Baltic | Nationals Through Tax: State-Society Relations in the Baltics Through the Fiscal Lens with Marija Norkūnaitė
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.
This talk is sponsored by the Baltic Studies Program.
Speakers
Marija Norkūnaitė works in the field of political and economic anthropology, and her research investigates state-society relations in the Baltic States, with a particular focus on economic and fiscal citizenship.
Marija holds a DPhil in Area Studies (Russia and Eastern Europe) from the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis looked at Russian-speaking communities and their relationship and lived experiences with the state in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Before coming to Yale, Marija was a Vilnius University Foundation junior research fellow at the Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science. She is also a member and co-convenor of the European Association of Social Anthropologists’ Anthropology of Tax Network.
While at Yale, Marija will be working on a book project based on her doctoral dissertation, which will look at the social contract between the state and society as imagined and lived by the mainly Russian-speaking residents of three former socialist towns in the Baltics. She will also be developing a new research project on fiscal citizenship among minority and migrant populations and taxpayers in Lithuania.