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- Convenors:
-
Ulla Savolainen
(University of Helsinki)
Elo-Hanna Seljamaa (University of Tartu)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- HERITAGE
- :
- Room H-202
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the roles and places of minorities, their memories, practices, and heritages in the efforts to (re)imagine nations and multinational communities, to (re)define their centres and margins, and to (re)member their pasts for the purposes of the present and future.
Long Abstract:
For well over a century, folklore studies and ethnology have participated in and sometimes led the efforts to (re)imagine nations and multinational communities, to (re)define their centres and margins, and to (re)collect their pasts for the purposes of the present and future. More recently, the emergence of ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘cultural memory’ as new categories of thought and action have come to (re)shape the ways in which these processes of (re)imagination are (re)valued and (re/de)constructed. This panel examines the roles and places of minorities, their memories, practices, and heritages in these (re)imaginings and (re)definitions. We invite case-study-based and theoretical contributions that explore the following questions: What kinds of tensions and logics relate to the canonization and marginalization of various groups and their perspectives with regard to collective memory? How are minority and majority categories co-constructed and related to each other in different historical times and in different venues? What kinds of roles have archives, museums and other memory and heritage institutions had in (re)imagining communities, national and otherwise? How do these (re)imaginations differ at institutions operating at national, regional, and local levels and how have they changed over time? How do grassroot voices and institutional actions interrelate (if at all), and what kinds of opportunities and frictions are associated with their interplay? How to best redress past acts of disremembering and dismembering? What kinds of ethical and epistemological challenges relate to differing and even conflicting conceptions of groupness and identity?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 16 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
The paper will explore legal narrative as a way to (re)imagine a nation and its identity, to reinforce and renew the relations between majority and minority. Based on a recent case study, it will argue that (re)imagining ties between heritage and land remain an instrumental narrative for this cause.
Paper long abstract:
Legal discourse, due to its various specificities including a self-referencing nature, is a politically powerful and necessary medium for imagining a nation. In addition to building legal regimes, articulating rights and duties of persons, and defining legal consequences of their action or its absence, law serves also for constructing grand narratives, most vividly expressed in preambles to constitutions or to other laws.
Building the argument on the case of drafting the Historical Latvian Lands Law, adapted in 2021 at the aftermath of the experience of nation-wide territorial divide accomplished through administrative reform, this paper will explore how legal narrative is used for reinforcing and renewing the complex relations between majority and minority of a people and a nation. The paper will address the way cultural spaces within historical lands (regions) are being conceptualised, and in particular the way legal narrative on history has been used to define the indigeneity of Livs, to acknowledge the role of their heritage in Latvian nation building, and to articulate their present cultural space and respective cultural rights.
Despite that heritage communities increasingly find their cultural space in digital realm, (re)imagining ties between heritage and land remain, as the case shows, an instrumental narrative in (re)imagining a nation and its identity. The paper is part of the postdoctoral research project ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage as Resource for Sustainable Development in Northern Europe: Rights-Based Approach’ (No.: 1.1.1.2/VIAA/3/19/476).
Paper short abstract:
The present and future of the Italian minority in Slovenia has been burdened by negative legacies of the past. How to (re)imagine its position after decades of silencing due to conflict memories between the invisibility and its contest against the hegemonic visions of the national past?
Paper long abstract:
The Italians in Slovenia’s borderland region of Istria were transformed to minority after the so-called “exodus” when 90% of Italians, mostly from urban environments, migrated to Italy and abroad after WW II due to complex reasons following the change of the national border and the introduction of socialist system. Before the urban environments were mostly inhabited by Italian speaking population, while the hinterland was mostly Slovenian. The emptied urban places were resettled by migrants from Slovenia and other republics of former Yugoslavia. Due to the new social reality and new language the Italians found themselves in the role of “foreigners at their own home”. As their memory was in conflict with the dominant one, the memories and heritages of the “remained” Italians have been silenced both in Slovenian and Italian collective memory. Moreover, due to two decades of violent Italian fascist oppression and war crimes they have been collectively criminalized in the Slovenian discourse.
If remembering makes the past active in the present the question is how they shape their future by drawing on the past and cultural heritage as strategic resources to give them voice? Are there any chances to reimagine their marginal position, burdened by contested past, when their memory has been recognized by an anthropological work from the dominant side? At the same time, feeling burdened by negative legacies of the past, such as fascism, isn’t it a safer strategy to survive in a dominant milieu of a dissonant memory to remain invisible?
Paper short abstract:
The case study on the marginalisation of Polish ethnic minority in Southeastern Lithuania shows that marginalised collective memories lead to the marginalisation of this ethnic group and result in its exclusion from Lithuanian society. In my presentation I discuss why and how this happen.
Paper long abstract:
Throughout the 20th century, the territory of Southeast Lithuania was a part of four different countries: Russia’s empire, Poland, the Soviet Union and, finally, Lithuania - the country that it belongs to today. As a result, the people living in this region in question were affected heavily by different policies implemented by these countries. Because of these experiences, the collective memory of Poles living in Southeastern Lithuania differs greatly from the one kept by the rest of Lithuanian society and the canonical interpretation of history, which is promoted by the state of Lithuania. The fieldwork data show that Poles feel that their grass-root voices and memories are suppressed and marginalised in modern-day Lithuania. Moreover, they believe that their memories are not represented in the official Lithuanian nation-state interpretation of the past; they are not transmitted through state institutions such as museums, schools, media, etc.
This marginalisation of the collective memory of the Poles creates the feeling of exclusion between the Polish ethnic minority and the rest of Lithuanian society. This leads to tensions in other areas of life (such as education programs, public festivals promoted by the state and local monuments ).
In my presentation, I introduce findings from my anthropological research conducted from 2017 to 2019 in Southeastern Lithuania. I highlight why and how these processes of marginalisation and exclusion occur. The findings are discussed within the theoretical framework based on Jan and Aleida Assmann’s insights.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation discusses experiences and expression of negotiating religious rules within the small but diverse Jewish minority of Finland, shedding light on how vernacular Judaism is done in the margins of a secular society with strong Lutheran heritage – and in the margins of the Jewish world.
Paper long abstract:
Margins surface on many levels in the life-narratives Finnish Jews. In all the Nordic countries, Jews form a miniscule ethnic and religious minority with a long historical experience of framing their cultural memory and heritage as parts of highly secular societies – shaped by the domination of Lutheran Christianity but today increasingly diverse. Finland is also placed at the margins of the Jewish world: a local diaspora at its northernmost outskirts.
The synagogues of Finland are Orthodox by ritual, but the persons who come here seldom share this self-identification. Most of them are secular – others are seekers, converts, new-Orthodox, indifferent, traditionalists or self-guided innovators. Leaning on extensive ethnography (101 interviews) and archival data generated within the Minhag Finland research project, this presentation focuses on expressions and experiences of religious rules in day-to-day Jewish life as part of complex interactions between individuals, institutions, and the surrounding society. Building on the analytical framework of vernacular religion (Primiano 1995; Bowman & Valk 2012) we ask: What does making, bending and breaking rules look like in a minority community coloured by growing diversity and deep-reaching secularity? What rules are remembered, rejected and reshaped when meaningful ways of being, knowing and doing Judaism are formed?
Longstanding established minority communities seldom advocate a total rejection of the surrounding culture but rather ‘creatively straddle both worlds’ (Kupari & Vuola 2020). We strive to capture this complex image of minority experiences in a framework sensitive to historical data and cultural context but also individual narratives and nuances.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic field work and bringing concepts of epistemology, power, cultural heritage, and others, this conference paper is dedicated to the explanation of different and contested ways of understanding and justifying Tatar minority heritages in Estonia.
Paper long abstract:
Based on ethnographic materials collected in Estonia in 2019, I will talk about contested discourses of Tatar heritage at a meaningful event for the Tatar community – the festival “Sabantuy”. I will try to explain in my conference paper how different actors and political figures interpret Tatar heritage in different ways and try to show how it is contested within everyday contexts. For some, Tatar heritage is connected with the long history of Tatars living in Tallinn, as evidenced by the historical quarter in the city called “Tatari”. For others, the Tatars and Russians have a long joint history, and therefore Tatar heritage is organically linked with the Russian state, and with Russian history. Yet another approach has Tatar heritage connected with Tatarstan and, its capital Kazan. Experiencing ethnographically the “everyday encounters” of Tatar-ness at the “Sabantuy” festival demonstrates the plurality of meanings around Tatar community memory and heritage.