The Baltic Studies Program presents
Marija Norkūnaitė, Kazickas Postdoctoral Associate, Yale University:
“Nationals Through Tax: State-Society Relations in the Baltics Through the Fiscal Lens.”
The talk examines the often taken-for-granted relationship between citizenship and taxes, focusing on Russian-speaking communities in Latvia and Estonia. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Daugavpils (Latvia) and Sillamäe (Estonia), conducted as part of a larger project on state-society relations among Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltics, the talk follows Russian-speaking residents’ efforts at joining the national Latvian or Estonian national collectives primarily as fiscal subjects. Building on and further contributing to the growing field of anthropology of tax research, the talk addresses three questions: How do Russian-speaking (non-)citizens employ taxes to navigate national and neoliberal ideals of citizenship in Latvia and Estonia? Why do they focus on taxes in particular? How effective are taxes in accessing (full) membership in the Baltics? In doing so, the talk offers a largely unexplored fiscal perspective on citizenship and state-society relations among ethno-linguistic minorities in the region, providing new and relevant insights into an otherwise widely studied field.