Ethnic segregation of consumption in Estonia: mythologies and practices

ABSTRACT

The segregation of consumption between the Russian- and Estonian-speaking populations residing in Estonia has been common knowledge in the popular imagination, mass media publications, and academic papers. Rather than undertaking an impossible mission to identify whether these narratives are true, in this article, I show how this repertoire of stories has fostered special marketing strategies and document the emergence of a special marketing niche of companies promising to teach how to market products to mainstream or minority consumers based on their presumed mental differences. Deriving from ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate how mythologies about ethnic segregation in consumption paradoxically result in integration.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic integration
• ethnic segregation
• assimilation
• Russian speakers
• mythology
• consumption
• ethnographic research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Estonian Research Council grants PSG48 “Performative Negotiations of Belonging in Contemporary Estonia” and PSG729 “COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories: Contents, Channels, and Target Groups.”

Notes on contributors

Anastasiya Astapova

Anastasiya Astapova is an Associate Professor of Folkloristics (University of Tartu, Estonia) and a member of the Estonian Young Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Humor and Rumor in the Post-Soviet Authoritarian State (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), a co-editor of Conspiracy Theories in Eastern Europe: Tropes and Trends (Routledge, 2021), and a co-author of Conspiracy Theories and the Nordic Countries (Routledge, 2020). At the moment, Astapova is the principal investigator in the Estonian Science Foundation project “COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories: Contents, Channels, and Target Groups” (2022–2025).