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Accepted Paper:
Estonian refugee ethnologists in Sweden and the question of a national discipline
Marleen Metslaid
(Estonian National Museum)
The paper deals with the question of continuity of a national Estonian ethnology in exile and the interaction between refugee and Soviet Estonian scholars in developing the discipline after the Second World War.
Paper long abstract:
After the Second World War, many Estonian ethnologists found themselves as refugees in Sweden. They had been representatives of national sciences in the independent republic of Estonia and had tried to continue their course during the war. Despite the need to adjust to new political, cultural, and academic circumstances, scholars initially considered it necessary to develop their discipline as national one even when in exile. What kind of opportunities and obstacles did they encounter due to the policies of the host country, the capabilities of refugee community, and the availability of research sources? How did they find balance between academic ambitions and the desire to support the national policy of the refugee community? Did this kind of initiative lasted for decades until the end of the Cold War or was it just a false hope that gradually disappeared? Did they reconsider their role over the years?
Although some scholars declared that the proper academic work is done only in exile, then most of the ethnologists intensively kept track of the publications published in the Soviet homeland and wrote reviews of those for the refugee press and Western academic journals. How did they perceive domestic disciplines? Refugee ethnologists were removed from the official historiography of Soviet Estonian scholarship, but the correspondence between colleagues revived in the 1960s at the latest. What was the role of communication for the ethnologists from both side of the Iron Curtain?