Aimar Ventsel (PhD) is a senior researcher in the Department of Ethnology at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Fieldwork has taken him to eastern Siberia to study language and identity processes, property relations, regional policy and local music business, and to eastern Germany to research punk subculture. Apart from academic research he has been active as a freelance journalist covering topics linked to the European Union, Russia and Central Asia. Aimar received his PhD in Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Germany) and has been a visiting fellow at Warwick University (UK) and visiting professor at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Russia. He has several academic publications on regional policy and entrepreneurship in the Russian Far East, the indigenous peoples of Russian Siberia, identity processes in post-reunion eastern Germany, and identity in Kazakhstan.
