Paper short abstract

This paper examines the Estonian belief-system Maausk as a mediating framework through which heritage, land, and tradition are politicized today. Focusing on the far-right organisation Sinine Äratus, it shows how landscapes and ancestral memory are mobilized to naturalize ethnonational belonging.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the political life of heritage in Estonia by looking at the contemporary belief-system Maausk and its selective appropriation by the ethno-nationalist group Sinine Äratus. Maausk is often presented by its practitioners as an apolitical way of life, rooted in relationships with land, ancestors, and non-human beings. Yet its symbols and practices have become entangled with nationalist projects that stress territorial belonging, cultural continuity, and ethnic survival.

Drawing on ethnographic materials, the paper treats Maausk as a mediating assemblage through which symbolic relations to the land can be used for political ends. Sacred landscapes, folklore, and ancestral presence function as identity markers that make national belonging tangible and embodied. The analysis shows how Sinine Äratus mobilizes Maausk-inspired ecological and spiritual imaginaries to present environmental protection as an ethnic duty. At the same time, Maausk practitioners and activists promote alternative values that resist the reduction of sacred sites to nationalist exclusivity, while still engaging with wider ideas of Estonia as a “forest nation.”

By approaching heritage as a shared symbolic repertoire, the paper argues that the political power of Maausk does not come from explicit doctrinal alignment, but from its broad cultural legitimacy and its grounding in ecological and cosmological sensibilities. Maausk provides a common language through which care for land, non-human life, and ancestral continuity can be expressed across political divides. This allows far-right actors to embed exclusionary narratives within practices and values that are otherwise widely perceived as ethical, environmental, and culturally unifying.