Abstract
This chapter discusses how ordinary Northwest Russians speak about themselves as northerners, as opposed to Russian southerners, and as Russians, as opposed to Scandinavians. Russian northerners describe themselves as efficient, cultured, calm and considerate, unlike southerners, who they portray as noisy, uncultured and cruel. Scandinavians come across as well-organized, orderly and shrewd on the one hand, and dull, spoiled and decadent on the other. The author argues that people draw on the common pool of narrative resources to construct an identity that either chimes with or challenges the Westernness of Scandinavians.
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Notes
For a wider discussion of the project, see O. S. Stokke and O. Tunander (eds) (1994) The Barents Region: Cooperation in Arctic Europe (London: Sage)
and G. Hønneland (2003) Russia and the West.
For a theoretically informed study of early region building in the European Arctic, see I. B. Neumann (1994) ‘A Region-Building Approach to Northern Europe’, Review of International Studies, 20, 53–74.
See O. S. Stokke and O. Tunander (eds) (1994) The Barents Region
and G. Hønneland (2003) Russia and the West.
G. Hønneland, A. Berteig, A. K. Jørgensen and T. Pachina (1998) Public Child Care on the Kola Peninsula (Oslo: SOS Children’s Villages).
G. Hønneland (2010) Borderland Russians: Identity, Narrative and International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Interview extracts in the rest of this chapter are from that book.
My main gateway to modern identity theory was another study of East-West border regions in Europe: U. H. Meinhof (ed.) (2002) Living (with) Borders: Identity Discourses on East-West Borders in Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate).
See, for instance, in the field of international relations (IR), P. M. Goff and K. C. Dunn (eds) (2004) Identity and Global Politics: Empirical and Theoretical Elaborations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
See U. H. Meinhof (ed.) (2002) Living (with) Borders. For an excellent introduction to this ‘narrative turn’ in identity theory,
see M. R. Somers (1994) ‘The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach’, Theory and Society, 23, 605–49.
A delightful, ironic take on the tendency of Western ethnographers and anthropologists to romanticize Russian tea drinking around the kitchen table is C. Kelly (2004) ‘Byt: Identity and Everyday Life’, in S. Franklin and E. Widdis (eds) National Identity in Russian Culture: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
A Russian study with very similar conclusions on the Kola identity is I. Razumova (2007) ‘Sotsialisticheski gorod v pamyati zhiteley’, in N. Baschmakoff, P. Fryer and M. Ristolainen (eds) Texts and Communities: Soviet and Post-Soviet Life in Discourse and Practice, Aleksanteri Series 4/2007 (Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute), pp. 145–58.
N. Ries (1994) Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Quotations are from pp. 42–9.
For a more extensive discussion of the concept of narrative juggling, see G. Hønneland (2010) Borderland Russians. Narrative can be understood narrowly as writing or speech in reference to a series of events, or more widely as a set of beliefs that are taken for granted in a particular cultural, social and historical setting.
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© 2014 Geir Hønneland
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Hønneland, G. (2014). Russia and the West — The Everyday Perspective. In: Arctic Politics, the Law of the Sea and Russian Identity: The Barents Sea Delimitation Agreement in Russian Public Debate. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137414069_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137414069_5
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