The nation in the field: The latent structuring effect of Nationality in Estonia


Leo HENRY, University of Toronto

In the era of nation-states, the dominant culture of the state is defined in national terms. In most states, for instance, knowledge of the state language is required to obtain their citizenship and rights. Nationality is the identity that emerges from this nationalist relationship between state, culture and people – citizenship being one of the ways in which the state sanctions this connection. But the attention given to nationality focus either on identification and meaning or take it as a shared individual characteristic explicative for patterns of behavior. The former misses the role of nationality on social structures, the latter essentializes nationality and misses its inner diversity of experience and intersectional effect. This speaks to the general issue of the relationship between identity and culture, and the ways in which we can recognize the role of identity onto people’s dispositions – and how dispositions affect identity – while capturing the diversity this relationship. This paper delves into the intricate web of national dispositions within the context of Estonia, shedding light on the multifaceted interplay of culture, identity, and social structure. Drawing upon Bourdieus field theory, the study explores the positioning of national dispositions within the Estonian field, encompassing values, perceptions, and tastes. This research does not only aim to discover how national identity affects social disposition through their relational organization, but also what are national disposition in Estonia but also how they can intersect with other form of belongingness such as gender, class, or age. Estonia, with its complex history marked by the presence of two competing nations, offers a unique setting for this analysis. To achieve this, I employ Multiple Factor Analysis (MFA) to explore various fields, including politics, family values, economic morality, and democratic beliefs, while considering variables like national identity, citizenship, gender, and age and interviews to determine how this hierarchization affects people’s trajectory. I show that there is an Estonian capital structuring the Estonian field that act in interaction with other system of domination, and that people’s disposition and position are affected by their accumulation of such national capital. Through interviews I collected, I explore how Estonian capital affected individual everyday life, but also the issues and unequal access to it. All in all, I show how in the era of the nation-state the legitimate culture of the state is not only the one of an Elite, but of a national elite, and that in Estonia, Russians especially, must conform to an Estonian habitus to get privileged positions. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of nationality in cultural stratification, but also of the relationship between identity and culture. It proposes a framework to analyze nationality that goes beyond the opposition between national identity as an identification and an ideology, and nationality as an essential human characteristic explaining people’s behavior, while capturing embedded relation of domination

This paper will be presented at the following session: