Empty Spaces and the Value of Symbols: Estonia's ‘War of Monuments’ from Another Angle

Burch, S J; Smith, David J.

doi:10.1080/09668130701489139

Cited by 35 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The political elites of post-Soviet Kazakhstan faced the problem of transforming the public 'worlds of meaning' (Verdery 1999). Among the most visible changes is the reshaping of the official urban landscape, a topic that has started to receive some scientific attention in post-Soviet Estonia and Uzbekistan (Bell 1999;Burch & Smith 2007). The removal of a soldier statue in Tallinn, Estonia, which had commemorated those killed during WWII, revealed the potential (violent) consequences of ethnic struggles over interpretative sovereignty in the symbolic urban landscape (Kaiser 2007).…”

Section: Alexander M Danzermentioning

confidence: 98%

Battlefields of Ethnic Symbols. Public Space and Post-Soviet Identity Formation from a Minority Perspective

Danzer

2009

Europe-Asia Studies

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Section: Alexander M Danzermentioning

confidence: 98%

Battlefields of Ethnic Symbols. Public Space and Post-Soviet Identity Formation from a Minority Perspective

Danzer

2009

Europe-Asia Studies

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“…Over the last decades, memory politics have dominated public debate in Estonia, making the national past endure into the future yet ignoring that there is far less consensus about historical representations than is officially depicted (Kirss 2017). Hence, these discussions of national identity should emphasise fluidity and complexity in contrast to essentialist categories rooted in models of the past, acknowledging that divergent views of the past lay at the core of the difficulties of integrating the Russian-speaking community (Burch and Smith 2007;Della Dora and Sooväli 2009;Kattago 2009b).…”

Section: A Scar Left From a Century Of Modernisationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

2018

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The FRINGE series explores the roles that complexity, ambivalence and immeasurability play in social and cultural phenomena. A cross-disciplinary initiative bringing together researchers from the humanities, social sciences and area studies, the series examines how seemingly opposed notions such as centrality and marginality, clarity and ambiguity, can shift and converge when embedded in everyday practices. Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of UCL. Peter Zusi is Lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of UCL.By adopting the tropes of 'repair' and 'waste', this book innovatively manages to link various material registers from architecture, intergenerational relations, affect and museums with ways of making the past present. Through a rigorous yet transdisciplinary method, Martínez brings together different scales and contexts that would often be segregated out. In this respect, the ethnography unfolds a deep and nuanced analysis, providing a useful comparative and insightful account of the processes of repair and waste making in all their material, social and ontological dimensions.Victor Buchli, Professor of Material Culture at UCL This book comprises an endearingly transdisciplinary ethnography of postsocialist material culture and social change in Estonia. Martínez creatively draws on a number of critical and cultural theorists, together with additional research on memory and political studies scholarship and the classics of anthropology. Grappling concurrently with time and space, the book offers a delightfully thick description of the material effects generated by the accelerated post-Soviet transformation in Estonia, inquiring into the generational specificities in experiencing and relating to the postsocialist condition through the conceptual anchors of wasted legacies and repair. This book defies disciplinary boundaries and shows how an attention to material relations and affective infrastructures might reinvigorate political theory.Maria This is a book about many things. Originally, it appears as a critique of discourses about the past, and yet it unfolds as an ethnography of pastness that deals with the contemporary city, geographies of affect, generational change and materiality. The work interweaves a number of topics related to how physical and cultural wasting are rarely synchronised, accounting for diverse ways of treating inheritances and the different intensities of urban memory that they generate. By studying the material and social afterlife of the Soviet world in Estonia, I attempt to show the dialectical relation between construction and demolition, and how the need to build something new entails the disinvestment and neglect of the legacies from the old regime. With a fringy anthropology, I explore how the vanquishing over the Soviet world happened on a different time scale from the decay of its legacy, allowing for new availabilities, intricate reappropriations and unforeseen opportunities for recuper...

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“…These processes were well noted in literature and great many conceptualisations and metaphors were produced, i.e. 'disposable past' (Lisiak 2009), 'uncomfortable past' (Uskoković 2013), 'battles of symbols' (Harutyunyan 2008), 'war on monuments' (Burch and Smith 2007) and many other. Capturing the essence of this interplay, Danzer (2009Danzer ( :1562Danzer ( -1563) describes this process as a 'symbolic appropriation of space'.…”

Section: Symbolic Transformation Of the Public Space Under The Pressumentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These adjustments are aptly named 'memory work' by Burch and Smith (2007). These semantic changes of the built environment characterised the transition throughout East Europe in the 1990s.…”

Section: Symbolic Transformation Of the Public Space Under The Pressumentioning

confidence: 99%

Burdensome past: Challenging the socialist heritage in Macedonia

Janev¹

2017

SEC

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This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Analysis of the project "Skopje 2014", a major symbolic reconstruction of Macedonia capital, points towards establishment of ethnocratic regime in the country. Juxtaposed to the treatment of the socialist monuments it reveals the major shift in the historical narrative. This symbolic appropriation accompanies the neoliberal capitalist appropriation of space and is in its service by shifting the debate away from the capitalist accumulation by means of dispossession. The neglect of socialist monuments is indicative of grey-zoning, a governmentality

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Empty Spaces and the Value of Symbols: Estonia's ‘War of Monuments’ from Another Angle

Cited by 35 publications

References 22 publications

Battlefields of Ethnic Symbols. Public Space and Post-Soviet Identity Formation from a Minority Perspective

Battlefields of Ethnic Symbols. Public Space and Post-Soviet Identity Formation from a Minority Perspective

Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia

Burdensome past: Challenging the socialist heritage in Macedonia

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