An article on Estonian boundaries and theory of culture

Some things take a really long time to come out.

Finally, everybody can HERE read a collection of articles on the Theory of Culture, where I have been contributing to one text on boundaries in space and time in the last 100 years of Estonia. I appear as a last author in some kind of quasi-science type of author listing, since I actually worked quite a bit with the manuscript, most of all the theoretical and background parts though.

It is quite a heavy reading, I think, but for me, an important one as well. It shows quite well how material and discursive borders do not always overlap, neither in time nor in space. The changes occur at different speeds in different spheres of culture, thus, for example, the discursive reality can be entirely Soviet, while the economic production, landownership or everyday practices can be still very much behind in the pervious economic order. Practices can maintain old boundaries long after they have been officially erased from the maps or history books.

Some texts grow old while you keep waiting for them to get published. “Plurality of pasts and boundaries: evidence from the last hundred years of Estonia“ has aged relatively well. Even the opening vignette on the EU/Estonian border with Russia reads well amidst the new rhetorical and physical closing of borders in Europe over the last months. How many of those borders that have been closed now are actually physically closed?

Raili Nugin, Tiiu Jaago, Anu Kannike, Kalevi Kull, Hannes Palang, Anu Printsmann, Pihla Maria Siim, Kati Lindström. 2020. Plurality of pasts and boundaries: evidence from the last hundred years of Estonia. In: Anu Kannike, Katre Pärn, Monika Tasa (eds.), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Culture Theory. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, pp. 334-373.