Raspberries, Tablecloths, and Critical Thinking

Abstract

This article looks at three different sites in post-Soviet Latvia that have all been subject to liberal democratic reforms: the State Audit Office, a local municipality, and civic education classes in primary schools. These sites exemplify an introduction to the kind of accountability relations that are expected to exist in a liberal democracy. Through the lens of accountability, this article exposes how the democratic reform initiatives are taken up by Latvian citizens, in what has been called a “secondary production of knowledge,” to become part of their own tactics of survival and adjustment. The article reveals a sharp, morally charged juxtaposition of the “old” and the “new,” prevailing in the Latvian everyday reality. Governance reforms carry symbolic and moral urgency that stems from annihilation of the Soviet past. The reforms in this context serve as gestures to be made about one’s “modernness.” However, reorganization of governance practices on the ground reveals profound tensions when the new practices are endowed with locally relevant meanings. In this article, I attempt to demonstrate how the secondary production of knowledge coalesces into a sense of “cultural intimacy,” since often the individual’s deep commitment to the symbolic “new” has to coexist with awareness of one’s own incongruence with the new order.