The Trap of Abstract Space: Recomposing Russian-Speaking Immigrants in Post-Soviet Estonia

In: Anthropological quarterly: AQ, Band 81, Heft 2, S. 311-342

Abstract

Focusing on the Estonian government's policy to integrate Soviet-era Russian-speaking immigrants, this article historically examines how public officials have come to constitute Estonian state space as a particular national place through the re-constitution of these immigrants in public policy. Drawing on Lefebvre's The Production of Space , the analysis describes place as a combined result of three types of space mobilized in social practice: spatial practices, representational spaces, and representations of space. Conceived through the third type, successful statecraft produces an abstract space that traps target populations through subject-making. The article's deeper project is two-fold. First, it aims to theorize the spatial interplay between deterritorialization and the state's efforts to reterritorialize the nation through citizenship and integration policy. Second, it aims to compensate for ethnographic tendencies that privilege data obtained through direct sensory experience to better capture how the deployment of spatial abstractions in public policy marginalize immigrants and minority groups.