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.
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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).