What am I?

The question in this case isn't all that existential, but more concerning heritage. This question of my own identity serendipitously occurs while I'm doing my fieldwork which partly examines the attitude Swedes have toward immigrants. When I say "Swede" I mean "ethnic Swede" and when I say "immigrants" I mean both actual immigrants and those of non-ethnic Swedish descent but were born and raised in Sweden. From what I can tell, there are three ways to define someone as Swedish: ethnically, nationally or culturally. Most people living in Sweden are all three, but there are plenty of people who are only the last two. From my perspective, it is these last two—especially culture—that are the most important, but this is an American way of looking at things. Ethnicity in the US is a novelty; something cool that makes us interesting, something that we can draw a sense of pride from, but when it comes down to it, we're all Americans—at heart and on paper. In Sweden, the dominant culture seems to believe that if you are not ethnically a Swede, then you are simply a citizen of Sweden.

One of my Swedish friends here told me about how their grandparents on her mother's side are Finnish, which would make her mother ethnically Finnish even if she is culturally and nationally Swedish. She wasn't sure if that made her half or a quarter Finnish herself and asked me which it was. I said that from my understanding of ancestry she would be half Finnish because two ethnic Finns can only produce an ethnically Finnish child. She countered that she knows a fair number of people who would then be half Finnish, though they have chosen to identify themselves as ethnically Swedish because they are culturally and nationally Swedish.

So what does this have to do with me and my identity? I am officially one half Polish, one quarter Austrian and one quarter Lithuanian. There was at some point some confusion as to whether or not my family was Romanian rather than Austrian from the accounts of my grandmother, though that was likely due to the confusion caused by the territory of Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the 20th century. It is nearly certain my ethnic makeup contains at least those three groups, but lately I've been wondering if there's something more in my background. Over the years there have been a fair number of people who thought I might be part Asian or American Indian, oftentimes citing the shape of my eyes. I've noticed that Finnic peoples such as Finns and Saami have rather distinctively shaped eyes that bear a superficial similarity to Asian features. Estonians are also a Finnic people, and only about 100 miles from Lithuania so I wonder if I might have some Estonian ancestry as well. That's pure speculation on my part, but it would explain a bit. What isn't speculation is that my surname, Turausky, means "from Turau". Turau is a city in Belarus, hundreds of miles from the Lithuanian border. So if surnames are patrilineally descended then it seems reasonable to conclude that there is at least a small amount of ethnic Belorussian in my family as well.
None of this is ultimately that surprising and scintillating given that these ethnic groups are within a few hundred miles of one another (and as a good anthropologist I should mention that if you go far enough back, we're all Africans) but it does show how easy it is to forget—or choose not to remember—ethnic heritage when moving to a new country.