Kindred Peoples: Post-Soviet Estonia on Mental Maps of Finno-Ugric Shamanism

• In Event: Historicizing Indigeneity: Decolonization, Disciplines, and Politics

Abstract

In 1991, Estonians became citizens of their own sovereign nation-state, but hundreds of thousands of speakers of other Finno-Ugric languages, living primarily in Siberia, did not. They did, however, became objects of study and subjects of cultural diplomacy for a variety of Estonian ethnologists, writers, and activists. As one such writer put it in a 1990 article titled "Kneeling before the West": "in order to better understand our own place in this world, we should turn to the East, to the wellsprings of our national culture, and lend a helping hand to our kindred peoples over there."

This paper looks at how ethnologists and writers in the 1990s engaged with the "kindred peoples" - the Khanty, Mansi, Nenets and Nganasan Indigenous people in Russian Siberia - and how ethnographies of Finno-Ugric culture were mobilized to produce a narrative about Estonians as "modernized shamans". Such discourses were built on knowledge produced through expeditions organized by the Estonian Academy of Arts and Tartu University, but disseminated broadly in popular culture, in essays by writers like Valdur Mikita and institutions like the Viljandi Academy of Culture.

The paper outlines the institutional origins and shape of the ethnographic research that produced knowledge about Siberian Finno-Ugric cultures, and investigates the stakes of the "kindred peoples" discourse for key political debates in post-Soviet Estonia - from Soviet collaborationism to European integration.

Author

• Aro Velmet, U of Southern California