A Post-Soviet Eco-Digital Nation? Metonymic Processes of Nation-Building and Estonia’s High-Tech Dreams in the 2010s

Abstract

How do Estonians imagine themselves as a nation? According to a popular Estonian essayist, a proper Estonian digs his garden on Mondays and mines his bitcoins on Tuesdays. This article focuses on Estonian imaginaries to study the grounding structures of Estonian identity-creation in the 2010s and it articulates the core of a canonized understanding of Estonian identity as “eco-digital nationhood.” The article explores Estonia’s eco-digital national model as produced by an aesthetic screening, supported by a Western gaze adapted for local purposes of positive identity creation. In Estonia, international approval (for its reputation as a digital nation) has fostered a national self-image of living in a digital state. Technological advancement combined with idealizations of natural environments have sometimes produced “eco-ambiguous” results, as in efforts to encounter nonhuman life-worlds without leaving one’s own comfort zone. In other instances, the eco and the digital function as two alternating modes of selfhood, the eco-part sometimes finding expression in the narratives of ethnic particularism, the digital part figuring Estonia as a herald of western modernism prudently adapting itself to the digital future. Discrepancies between the eco-digital imaginary and the many less flattering elements of Estonian actuality highlight selective (self-)representative strategies in narratives of national success. Nation building here emerges as a metonymic process, wherein certain parts of culture are foregrounded to represent the whole—while other parts, including substantial parts of the Soviet heritage (material, demographic, social, psychological) languish as unsuitable to be framed.

An ecosemiotic dimension of folklore: Reframing the concept of place-lore

“…At the same time, work of the EFA place-lore research group can be seen as a reaction to intense searches for local and national identity in the period following the restoration of the Republic of Estonia (Remmel 2014b: 19). In these discussions, nature-related tradition has an important role (see Remmel, Jonuks 2021;Annus 2020). The EFA place-lore research group have been recording additional material and making archived material available in cooperation with local communities and institutions either by publishing anthologies on specific regions (see Potter, Remmel, Valk 2001;Remmel 2004;Valper 2010;Remmel 2011;Remmel 2017) or through other forms of cooperation, such as drawing up an inventory of sacred natural sites, 9 or contributing to local or national cultural heritage management and nature protection, 10 etc.…”