The Nationalization of Dispositions: Field Transformations in Post-Soviet Estonia

Léo P Henry, University of Toronto

How do social spaces shift over time in post-imperial contexts? Although significant research demonstrates how hierarchies and patterns of empire extend into colonies and then persist in post-imperial contexts, we know comparatively little about how imperial patterns differentiate over time within postimperial states. In this paper, I focus on Estonia, which in 1991 became independent from the Soviet Union, following fifty years of imperial rule. Drawing on surveys conducted in Estonia twenty years apart (in 1996 and 2018), I demonstrate how Estonian communities came to differentiate themselves from Russia over these first two decades of independence. Through correspondence analyses (Multiple Factorial Analysis), I focus on the spaces of values and politics, and demonstrate a transformation over time from imperial to post-imperial spaces. In so doing, I measure the growing distance and differentiation — and even the inversion — of earlier Soviet preferences that had been extended into Estonia. With this, I identify the emergence of a post-imperial space in which orientations toward an earlier Soviet set of preferences become unsettled, in favour of new forms of capital in newly independent Estonia. Finally, I offer a new methodological approach to studying field change over time in the imperial context, and how we might detect structural shifts in the imperial time of newly emergent nation-states.

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 Presented in Session 15. Rethinking Fields, Social Spaces, and Reflexivity: Theoretical and Methodological Innovations in Historical Sociology