One Area,Several Cultural Spaces: Comparative Analysis of Stories as the Bases of Local Identity1

摘要

The article examines how different ethnic and cultural groups living in the same multicultural micro-environment (a small town) establish the boundaries for the group with which they identify. The article is based on texts that describe local life (personal interviews, life stories, memoirs, local historical research by amateur historians, etc.). We will be looking at the small industrial town of Kohtla-Jaì?rve, located in north-eastern Estonia, which became a multicultural environment during the period when Estonia was a part of the Soviet Union (1940a€“41 and 1944a€“1991). The regime changes during the 1940s and in 1991 caused the mutual relations between the various communities to become politicised. In order to avoid addressing the political aspects, the research focus in this article is not on communities (e.g. the Estonian- speaking and Russian-speaking communities in Estonian society), but rather on small groups (e.g. the activity groups and cultural societies that uphold and create ethnic and cultural boundaries). From this perspective, Kohtla-Jaì?rve can be viewed as a network of intellectual and practical spheres of life that contains junctions for affirming onea€?s a€?owna€? cultural identity as well as intersections where a group can find common ground with groups that constitute the a€?othera€?.