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).