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The seminar series Inimkond: Current issues in Anthropology and beyond is starting again. As in the the previous years, the aim is to build a space for conversations among colleagues as well as to open the doors of the university to people who are simply curious about social anthropology and other humanities.

The series will start on September 13 at 16:15 with Lorraine Weekes, an anthropologist from the US who writes about the E-Estonia. 

Scaling Up: Estonian e-Residency and (In)Dividualization in the Derivative and the Digital

"Launched in the late 2014, e-Residency is an Estonian state initiative that aims to "turbocharge" the Estonian economy by allowing almost anyone, anywhere in the world to become an "e-resident" of Estonia. Though they have no right to live or work in Estonia, e-residents receive a digital ID from the government of Estonia and can use it to remotely open an Estonian OÃœ. Estonia will not be able to tax the earnings of most e-residents' firms, but the initiative's founders expect Estonia will nevertheless benefit from the ancillary effects of e-residents' entrepreneurialism. In this talk, I draw on nine months of institutional ethnography with the e-Residency team to explore the dual nature of the figure of the e-resident as it emerges in the day-to-day work of the  team and in the elite discourses surrounding the project. I show how the techno-legal apparatus of e-Residency produces e-residents as both highly dividualized (vis-a-vis the Estonian economy) and highly individualized (vis-a-vis potential online customers and business partners). Both e-residents' dividuality and individuality, I argue, work in service of the ambition of a scalable national economy, one capable of infinite expansion without any undesired concomitant impacts on Estonia's population, demography, politics, or cultural sphere."

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