![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article creates a conceptual and methodological framework for reading case studies. First, it conceptualizes life story and oral history as medium of memory of the twentieth century. Second, it demonstrates how individual, social, and political formats and dimensions of memory intersect in remembering the Baltic socialism. Third, it shows how in a common attempt to remember the socialist past, groups and individuals encounter considerable differences of temporal horizon as well as differences in attributing importance to experiences and events.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Alheit himself does not connect his model to Assmanns’ and the cultural memory studies or to the German communicative and social memory studies developed by Harald Welzer.
2. Methodologically, Alheit’s point of departure is phenomenological sociology, which considers culture to be a shared system of everyday knowledge and meanings, which allow an individual to organize his/her everyday experience, to live and cope in everyday life.
3. Here, however, Alheit differentiates between social memories in totalitarian and democratic societies: in a totalitarian system, dominant knowledge and social counter-knowledge are sealed off from each other, while in a democratic society they are contrasting, conflictual, or competing, maintaining nonetheless a reciprocal influence.
4. On various approaches on memory – autobiography relationship see Roberts (Citation2002, 134–147).
5. In this context, see also the treatment by Aili Aarelaid-Tart on the entwinement of generational, historical, and political time in the context of the 1900–1999 Estonia (Aarelaid-Tart Citation2006, 24–29).
6. For instance, the popular life writing campaign dedicated to the celebration of the ninetieth anniversary of the Republic of Estonia in 2008 elicited highly individualistic stories, although the emphasis of the appeal was directed at the relationships of the writer with their relevant others (from a verbal discussion with Tiiu Jaago).
7. In this common trend of the meaning making of the past, the internal division has been more visible in Lithuanian memory culture and remembrance policy than in Estonia or Latvia. Accompanied with the peculiarities of law and related to political identities and power arrangements, this has resulted in a more ambivalent and defensive evaluation of the Soviet past from the early 1990s onwards (in Šutinienė).
8. Estonian politologist Anu Toots (Citation2003) confirms that due to several law amendments at the beginning of the 2000s, the role of political parties in local politics changed. The parties became stronger organizationally and more and more local elections and decision-making started to resemble that of the parliament, where all processes went through political parties. This in turn affected other local-level positions becoming indirectly related with the parties, which brought about the understanding that ‘in this job you cannot do your work properly if you do not have some political party backing you.’
9. Another such mnemonic motif is informal relationships facilitated by blat (Ledeneva Citation1998). See Kaprāns and Paert in this volume.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Ene Kõresaar
Ene Kõresaar is an Associate Professor of Ethnology at the University of Tartu. Her main research fields are memory of World War II and socialism, oral history and biographical research, and socialist everyday life. She has been working on issues of culture and politics of remembering and life story telling since 1998 with a focus on Estonian post-Soviet narrative memory of the twentieth century. She has edited and coauthored several books on cultural memory and life stories with a particular focus on post-communist developments.