rights issues.