As a child of exiles, I've always been puzzled by the focus of immigrant and ethnic studies on the adaptive strategies of immigrants to the U.S. and the lack of interest in the continuing orientation of migrants to the homeland.1 I've also been struck by conceptions (implicit and explicit) of America as the Promised Land, even though, for example, Einstein ironically referred to himself as "exiled to Paradise" (Heilbut 1983), Latvian Displaced Persons described the United States as their "detour" back home (Cooper 1978, 30; Carpenter 1989, 132), and a Hungarian woman thought of herself as a "guest" in Canada for sixty years (Degh 1980,263).2 For such migrants, America was a liminal place of refuge;
the true destination remained the "lost Paradise" of the homeland. As Liisa Malkki writes, resistance to "putting down roots" in the host society is pan of what exile is all about, since "being an exile signals the possibility of an ultimate, if distant, return" (Malkki 1990, 45). Immigrant and ethnic studies turned our attention to the processes of assimilation, acculturation, and creative negotiations of identity. Exile studies direct our attention to the intense concern of those who "live at home abroad" with nationalism and with the formation and transmission of ideology.
During World War II, thousands of Latvians fled their homeland, especially after the return of Soviet troops to Latvian territory in 1944. For five years, approximately 120,000 Latvians lived in Displaced Persons camps in Germany, which were administered by the United Nations. Between 1949-52, nearly 40,000 Latvians, unwilling to return to a Soviet-occupied Latvia, emigrated to the U.S. Their ranks were populated by professionals, academics, and intellectuals3 who had had a substantial stake in the native land and who perceived themselves as having been torn unwillingly from home soil. The bulk of them were part of the first generation of Latvians to be born in or grow up in an independent Latvia.
For over forty years, Latvian exiles in the U.S., as well as in Canada, Sweden, Germany, England, and Australia, lived as if they were nationalists at home. In a typically exilic response (see Miller 1990, 834), they constructed and nurtured a borderless Latvia-outside-of-Latvia4 to promote their ideological strategies for restoring Latvian independence and sustaining Latvian culture. Latvians grounded exile life in the local community, where they built community centers and churches, but they routinely congregated regionally, nationally, and internationally through a complex and overlapping network of associations and events. For example, they drove to regional centers to enroll children in Latvian-language summer high schools or to celebrate Midsummers' eve; they traveled to major urban centers (primarily, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Los Angeles) to attend Canada to compete in sports tournaments or to participate in international congresses.5 Until 1991, when Latvia regained its independence, the only territory excluded from the exile province was Soviet Latvia itself, which the exile hegemony portrayed as taboo territory under Soviet control.
In what follows, I will focus on the cross-generational transmission of exile as identity in terms of what Karl Mannheim terms "fresh contact". In his classic essay "The Problem of Generations" (Mannheim 1952), Mannheim refers to "fresh contact" as the process by which culture is developed by those "who come into contact anew with the accumulated heritage" (Mannheim 1952, 293). It always entails a changed relationship of distance and a novel approach to assimilating, using and developing the proffered material. I will examine "fresh contact" as it is revealed in a lecture, a mode of performance that Erving Goffman explores in his 1981 book Forms of Talk. Goffman argues that the lecture, a little studied occasion of face-to-face interaction, can be analyzed as "an institutionalized extended holding of the floor in which one speaker imparts his views on a subject, those thoughts comprising what can be called his 'text" (Goffman 1981, 165). In the lecture 1 will target, a second-generation exile "mobilizes ethnicity" (Fishman 1985,7) in order to challenge the first-generation's ideological stranglehold, which handicaps him and others like him who wish to claim full authority in exile social and cultural life.
Characteristically, exile places individuals both inside and outside two cultures at the same time and generates a multinational dialogue in which contrasting orientations and needs meet, interact, clash, and evolve (Kramer 1988, 7, 9). For exile microcosms to survive, the founding elders must transmit their sense of cause to their offspring. But, as Mannheim notes, "the older people may still be combating something in themselves or in the external world in such a fashion that all their feelings and efforts and even their concepts and categories of thought are determined by that adversary, while for the younger people this adversary may be simply non-existent" (Mannheim 1952,298-299). Bom in different historical and cultural regions, parents and offspring identify different opponents by virtue of occupying different "generation locations" (Mannheim 1952, 288-290). As Nahirny and Fishman have demonstrated, immigrant parents have only limited success in leading their children to approach ethnicity in the same manner as themselves, for ethnicity represents a particular way of life bound up with daily activities (Nahirny & Fishman 1965, 312-313).
In Latvian exile life, the key generationally-charged issues were the relationship to Soviet Latvia and access to power and authority in the diaspora society. To the emigrating generation, the Old World - now become Soviet Latvia - was no longer a source of cultural tradition available for re-making. From their perspective in the "Free World", Latvians viewed themselves as standing in proxy for those they perceived to be temporarily silenced, or, at worst, compromised and contaminated by the coercive Soviet system. The exiles invalidated Latvia as source because they defined it as cause (see, among others, Baskauskas 1975; Kramer 1988; Carpenter 1989; Fagen 1968; Forbes 1989; Johnston 1988). As part of their ideological strategy, they cut off dialogue with the homeland, representing Soviet Latvia to their offspring as a "symbol of dread" (Putnins 1979), a place better left unexperienced. In its place, they offered idealized images and narratives of a remembered independent Latvia circa 1939. Most of their children, however, were little satisfied by such "appropriated memories" (Mannheim 1951,296) and, to the consternation of their elders, sought out Soviet Latvia as a pilgrimage destination.
The intense ideological orientation of the first generation of Latvians in exile saturated social life with polemic and subjected all words, actions, and individuals to scrutiny. Although factions developed within identity locations — Mannheim distinguishes them as "generation units" composed of those who "work up" the materials of their common experience differently (Mannheim 1952,304)6 -the hegemony succeeded in keeping the buzz of dissension in the back regions following community events (Carpenter 1989, 148-150). In deliberate contrast, the second generation fostered an alternative social life: they moved debate from the back to the front regions and (rhetorically, at least) ignored generational and spatial borders,
The relationship with Soviet Latvia, generational authority, and language and identity are at the center of a week-long Latvian cultural seminar started by a second-generation woman in Michigan in 1980. Called Trisreiztris, which literally translated means 3 x 3,7 the seminar was designed as an intergenerational support system. Its stated goals are to strengthen the family, to promote friendships, to deepen group identity, and to educate all three generations about Latvian history, politics, and culture in a retreat-like setting "where for seven days individuals can intensely experience being Latvian together". First held in Michigan, 3x3 now has off-shoots throughout the diaspora, including, as of 1990, Latvia itself.
In 1985, along with about 200 other participants, I attended 3 x 3 in Three Rivers, Michigan at the Latvian camp Garezers. I had been invited to read a lecture as part of the sessions devoted to Latvian folklore. During the week, I participated in other lectures and discussions, group meals, evening programs, and the late-night-to-early morning socializing csi\\ed niksana (lit., to wither away, fig, to spend time together in song and talk). 1 noticed that in contrast to the strict observance of age and status differentials in the exile establishment, 3x3 sought to foster an egalitarian atmosphere. Everyone, for example, was asked to use tu, the familiar form of address; and lecturers and participants alike shared rather primitive dormitory rooms.
Despite its goals, whichjibe with official exile ideology, 3 x 3 had its share of critics, at least until 1988-1990, by which time political reform in Latvia was well underway. Such critics grumbled that 3 x 3 participants were "rebels and upstarts" or that they were "a little pink", i.e., they were sakarnieki, a loaded term used to denote fellow-travelers.
Lecturers were censured for using materials or films from Soviet Latvia; some were deemed suspect because they held "questionable" memberships, for example, in dievturi, a revivalist movement grounded in Latvian folk religion, whose predominantely young membership openly challenges the authority of the Latvian Lutheran and Catholic churches. Many 3x3 presenters and participants visited Soviet Latvia regularly and openly advocated contact with the homeland.
Lecture as performance. The lecture is a central activity of 3 x 3. Each day is divided into two-to-four simultaneous sessions on topics related to Latvian politics, history, literature, folk culture. In intent, if not in style, 3x3 resembles the cultural seminars established by Latvian intellectuals in nineteenth-century Latvia to resist the cultural domination of Baltic Germans, who were commonly refered to as kungi (lords or masters). In order to promote Latvian cultural and national consciousness, such seminars relied as much on the lecture as on the print-language identified by Benedict Anderson (Anderson 1983, 66). Male activist-spokesmen called runas viri (literally, "men of talk") used rhetoric to urge Latvians to become kungi in their own land.
In the twenty years of Latvian independence (1918-1939), the five years of intense questioning about identity in the refugee camps (1945-1949), and in the forty years of exile, the runas virs evolved as a familiar type, as someone who took it as his duty to present to the group its duties (Abele 1973,11-12). In lectures, the expressive bias of the runas virs became a reality performed through formulaic phrases that recalled the "700 years of foreign oppression", the "briefly realized dream" of independence, "the good old days" of statehood, the mass deportations by the Soviets during the "Year of Terror", and "our righteous cause in exile".
In exile, the mantel of the runas virs was available as an "invitation to form" (Bauman 1987, 5-6), readily adaptable to specific, situational social ends. Some second-generation Latvians continued to fill the role of runas virs according to the old conventions. But others, like Augusts Ozols,8 a professor of linguistics in Germany, recast the runas virs convention. Ozols, a popular speaker on the diaspora lecture circuit, transformed the style of the runas virs from a tired and monologic strip of rhetorical solemnity into a stress-producing dialogic strip of rhetorical play that challenged establishment practices and taboos. He, too, rehearsed the collective Latvian past; he, too, prescribed duties and strategies. But in mobilizing the runas virs as "guided doing" (Goffman 1974,41), he temporarily turned exile social structure on its head. In his lectures, the young prescribed to the old.
I first met Augusts Ozols at 3 x 3 in 1985. Settling into my dorm space, I heard the sound of bagpipes. When I left my room to investigate, I found that six to eight people were crowded into a nearby room around a slightly balding man in his early fourties who was playing the bagpipes. When he stopped playing, he introduced himself to me as Augusts Ozols, apparently because I was the only one in the group he did not know. He struck me as an aggressively knowledgeable and committed Latvian, something of a purist about language, who initially made me stutter in response to his fast-talking and questioning manner. Later I was told that he perceived himself and was perceived by others as an ethnic activist. In his lectures, he pointedly describes himself as "a Latvian living temporarily in Germany" who is committed to "turning the 'young' into Latvians". He dares to assume competence for speaking inappropriately to his elders (see, in contrast, Briggs 1988), and explicitly labels himself a provocateur, whose goal is to "stir up debate and dissipate apathy among Latvians, especially the older ones who no longer offer the young people a model to emulate".9
At 3 x 3, Ozols was presenting daily sessions on Latvian folk culture to a large number of attentive listeners. But one Tuesday night at 9:00, he was scheduled to give a slide talk to all 3 x 3 participants. Entitled "Folk Costumes and Traditions of Wear", the lecture was scheduled in the same large room where other lectures and activities had been held throughout the week.
Ozols is a well-known and controversial figure in the diaspora community, and in conversations throughout the day, people anticipated his upcoming presentation. The full meaning of his lecture, therefore, cannot be grasped solely from an analysis of it as a temporally - and spatially - bounded performance. Part of its meaning resides in what Goffman terms "pre-play", that is, the talk that normally precedes lectures. The pre-play buzz about Ozols primed the various constituencies for the active role they themselves would play during his lecture.
Some of those talking expected an education, for Ozols command the requisite intellectual authority Goffman deems characterstic of lei turers (Goffman 1981, 167). But they did not expect him to usel "cooly dispassionate" (Goffman 1981,167) style that characterized the comparatively staid lectures they had heard throughout the week. Instead, they looked forward to information packaged "as show". A few announced that they would not attend precisely because Ozols' polemics bored and offended them. The staunchly conservative rehearsed resistance, knowing that Ozols ignored "his place" and flaunted their strictures (cf. Higham 1990). Others shared Ozols' views about the importance of contact with Soviet Latvia and enjoyed his daring, abrasive rhetoric. The young valued his refusal of the apprenticeship role the exile hegemony expected of him, even in middle age. One of the oldest and most respected members of exile society, a silversmith named Kalejs, categorically told everyone, "I can tell you all about it. He's going to tell you to always wear a hat". Kalejs thereby predicted Ozols' role as a runas virs.
Ozols was well aware of the constituences he would be mediating. He was also well aware of his charisma and knew that people came to his lectures because they were more than simply "text transmissions". To paraphrase Goffman, they attended because listening to text transmission was the price they had to pay for interaction with the transmitter, with Ozols himself (Goffman 1981, 186-187). Access to Ozols assumed a ritualistic character: those who admired him gained preferential contact; those who did not, recognized an opportunity to defuse his influence. Simultaneously, the audience gained ritual access to the subject matter over which Ozols commanded authority, i.e., Latvian cultural identity.
Ozols delivered his lecture in a mode Goffman calls "fresh talk", that is, he seemed to formulate his text from moment to moment. By doing so, he conveyed not only an authoritative voice, but also the impression that he was responding within and to the current situation and to what could be envisaged and anticipated (Goffman 1981, 171). (The extent to which this was so is another topic.) Ozols did not stay behind the podium, but walked freely to and fro. He tolerated frame breaks by the audience, almost from the beginning, with the result that Ozols and his audience of some 100 became co-performers/producers of that special realm his lecture generated: engrossment, provocation, and entertainment.
Ozols began by projecting his "textual self (Goffman 1981,173), a self his audience acknowledges as an authority on Latvian folk culture. But he immediately problematized his authority by announcing he would show slides of his recent trip to Soviet Latvia, where he had attended the song festival and a major exhibit of Latvian folk costumes. To some in the audience, this reference to Soviet Latvia signaled that he had taken yet another of "too many" such trips to Latvia and that he had attended an event - the song festival - which in 1985 was still widely judged by exiles to be an instrument of Soviet propaganda and not an instance of Latvian culture. For others, Ozols' access to events and materials in Latvia raised his status.
Anticipating murmured criticism, Ozols immediately brokered his text. He left the lecture "realm" - that meaningful universe sustained by his talk (Goffman 1981,173)-and entered the "real world" of the relationships he projected to exist between himself and his audience. He took the offensive in a parenthetical remark that drew authority, not from his textual self, but from his historical/experiential self as second-generation exile: "Some of you may not like what you see in the slides and things may seem strange and you will right away say, 'Nu, that's not how it should be." With this attributed speech, which in itself models debate, Ozols "dared the taboos": he affirmed Soviet Latvia as a source of cultural knowledge. He also linked this breach to the main theme of his lecture: namely, his claim that the exile establishment had institutionalized and was transmitting the doxa (Bourdieu 1977, 164) of its oldest generation as if it were authentic Latvian culture. The doxic world of "How we remember it and how we do it" had become the standard for authority, a standard totally unconcerned with the question of legitimacy that Ozols competitively raised. By briefly switching from textual to historical voice, Ozols cleared the air, making it more possible for him as scholar to build his case: ". what is a folk costume, how far back do we have to go to be sure about something, how does it change, can we still change it today, or do we have to maintain 12-13th century standards?"
As predicted, Ozols advocated the wearing of hats. He introduced the hat as a sign of authentic Latvian culture. What is more, he coupled the absence of the hat in the folk costumes in the diaspora with the presence of white boots in the folk costumes of present-day Latvia. He thus established equivalences of inauthenticity on both sides of the Atlantic: "You've all seen the stylized costumes in Riga - to the point of absurdity - white boots and long capes". The white boots in Latvia indexed Soviet coercion, he asserted. But in the West, he proceeded, "No one forces us to do anything. And that means that our assignment - in my way of thinking - is to consciously examine and understand our matters and to demonstrate how they should be done". In this statement, Ozols affirmed the prevailing ideology that Latvian culture could develop freely only in the West and was the responsibility of the exiles.
But in a densely packed, multivocal sequence in which he armed himself with "traditional wisdom", Ozols argued that exile practice betrayed its own ideological structures.
I emphasize again: hats are a fundamental part of men's folk costumes. It is a matter of male honor, as the Latvian proverb says, Ka virs bez cepures ('Like a man without a hat'). I have gathered a whole pile of material about this. It was exactly the opposite from what we think today: there are precise descriptions about when the hat could be taken off- at weddings men danced with their hats on, but you lifted your hat to your mother-in-law or when you toasted someone's health, but you put your hat back on when you sat down. In folk belief, Ja virs pazaude cepuri, tad pazaude pratu ('If a man loses his hat, he loses his senses'). Many in his audience chuckled appreciatively.
Before identifying the genesis of this "incorrect" practice, Ozols once more sought to bolster his authority by putting words into the mouths of his elders: "People will again say, 'Nu, ja, he is a young person, barely bom in Latvia, what is he trying to tell us. A Latvian is a polite person. When he enters a room, he takes off his hat." Ozols here was evoking the exclusionary nature of exile organizations, which resemble what Nahirny and Fishman describe as "communal reunions" (Nahimy & Fishman 1965, 315) of cohorts with direct experience of independent Latvia.
Barred from access to authority by virtue of age, Ozols redefined the terms and sought access on the basis of "fresh contact" - gained through the study of Latvian culture and visits to Soviet Latvia. He charged that the norms canonized as "authentically Latvian" by the first generation derived from "a typical German custom... You had to take your hat off to the German lord (kungs). But today we no longer have kungi. To whom do we continue to take off our hats?" To Ozols, substituting foreign culture - even worse, substituting the culture of the oppressor - for Latvian tradition was indeed "to have lost one's senses" and little different from the situation he criticized in Soviet Latvia.
Ozols thus accomplished a generational shift in the orientation to Latvian identity. He disavowed the tangible elements of identity offered to him by his elders and embraced "adopted ancestors" from the distant past (Nahirny & Fishman 1965, 321). By charging that his exile elders had betrayed authentic Latvian culture, he found "high ground" for his disavowal of their norms. He dared to present information about bygone days to his seniors because he jumped beyond their historical memory into a remote time he had accessed by virtue of his fresh contact with Latvian cultural materials. This move allowed him to connect abstractly with a national collectivity, while dismissing in concrete those who excluded him from power (Nahirny & Fishman 1965, 322).
Ozols' role as provocateur got a rise from a woman in the audience when he indicted the Lutheran church as a German import which also dictated customs of wear. (Ozols is well-known as a follower of the folk religion dievturi, see above). She insisted that Ozols take - and admit -a personal stand. He did, but in the process, he made the equivalent of an actor's flub: he broke out in an unscripted way that failed to sustain the reality of the lecture realm in which he was engaged (see Goffman 1981, 139). Some in his audience responded with not entirely sympathetic laughter. These confused moments, during which Ozols spoke with uncharacteristic stuttering, climaxed in his most damning and concrete indictment of the exile establishment. But it was an indictment co-produced with members of the audience who used the break in performance to "climb on stage" with Ozols:
Ozols: But why haven't any of you thought about the fact that no one gets upset when fraternity ten men sit down at the table with hats on? That's acceptable. Audience: That's a tradition.
Ozols: What? A tradition? But it's also a tradition for the Latvian man to wear a hat. Why should a German tradition be better than a Latvian tradition? Audience: It's a kungu tradition! Ozols: Jaaa. Vot! That's the thing! (Commotion.) The kungi showeq us culture, and therefore it was important to become like them as fast as possible. But we need to keep things separate. If we think that it's important to wear folk costumes, then we need to wear them in the right way. And not just "how I like it". If I wear it like I like, then I have no right to condemn the white boots in Riga.
With his audience's help, Ozols concluded his lecture with the thesis that status-conscious Latvian elites (re) imposed and then reified German tradition and that their descendants now controlled exile society in those same terms. Turning the white boots into a sign of a sign, Ozols pointed out the hypocrisy of those in his audience who condemned the boots as a evidence of submission, but forgot about their own missing hats.
After Ozols formally ended his talk, the audience remained in the room for over an hour, engaging in the segment of lecture-as-perform-ance that Goffman terms "post-play" (which, together with pre-play, constitutes the "squeeeze of talk and bustle just before and after the lecture"; Goffman 1981, 166). In moments generating heartfelt laughter, people contemplated the varied consequences of wearing hats in everyday life, in the West and in Soviet Latvia:
"If you wear a hat all the time, how can you comb your hair?" "I don't think they have enough hats in the Soviet Union...". "How will I be able to fit into my Volkswagen if I wear a hat?" "I have a question about the hygienic nature of wearing hats. I found an article that said that the inside band gets sweated up and then bugs lay their eggs", there burst of audience laughter, "and often people lose all their hair at which point the audience burst into laughter, for Ozols is all but bald".
After the lecture, talk reverberated across time, space, and medium, in a seemingly endless extension of post-play. Throughout the night, and especially during the niksana, the pros and cons of "wearing hats" dominated conversations. One man, fundamentally at odds with Ozols' line of argument, analyzed the dynamic of the evening with an anecdote:
A boy decided that one way to control the pigs was to put a piece of bread in the hub of an old wheel and shut both ends. And the pigs spent all day around the wheel.
Concluding that Ozols' lecture had been "one of the best pig-controlling machines" he had ever seen, the man said, "We should have let him say his piece, applauded politely, and left. To get involved was only to prolong the thing and it wasn't worth it, because he was simply substituing one dogmatism for another". Note that the tactic suggested here corresponds to the conventional response taken by those who disagree with the views of runas viri.
But others revelled in Ozols' ability to "shake up the old folks". Six months later, a Soviet Latvian newspaper reprinted a verbatim account of the evening, generating speculation about Soviet spies at 3 x 3 as well as Ozols' suspect identity as a sakarnieks. A year later, I listened as a woman in Indianapolis recounted the gist of Ozols' argument as part of her own struggle for power in her community. Ozols' performance, thus, was available to be recalled and re-performed in other contexts.
Writing of the lecture as performance, Goffman concludes that the lecturer's contract, even when a talk is designed to be amusing, is to "protect us from the wind, to stand up and seriously project the assumption that through lecturing, a meaningful picture of some part of the world can be conveyed" and that there is a "real, structured, somewhat unitary world out there to comprehend" (Goffman 1981, 194-195). Ozols as provocateur and the runas viri before him fulfil this contract. In "situationally-usable", "audience-usable" construings of Self, they map a particular text and status into a speaking engagement (Goffman 1981, 193). Both lead their audiences (and themselves) to treat lecturing and what is lectured about, as serious matters related to a "real world" (Goffman 1981, 193).
The runas viri performed a vision of reality linked to and sanctioned by the establishment. Their audiences remained whispering off-stage, Ozols, identified with the iconoclastic second generation, questioned and restructured the inherited social reality. Together with those in his audience who shared his "fresh contact", he briefly managed exile life in new terms. In the process, he demonstrated that the commonality of ideological perception provides people with a vocabulary through which to explore "more exquisitely" the differences among them (Geertz 1973, 206). In other words, national consciousness, even when affirmed, is prey to internal contradictions that foster controversy.
Because Ozols keyed his runas virs identity to the action of provoking, the realm of his lecture incrementally opened up to the world of debate. His audience joined him on stage; and after the lecture, instead of politely applauding and returning alone to what Goffman calls "the flickering, cross-purposed, messy irresolution of their unknowable circumstances", as humans and as exiles, Ozols and his audience lingered a while, to face the "messiness" openly and together, without seeking reconciliation. The older and more conservative in the audience, though unconvinced, seemed reassured by hearing their own or another's voice speak publicly on behalf of familiar mores. The young or more liberal eagerly accepted the option Ozols offered, which allowed them to be pious heirs with their own vision rather than rebellious children (see Sollors 1986,237). They donned the hats of their "adopted ancestors".
In the alternative social world modeled by the second generation, in such settings as 3 x 3, the many voices in exile can be heard more clearly than in the structures established by the first generation. At 3 x 3, reconciliation among the generations in the diaspora is neither effected, desired, nor necessary. Those second-generation Latvians who designed 3 x 3 represent those who also were excluded from access to power and authority in the exile society at large. For them, being heard as one equal voice among others was accomplishment enough. In the alternative structures they themselves designed, they could reaffirm allegiance to cause-to the exile goal of (re) unification with an independent homeland - as they simultaneously contested the strategies and social relations to which this allegiance had been linked. It was a move possible in the open-ended debate created by the children, not in the podium work
fostered by their parents.
Paper presented at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association Chicago, November 1991. Published in Selected Paper on Refugee Issues, edited by Pamela A. De Vos. Washington, D. C.: American Anthropological Association, 1992, pp. 56-70.
1) Historians estimate that "return movements" have resulted in 25-60 percent of all migrants to the U.S. going back to their homelands (Bodnar 1985, 53). In the Harvard encyclopedia of American ethnic groups, Thernstrom notes that a concern with homeland politics is a distinguishing feature of the more than 106 ethnic groups in the U.S. (Thernstrom 1980,vi).
2) Russian exiles living in Paris after World War I viewed France as a "waiting station" (Velikonja 1990, 383). Studies of exile populations are missing from the anthropological discourse, especially among those who study American society (for exceptions, see: Baskauskas, Carpenter, Fagen).
3) According to the Latvian encyclopedia edited by Arveds Svabe in 1955,564 physicians, 766 engineers, 123 chemists and an equal number of architects, 300 lawyers, 2,827 teachers, 336 ministers, and over 3000 writers, academics, and artists were among those in the DP camps (p. 508).
4) I adapt this description from Chapin W. Huntington's 1933 book The Homesick Million: Russia-ont-of-Russia, about Russian exiles in France after the Revolution.
5) 1 have been told by any number of young Latvians that their address books, which put them into contact with Latvians throughout the diaspora, are their tickets to the world.
6) Some children stay within their parent's world, while "the mili-tantly conscious" (Higham 1990,23) generate conflict and bring about changes in self-definition (see, e.g., Nahirny & Fishman 1965).
7) The precursor to 3 x 3 was 2x2 (Divreizdivi) which was begun in 1964 as a "daring new experiment in cultural education" (Miezitis 1979, 74). It was intended for college-aged Latvians and was organized by the second generation who believed that Latvians born in America would not "automatically" grow up Latvian. In a retreat-like atmosphere, 2x2 brought young Latvians together with eminent diaspora lecturers and performers for ten days of intensive cultural immersion "as Latvians". The majority of the youngest generation of active Latvians today has attended 2x2.
8) The name is a pseudonym.
9) All unattributed quotes are from field tapes in my personal collection.
10) Latvian academic fraternities are modeled after German customs, which include wearing a tri-coloured hat. The first Latvian fraternity was founded in 1870 by individuals identified with the 19th century National Awakening.
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