Symbolic boundaries and national borders: The construction of an Estonian Russian identity

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Notes

1. Aksel Kirch, The Integration of non-Estonians into Estonian Society: History, Problems and Trends (Tallinn: Estonian Academy Publishers, 1997), p. 15, footnote 16.

2. Estonian Population Census 2000; Other Russian speakers include Ukrainians, Belorussians, and members of other nationalities who are neither Russian nor Estonian, but use Russian as their primary language of communication.

3. Estonian Population Census 2000.

4. Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1969); Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual Review of Sociology, 28 (2002), pp. 167–195; Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Joel S. Migdal, “Mental Maps and Virtual Checkpoints: Struggles to Construct and Maintain Social Boundaries,” in J. S. Migdal, ed., Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

5. Lamont and Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.”

6. Lamont and Molnár, “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” p. 168.

7. Henri Tajfel and J. C. Turner, “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior,” in S. Worchel and W. G. Austen, eds, Psychology of Intergroup Relations (Chicago: Nelson Hall, l985).

8. For discussions of stereotyping by Estonians and how Estonians view the boundary that separates them from Russians in Estonia, see Martha Merritt, “A Geopolitics of Identity: Drawing the Line between Russia and Estonia,” Nationalities Papers, 28, 2 (2000), pp. 243–262.

9. I would like to thank the Institute for International Education Fulbright program for funding this project, as well as the Institute for International and Social Studies (IISS) in Tallinn for hosting my stay in Estonia and providing invaluable assistance for the 10 months that I was in the field. I would also like to thank the Ford Foundation and the University of Michigan International Institute for their support.

10. Grant McCracken, The Long Interview (Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, 1988).

11. In each Ford project focus group, numbers were assigned to respondents with the same first names.

12. Although interview respondents described themselves as different from Estonians and Russians in Russia, most did not discuss the salience of these differences. As this paper is only intended to demonstrate the existence and content of the symbolic boundaries between groups, the salience of these boundaries does not affect my analysis.

13. The speaker is referring to situations of ethnic strife in Azerbaijan and the Russian Federation, respectively, following the break-up of the Soviet Union.

14. Kennedy, Cultural Formations of Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation, and War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

15. Janet Hart, New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance, 1941–1964 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Margaret R. Somers and Gloria D. Gibson, “Reclaiming the Epistemological ‘Other’: Narrative and the Social Construction of Identity,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Malden Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), pp. 37–99.

16. Hilary Pilkington, Migration, Displacement, and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia (London, New York: Routledge, 1998).

17. David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

18. Pilkington, Migration, Displacement, and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia.

19. Graham Smith, “The Ethnic Democracy Thesis and the Citizenship Debates in Estonia and Latvia,” Nationalities Papers, 24, 2 (1996); State Programme: “Integration in Estonian Society 2000–2007,” http://www.riik.ee/saks/ikomisjon/programme.htm.