Life as journey: narrative selfidentification in autobiographical interview

This article studies a remigrant female narrative interview that was conducted within the project “A story of moving” implemented at the University of Tampere by the department of Russian Language, Culture and Translation. The main purpose of this research was to analyze the processes of ethno-cultural identification and the ways of narrative identity construction through categories of space and dislocation during the process of autobiographical interview. While examining the categories of identity and space within the framework of cultural studies and human geography, the authors tried to demonstrate how the remigrant woman’s “Finnishness”, “Russianness” or “Ingrianness” as the key aspects of ethno-cultural self-identification are produced, discussed, and transformed in the process of imagined spaces’ construction during the narrative interview. This article argues that the autobiographical narrative represents both a site and a tool of the contradictory and continuous self-identification process that is never completed. Migration and dislocations determine dynamics of the process. The location, topos, and chronotopes become one of the most operative tools for self construction in the process of storytelling through self-explanatory story.