How do Estonians imagine themselves as a nation? According to a popular Estonian essayist, a proper Estonian digs his garden on Mondays and mines his bitcoins on Tuesdays. This article focuses on Estonian imaginaries to study the grounding structures of Estonian identity-creation in the 2010s and it articulates the core of a canonized understanding of Estonian identity as “eco-digital nationhood.” The article explores Estonia’s eco-digital national model as produced by an aesthetic screening, supported by a Western gaze adapted for local purposes of positive identity creation. In Estonia, international approval (for its reputation as a digital nation) has fostered a national self-image of living in a digital state. Technological advancement combined with idealizations of natural environments have sometimes produced “eco-ambiguous” results, as in efforts to encounter nonhuman life-worlds without leaving one’s own comfort zone. In other instances, the eco and the digital function as two alternating modes of selfhood, the eco-part sometimes finding expression in the narratives of ethnic particularism, the digital part figuring Estonia as a herald of western modernism prudently adapting itself to the digital future. Discrepancies between the eco-digital imaginary and the many less flattering elements of Estonian actuality highlight selective (self-)representative strategies in narratives of national success. Nation building here emerges as a metonymic process, wherein certain parts of culture are foregrounded to represent the whole—while other parts, including substantial parts of the Soviet heritage (material, demographic, social, psychological) languish as unsuitable to be framed.

爱沙尼亚人如何看待自己作为一个国家？根据爱沙尼亚著名杂文家的说法，一个适当的爱沙尼亚人在星期一挖他的花园，在星期二挖他的比特币。本文重点介绍爱沙尼亚假想者，以研究2010年代爱沙尼亚人身份创造的基础结构，并阐明对爱沙尼亚人身份的规范理解的核心，即“生态数字国家”。本文探讨了爱沙尼亚的生态数字国家模式，该模式由美学筛选产生，并辅以适合当地本地积极身份创建目的的西方注视。在爱沙尼亚，国际认可（以其作为数字国家的声誉）树立了生活在数字国家的国家自我形象。技术进步加上自然环境的理想化有时会产生“生态模糊”的结果，就像努力在不离开自己的舒适地带的情况下遇到非人类的生活世界一样。在另一些情况下，生态和数字功能是两种交替的自我模式，生态部分有时会在种族特殊主义的叙事中找到表达，数字部分将爱沙尼亚视为西方现代主义的先驱，审慎地将自己适应数字未来。生态数字假想与爱沙尼亚现实中许多不那么讨人喜欢的元素之间的差异突出了国家成功叙述中的选择性（自我）代表策略。这里的民族建设是一个转喻过程，其中文化的某些部分被用来代表整体，而其他部分，包括苏维埃遗产的实质部分（物质，人口，社会，心理）则被认为不合适。