Review essay: An ethnography of pastness identity playgrounds and battlefields in Post-Post-Soviet Estonia

The last time Francisco passed through Lisbon before this book was out, he brought me from Estonia a marine blue rucksack and a shocking-green pin with the words ‘believe in the periphery’. These two objects came to my mind when I started writing this review, not just because this is a book about material culture being taken out of the waste and repaired by the youth in Estonia, but mostly because I have had the opportunity to discuss with Francisco the dialectics of the ‘post-Soviet’ in various travelling contexts. Travelling as method has taken us through the post-Soviet wastelands and its borders, problematizing anew the ‘post’ and ‘pastness’ while eating khachapuri in Tbilisi, staring at the Soviet Armenian industrial complex of Alaverdi, or crossing silently the ghost town of Agdam, in Nagorno-Kharabakh.