What is the role of kinship awareness in Estonian culture? On the one hand, there are organisations today that specifically deal with this matter (see www.suri.ee), as well as professional culture, using the heritage of kinship nations.
On the other hand, we could well ask how important the national-romantic myths still are. The most populous Finno-Ugric peoples, Estonians, Finns and Hungarians, constitute their own national statehood and have become largely urban nations, whereas the way of life of the Maris and Udmurts by the Volga River is still mostly agrarian, with their identity based on village environment. The connection with the land and traditions of the Komis in the north, and of small related groups in western Siberia, is daily proved by hunting and fishing. What are those things that unite us? What can we learn from them?
This is the topic of conversation between the Estonian linguist and one of the leaders of the kinship movement, Mart Meri, the folk musician and singer-songwriter Jaak Johanson, and the head of the Information Centre of the Finno-Ugric Peoples, the Udmurt Konstantin Zamyatin.

Mart Meri: "Talking about kinship awareness, we should specify what exactly it means. What does it mean to Estonians? Or to the Udmurts? What layers does it contain?"

mart meri

Konstantin Zamjatin: "We cannot talk about kinship awareness without dealing with the notion of heritage - these two phenomena certainly belong together. Regarding a nation or another indigenous group, it does not really matter whether it is a northern nation such as the Khanty or Mansi people, or Volganations such as Udmurts or Maris. The important thing here is the legacy of colonialism, as a result of which Udmurts and Maris have largely lost their indigenousness because they no longer lead a traditional life. Despite that they are still seen as Finno-Ugric peoples and we cannot avoid the issue of kinship while examining this matter."

MM: "I don't think we need make such a distinction. All people really care equally for their ways of life, be it traditional hunting and fishing, or agriculture."

KZ: "We could then say that from the point of view of kinship awareness, what matters is its relativity. In order to keep going the awareness requires someone else with whom to draw comparisons. One aspect is the difference between town and country. For Estonians this used to be significant, but for Udmurts, for example, the cultural-national difference between town and country is still essential. It is interesting to follow the changes in these relations today - how town comes to village and village comes to town.
These changes are naturally quite slow, as the Udmurt identity is less founded on an idealistic national identity that emerged during the period of romanticism. Much more significant and closer, however, is the undefined 'us', surrounded by a familiar, but a bit more distant, circle of culture. For an Udmurt, this is the Russian culture - but the Tatar culture, considered alien and as something that fortifies the identity and draws the borders, operates at a greater distance. Everything else is unknown and is the culture of another world.
I'd like to stress a universal aspect here that unites Estonians and Udmurts. This is their existence on the boundaries of civilisations. In Estonia this boundary is between Estonian Lutheranism and the Russian Orthodox Church, while in Udmurtia the border is between the Orthodox faith of both the Udmurts and the Russians, and the Islam of the Tatars. It seems to me that a national project can be realised in a situation where such boundaries exist."

MM: "So it is the acceptance of difference, depicting the Other as clearly as possible, that provides a nation with a will to sovereignty, a will to be itself?"

KZ: "Yes, and at the same time it helps us to understand geographically close strangers, because opposition must occur with full awareness, on the basis of truly existing grounds."

MM: "What is the opinion of the Udmurts regarding Estonia, Finland and Hungary? How do they relate to them?"

KZ: "The above-described self-image is here supplemented by a pan-Finno-Ugric element, inevitably an essential phenomenon for the elite, an idealistic project that cannot be realised in daily life. On the other hand, it still has an outlet and significance for the Udmurt people, being a peculiar support to our identity. In my opinion this should be the aim of the Finno-Ugric movement. The aim of every national movement is to strengthen its national identity, and if the kinship movement helps, all the better."

konstantin zamyatin

MM: "I remember an incident on one of my trips to the Khanty people. I was chopping firewood there, but had to make do without a tree stump, because they do not use it. I placed a piece of wood on the mossy ground and swung my axe. It so happened that I did not use enough strength, so the axe failed to split the log properly and did not reach the ground. The Khanty men were sitting nearby on tree stumps watching me. The next day I heard that they had discussed me and decided that I was one of them - because I never touched the ground with my axe. Apparently the Khanty people are not supposed to wound the ground with their axes. So what phenomenon is it that made them accept me as one of their own?"

KZ: "This is quite another level, because you took the trouble to go there in the first place. There are, sadly, very few similar contacts and therefore the kinship movement mostly takes place in people's minds rather than in actions. This is one of the reasons why I dare call it a project of the elite: it hardly ever finds a simple expression like you experienced."

MM: "That might well be true. But talking about opposition as the basis that strengthens identity, the oppositions within a culture are significant as well. In Estonia we used to have the town-country opposition, which has lost momentum today. Where do we find opposition today?"

KZ: "Yes, we must ask ourselves who is the Other today. Today's mostly urban culture applies different rules than in the country."

MM: "Indeed. But this shows us that the awareness of kinship is not that intense. This is nothing universal, but rather relies on specific activities and specific bases. If any of the activities cease, the awareness weakens. It is easier to weaken than to strengthen it, as it is an artificial undertaking of the elite!
Let us take as an example the kinship feelings between Estonians and Finns, which is basically a learned understanding. When an Estonian or a Finn wishes to seem educated and well-informed, he certainly claims that there is something deeper between our two nations. On the other hand, such a sentiment does not have to be genuine - there is no need to pretend that it is natural because artificial things become reality in the course of their development. When a sufficient number of people claim that there is something in common between our nations, this cannot be wrong then."

jaak johanson

Jaak Johanson: "The question of being natural or artificial is of course rather complicated. For example I believe that Veljo Tormis has, most sincerely, tried to point at something in his work, support some values, but at the same time I feel that regardless of his work, quite different things sometimes happen. Instead of promoting the music and culture of small Baltic Sea nations, he has in fact failed to help them or make anything clearer. Instead, he has taken it to a new, stranger and more abstract level. Instead of a natural thing, people notice the new level of abstraction. This, in turn, leads to the topic of turning identities into products and stealing them."

KZ: "Perhaps it would be interesting to have a look at the opportunities that different art genres can offer for furthering kinship awareness. Some time ago, I went for the first time to see Mari ballet. It was interesting, but I would not call it Mari ballet. They did use some elements of Mari folk dances, which were meant to make it more ethnic, and it did push some switch in my soul. But on the other hand, I had an uneasy feeling that here folklore was used in an unaccustomed context. Is it right to consider this an achievement?
In modern international competition, each culture should try to find the genre where it feels most at home. And kinship awareness should also be strengthened only through the genre where it feels most at home. Perhaps we have not yet discovered this genre."

MM: "I believe I could imagine Mari modern dance..."

KZ: "The problem lies in the fact that culture is always divided into two halves - the visible-performed and the cognisable, which is hard to talk about. It is clear that the first level is more extensive and it can, at least, be talked about. The second part is, actually, a question of how a creative work is born. Here we cannot and do not have to set any conditions."

JJ: "Naturally, living things are the most fascinating. Talking about music, for example, the most captivating factor for me has always been when I can sense behind music the presence of some kind of a community which enjoys being together. Based on this principle, I am attracted to blues, the folk music of the 1960s, and Irish and Breton music, because you can sense the energy of the community, which could also be called kinship awareness. This phenomenon does not give in to any rigid rules of market economy society; it is entirely outside of them, entirely somewhere else. It is very strongly related to Life itself. In this sense, it is important to turn to the past now and then. The tempo of life has sped up to such an extent that we always forget to notice those relations that are important to our lives, and we cannot find them anywhere else but in the past. Maybe from the past we can learn again how to be alive."

KZ: "Perhaps the wish to find security in this large world could be another reason, besides striving for something else which is topical at all times, why we turn to the past. Individuals have always felt that somewhere there is a large and complicated world, next to which there are also a smaller and much more familiar village and a field of their own, and in and around them, there is an understandable world full of meanings. This is the same today. For example, let's take the Internet; even there we have mapped a certain area for our everyday use, we know a certain number of web pages out of all the millions that can be found there, and we use a certain number of them. Maybe kinship awareness is also among these criteria that help us to orientate ourselves. I mean that when a person is in some kind of a crisis, he can base his choices also on kinship awareness, which could help and inspire him."

JJ: "I still do believe that kinship awareness is largely created by human hands. For example, I think that the majority of those who have turned to folk music through the Viljandi Culture Academy have made a large detour regarding their musical mother tongue. Mostly, they were attracted by the lure of Irish or Scandinavian folk music, which had already been established in the world, and only later did they start to look for similar things in their own home. They started to look for things that should be dear to their hearts and souls. In this sense, people do not experience intuitive musical recognition."

KZ: "But if we take, for example, the Kalevala-song, we can hear something familiar echoing there."

JJ: "I feel exactly the opposite - if the present-day Estonian listens to the old archival recordings of the Kalevala-song, this is as far away from him as a song of some African tribe, and the latter may even have become closer by now, through reggae, rap and hip hop."

MM: "Artificial or not, it is clear that the interest in kindred peoples and their cultures needs some initial impulse. For example, my kinship awareness woke up with a large bang when I heard the music created by the folk group Hellero. I was still at school when my father took me with him to a folk poetry day at the Elva schoolhouse. Actually, I believe that kinship awareness already had to have been present in our home then, since my father had already made one film about the life of kindred peoples in Siberia and we had plenty of photos from the expeditions at home. But all this was still foreign to me. Only when Hellero began to sing in the Elva school hall, did I feel how powerful it was."

KZ: "Well, even Rammstein could be a strong impulse for somebody. But does it make sense to talk about formal similarities in music? Perhaps some kind of spiritual common properties of music are much more important?"

MM: "Perhaps we should, indeed, go still deeper. The most primeval phenomenon should, in this case, be ecology-conscious relations with nature, but they are weakened by city culture. An important element of kinship awareness could be that we consider a natural environment to be the normal environment for humans, where human actions are in natural symbiosis with nature. I can see a very powerful potential here, since a global understanding has already been reached that, after the Industrial Revolution, a more peaceful channel should be found for our civilisation. The Finno-Ugric experience of living together with nature could be of help here. It has found an especially clear expression with the Nordic people, who have to be very careful with their environment and maintain the ecological balance to survive. I believe that this could be the ethno-futuristic objective of kinship awareness."

KZ: "Today, a lively discussion is going on about "indigenous knowledge", the knowledge that has been forgotten by a large part of the world in the course of modernisation, but which is still alive somewhere. Do the Finno-Ugrians have anything to offer which the modern world could use? For example, the Udmurt language has dozens of words to denote the colour of horses. Does this knowledge have a message for the modern world, or is this only a clumsy obstacle in their way to adapting to the contemporary world?
Concerning the skills of living in accordance with nature and the attempts to explain it to the rest of the world in a language it would understand, I would use the idea of 'holy homeland' borrowed from North American natives, which they use in describing why some piece of land is important to them. Their answer is that their ancestors have been buried there or that their ancestors had cultivated that land. Such a train of thought is, again, an agreement between people, a cultural phenomenon. It has a rational basis too, but generally it is based on a traditional way of life. A stranger, who knows this culture or who wants to honour it, does not question such an agreement, but simply respects the fact that things have always been this way. But actually, all these themes need some thorough thinking..."