Abstract
Museums are powerful actors in the making of national identity. Through selection of objects, their spatial arrangements and storyline they open a possibility of a personal engagement with the national past. This ethnographic study analyses the new permanent exhibitions at the Estonian National Museum (reopened in October 2016) as a site where the notion of the Estonian nation, its heritage, heroes and historical memory is constructed. The main argument is that the National Museum has initiated a shift towards inclusiveness in the way Estonian national identity is constructed. The initial post-Soviet nation-building was largely based on a firm rejection of the Soviet era as a valid part of national history and employed ethnocentrism which emphasised the privileged status of ethnic Estonian nation and culture while excluding Russian speakers from the core nation. The new exhibitions rely on the language of human experience rather than placing the nation as the main actor of history. Effectively, the paper demonstrates that in this new discourse the boundaries of Estonian identity have become more permeable and adaptable in comparison with the early post-independence time.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
As a result of its geographical proximity to Russia, Estonia has always had a significant presence of the Russian speaking population. During the Soviet times, a considerable number of Russian-speakers settled in Estonia. By the end of the occupation, Russian-speakers made up about 40% of the population and most of them did not speak Estonian (Ehala & Niglas, 2006, p. 210). The rapid change of the demographic situation as well as the restorationist discourse resulted in a situation where the Soviet immigrants were deemed illegal and Estonia did not want to bear any legal responsibility for the newcomers. The Russian speakers were not seen so much in terms of ethnicity but rather as a potential political and demographic threat to the continuance of the state (cf. Pettai, 2007).
References
Adams, L. L. (1999). Invention, institutionalization and renewal in Uzbekistan’s national culture. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2(3), 355–373.
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
Aronsson, P., Elgenius, G. (2011). Making National Museums in Europe: A comparative approach. In Building National Museums in Europe 1750–2010. Conference proceedings from EuNaMus; European National Museums: Identity politics; the uses of the past and the European Citizen, Bologna, 28–30 April 2011. EuNaMus Report No. 1 (No. 064) (pp. 5–20). Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press.
Barth, F. (Ed.). (1969). Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of culture difference. Bergen: Universitets forlaget.
Bennett, T. (1998). Culture: A reformer’s science. London: Routledge.
Best, S. (2002). What is affect? Considering the affective dimension of contemporary installation art. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 3(1), 207–225.
Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage.
Datunashvili, A. (2017). The Georgian National Museum and the Museum of Soviet Occupation as loci of informal nation building. In A. Polese et al. (Eds.), Identity and nation building in everyday post-socialist life (pp. 52–69). New York: Routledge.
Deutsch, K., & Foltz, W. (1966). National building. New York: Atherton Press.
Duncan, C. (2005). Civilizing rituals: Inside public art museums. New York: Routledge.
Edensor, T. (2002). National identity, popular culture and everyday life. Oxford: Berg.
Ehala, M., & Niglas, K. (2006). Language attitudes of Estonian secondary school students. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 5(3), 209–227.
Fox, J. E., & Miller-Idriss, C. (2008). Everyday nationhood. Ethnicities, 8(4), 536–563.
Gregory, K., & Witcomb, A. (2007). Beyond nostalgia: The role of affect in generating historical understanding at heritage sites. In S. Knell et al. (Eds.), Museum revolutions: How museums change and are changed (pp. 263–275). London: Routledge.
Isaacs, R. (2014). Nomads, warriors and bureaucrats: Nation-building and film in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Nationalities Papers, 43(3), 399–416.
Jones, R., & Merriman, P. (2009). Hot, banal and everyday nationalism: Bilingual road signs in Wales. Political Geography, 28, 164–173.
Karm, S., & Leete, A. (2015). The ethics of ethnographic attraction: Reflections on the production of the Finno-Ugric exhibitions at the Estonian National Museum. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, 9(1), 99–121.
Kolstø, P. (Ed.). (1999). Nation-building and ethnic integration in post-soviet societies: An investigation of Latvia and Kazakhstan. New York: Westview Press.
Kolstø, P. (Ed.). (2014). Strategies of symbolic nation-building in South Eastern Europe. Farnham: Ashgate.
Kuutma, K. (2011). National museums in Estonia. In Building National Museums in Europe 1750–2010. Conference proceedings from EuNaMus; European National Museums: Identity politics; the uses of the past and the European Citizen, Bologna, 28–30 April 2011. EuNaMus Report No. 1 (pp. 231–259). Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press.
Lamont, M. (1992). Money, morals and manners. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Knell, S., Aronsson, P., & Amundsen, A. B. (Eds.). (2014). National museums: New studies from around the world. Routledge.
Martinez, F. (2016). Wasted legacies? Material culture in contemporary Estonia. PhD dissertation, Tallinn University.
McLean, F. (2005). Museums and national identity. Museum and Society, 3(1), 1–4.
Mole, R. (2012). The Baltic States from the Soviet Union to the European Union. Identity, discourse and power in the post-communist transition of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. New York: Routledge.
Polese, A., Morris, J., Pawłusz, E., & Seliverstova, O. (Eds.). (2017). Identity and nation building in everyday post-socialist life. Routledge.
Pawłusz, E. (2016). The Estonian Song Celebration (Laulupidu) as an instrument of language policy. Journal of Baltic Studies, 48, 251–271. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2016.1164203
Pettai, V. (2007). The construction of state identity and its legacies: Legal restorationism in Estonia. Ab Imperio, 3, 403–426.
Pfoser, A. (2015). Between security and mobility: Negotiating a hardening border regime in the Russian-Estonian borderland. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41(10), 1684–1702.
Pye, L. (1962). Politics, personality and nation-building: Burma’s search for identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Runnel, P., Tatsi, T., & Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, P. (2014). Who Authors the Nation?: The debate surrounding the building of the new Estonian National Museum. In National Museums (pp. 325-338). Routledge.
Scorrano, A. (2012). Constructing national identity: National representations at the Museum of Sydney. Journal of Australian Studies, 36(3), 345–362.
Seliverstova, O. (2017a). Consumer citizenship and reproduction of Estonianness. In A. Polese et al. (Eds.), Identity and nation building in everyday post-socialist life (pp. 119–138). New York: Routledge.
Seliverstova, O. (2017b). The role of consumer culture in the formation of national identity in the post-Soviet region. Evidence from Estonia and Ukraine. PhD dissertation, Tallinn University.
Seljamaa, E.-H. (2012). A home for 121 nationalities or less: Nationalism, ethnicity, and integration in post-Soviet Estonia. PhD dissertation, Ohio State University.
Skey, M. (2009). The national in everyday life: A critical engagement with Michael Billig’s thesis of banal nationalism. The Sociological Review, 57(2), 331–346.
Skey, M. (2011). National belonging and everyday life. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Slezkine, Y. (1994). The USSR as a communal apartment, or how a socialist state promoted ethnic particularism. Slavic Review, 53(2), 414–452.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–37). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Tallinn (1999) - this is not a reference to an academic work but part of the name “Estonian Academy of Music and Theater in Tallinn”.
Vetik, R. (Ed.). (2012). Nation-building in the context of post-communist transformation and globalization. The case of Estonia. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pawłusz, E. (2021). The Role of Estonian National Museum in the Process of Redefining the Boundaries of National Identity. In: Kullasepp, K., Marsico, G. (eds) Identity at the Borders and Between the Borders. SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62267-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62267-1_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62266-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62267-1
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)