Post-socialism as an experience of distancing and dispossession in rural and transnational Estonia

Abstract

This article brings together two sets of data – from rural Estonia and the Estonian diaspora in the UK – to analyse the themes of dispossession and distancing. The article highlights links between the processes of Othering and the continuing significance of the concepts of socialism and post-socialism as explanatory in relation to emerging hierarchies related to the region. In Estonia, some people and regions still seem to bear the marks of state socialism and face symbolic dispossession, in particular, the rural regions. Rural Estonians experience social dispossession and distance from one another, as well as from their home regions by migrating. With migration to western Europe, people acquire opportunities for taking new control over their own image, thus enabling some renewed symbolic and social worth. However, in the case of the diaspora in the UK, the migrant setting demonstrates how the use of disparaging terminology linked to the post-socialist transformation travels beyond borders, and also how the symbolic dispossession of eastern Europeans arises from the stigma of post-socialism.