The Folklore Fellows’ Summer School 2002
(The participants of the FF Summer School 2002 at Lammi)
The 6th international FF Summer School was held on July 15–24, 2002 at Lammi in Southern Finland. The overall theme was one of the most central in folklore research: memory, recollection and creativity. The participants, representing more than ten countries, dwelled on the topic not only in listening to the papers delivered by teachers of international repute but also in joining in the discussions based on short papers given by each participant on his or her topic of study.
The following report consists of the accounts by Maria Vasenkari, Niina Hämäläinen and Kaarina Koski. It follows the chronological order of the papers.
Dialogues between local and global
The Summer School started with the theme “Dialogues between local and global”. In her opening address titled “Ethnic/national tradition in the age of globalisation”, Academy Professor Anna-Leena Siikala set out to seek a frame for interpreting living contemporary folklore. In discussing the effects of globalism, she pointed out how the international economy, information exchange and changes in political regimes have raised problems pertaining to ethnic and national identity in different parts of the world. This is a prominent feature not only in Western countries but also in Post-Soviet Russia, where she has conducted fieldwork.
She argued that the increasing realisation of the significance of one’s own culture is both a consequence of and a counter-force to globalisation. The concepts of tradition, nationalism and ethnonationalism are often applied in the analysis of the interplay between the global and local.
Siikala reminded listeners of the importance of defining these concepts carefully. In the discussion on nation-state building the concept of nationalism is, for example, often blurred by mixing national attitudes, the cultural and social programmes of the European nation-state processes, the political programmes of these processes and the aggressive expansion policies of chauvinistic nationality with its destructive results in World War II. She emphasised that the ideological field of nationalism – and ethnonationalism – should be examined in its concrete historical, international and socio-economic contexts.
Bringing the examination of ethnic and/or national tradition down to grass-root level always involves the question of locality, globalisation and identity formation. As Siikala pointed out, the interconnections and dialogue between locality and global processes (be they administrative, economic or cultural) constitute a complex and challenging field of study. In her own work she has followed Arjun Appadurai’s concept of locality, which emphasises the relational and contextual dimension of locality instead of the scalar and spatial one. It is the neighbourhood of people that generates the contexts of locality and that is also the place where the work should begin. The 1990s in Russia were a decade of memorising and reinterpreting history. The Finno-Ugrian minorities are now reviving their old rituals and transforming them into public cultural performances. Even though there is a great difference between male and female spaces in these cultures, the visibility of women in cultural arenas has increased. If the building of ethnic identity in the European nation-state processes was a male enterprise, in Post-Soviet Russia women are more and more defining the symbols of ethnicity. Siikala reminded us that the ethnographers, journalists and media invited by the people to join in the cultural festivals and other presentations of culture should realise that they thus become partners and contribute to the complex processes of performing the ethnicity. The researchers and the media serve as instruments connecting the people of the villages and their events to the world. In this instance they participate together in the negotiation between the local and the global.
The first paper by Professor Diarmuid Ó Giolláin was titled “Universalism, particularism and the identity of folkloristics”. He examined how the ideas of universalism and particularism have determined both the concept of folklore and the subjects of folklore studies.
Ó Giolláin began his address with a statement that folklore was born of a dialogue between universalism and particularism. Whereas the Enlightenment had implied the sameness of different communities and cultures, Herder emphasised the incommensurability of culture and argued for the specificity of both individuals and communities.
In analysing the early concepts linked with folklore, Ó Giolláin referred to Norbert Elias, who has studied the distinction between the concept of civilisation and the German concept Kultur. Whereas civilisation has been conceived of as a process based on universalist notions, Kultur has emphasised the differences between peoples – it has limited and drawn boundaries. Kultur has made reference to products that have already existed, as flowers in the field, waiting for the ethnographer to come and pluck them. As Ó Giolláin pointed out, the relationship between Kultur and folklore is obvious: for much of its history folklore studies have aimed at safeguarding and collecting folklore items that are threatened by decay and at worse, extinction.
The concept of popular has always been closely linked with folklore. In English “popular” was first defined as “belonging to the people”; later it came to mean “liked by people”. According to Antonio Gramsci, popular has close links with national in many languages. Examples of this are the German Volk, Russian narod, and Finnish kansa. Because of its definition as something belonging to the people, folklore has been used to achieve national distinctiveness. In many countries the relationship between the study of folklore and nationalistic enterprises is undisputed. In such enterprises the choice of folklore material for collection has always been made outside the actual folklore community.
Popular has also been identified with traditional. In folklore studies the discussion on traditional was largely conducted in the polarities of traditional and modern. Modern society was seen as a threat to traditional forms of life and folklore. As Ó Giolláin pointed out, awareness of the threat of decay posed by modern society to traditional folklore has sometimes prevented folklorists from seeing the real dynamics of folklore in society.
Nowadays, the popular in folkloristics is associated not so much with national and modern as with global postmodern. Will globalisation bring about the death of particularism? The question of cultural diversity in postmodern discourse is complex, since along with the process of globalisation, postmodernist notions predict the death of universalism. The dialogue of universalism and particularism goes on.
Professor Lauri Harvilahti continued on the day’s theme with a paper entitled “Traditional knowledge in the context of a ‘global’ world”. He set out to examine the state of globalisation in the world. Globalisation refers to the growing pace of scientific and technological development, and the speed of economic and financial flows that lead to genuine upheavals in economies, societies and cultures throughout the world. One defining factor often linked with globalisation is information technology, and within this the role of the Internet.
Like Siikala earlier, Harvilahti focused his examination of the global on the level of identity. He referred to Manuel Castells’s study The Information Age (1996–98) concentrating on the different dimensions of the network society – an integral part of the process of globalisation. According to Castells, the rise of the network society calls into question the processes of identity, including new forms of social change. Castells distinguishes three types of identities that can be perceived to exist in the network society. First there is the legitimising identity. This generates a civil society with churches, unions, parties, cooperatives, etc., which prolong the dynamics of the state and are deeply rooted. Resistance identity leads to the formation of communes or communities. It is a process of building a defensive identity. The characteristics of resistance identity are religious fundamentalism, ethnically-based nationalism, etc.: the “exclusion of the excluders by the excluded”. Project identity then produces subjects. It is a project of a “different life” aiming at the transformation of society. According to Harvilahti, the legitimised identities will be replaced by resistance or project identities based on religion, nationalism or ethnicity.
Harvilahti continued to elaborate on the effects and consequences of the information age on people living in different cultures and societies. He stressed first of all that the processes of cultural identity and the information age are closely related to the processes of social change. We are confronted with unforeseen challenges now that information can be exchanged instantly, without regard to geographical and national borders. As a consequence, the “world” village is inhabited by increasing numbers of de- and re-territorialised citizens. Our rational and stable “modern” world is becoming unstable and diffuse due to globalisation. This situation is, he pointed out, causing the fragmentation of societies and growing xenophobia.
The second day of the Summer School began with a paper by Professor Barbro Klein “A world of nations: folklore, heritage politics, and ethnic diversity in four countries”. In it she examined the role and significance of nations in cultural analysis, and especially in folkloristic studies. In this context the “World of Nations” of the title referred to the interplay of nationalism and internationalism – again one dimension of the globalisation debate. According to Klein, nations are gaining more and more importance as cultural residences. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than fifteen new nations have come into being.
Questions of nations and national identities are critical ones for folkloristics and have been subjects of teaching and research ever since the beginning of the discipline. One central theme of study has been the misuse of folklore in nationalism. At present, however, as Barbro Klein further argued, the use of folklore in national processes is hardly looked at, analysed or examined. When it is subjected to study, it is done with reference to small countries on the periphery, not the nations in the heartlands. Thus folklorists do not live up to the internationalism they praise.
Barbro Klein elaborated her arguments by presenting four cases in four countries: Estonia, Sweden, the USA and Mali. She examined the folklore scholarship of each country in relation to the ethnic borders within that state.
In conclusion Barbro Klein presented three tasks for folklorists. First, scholars in small fields need crossroads, such as the FF Summer School, where the national and the international can be ventilated together. The work in the local arena cannot be separated from the international context. Second, the premises of scholarship must be examined. We should start asking which platform and power arena we are speaking from. What theoretical questions are we asking, and in what language? And third, we should start to appreciate critical debate, consider it exhilarating, even though it may appear troublesome and frightening. We must debate the structure of power in the folkloristic world.
Participant papers
Susan MacAuley: “Diaspora by degree”. Susan MacAuley’s paper described her study of the expatriate community of “professional” exiles living and working in Wanganui, New Zealand. Her research focuses on the significance of the personal and historical circumstances of the exodus of mainly medical and academic professionals who have come to Wanganui from North America, Great Britain, South Africa and Yugoslavia. The orientation in her study is an “actor-directed view of globalisation“ linking the local to the global. Wanganui is an arena where multicultural and bicultural relationships between the Maori and the immigrants are formed, articulated and negotiated: the issues of separatism, colonialism and global cultural politics lie beneath the interaction. MacAuley also discussed methodological issues concerning her material: personal experience narratives produced in interview sessions. She made an important point in stressing that it is important for folkloristic studies to regard electronic communication as an integral part of cultural transmission today.
Jarno Väisänen: “Global processes and local arguments”. Jarno Väisänen’s paper focused on the study he has conducted among the Sami and non-Sami living in the Karesuando region of Sweden. His study centres on the debate over the rights of the Sami as an indigenous people. He has focused on the debate and argumentation concerning the article on the administration and ownership of land and water in ILO convention no. 169. He has studied how the local people affected by this article argue about the justice of the re-arrangement of the right to land and water. The discussion goes beyond the distinction between the Sami and the non-Sami. As Väisänen pointed out, the social organisation of the community goes across the ethnic borders: there are very important we’s and they’s that the global process does not notice but which must be accounted for in the local-level argumentation. Väisänen has paid special attention to topics, the commonly used and commonly held notions and values, as the local-level argumentative places where the dilemmas of the ILO convention are recreated. The topics are, as he pointed out, both the context and products of the local culture. Väisänen has applied Michael Billig’s rhetorical approach in his analysis. The rhetorical approach considers thinking as being essentially formed in discourse. It also assumes that common-sense thinking is fundamentally argumentative and that it is composed of contrary, dilemmatic themes.
Hu Xiaohui: “Protection of folklore and the desire for development”. In his paper Hu Xiaohui took up the important issue of folklorists’ ethics and responsibility when dealing with national minorities and acute issues in their everyday life. In China, as in other countries of the world, folklorists are faced with the dilemma of the need and motivation to protect the traditional forms of culture. The larger frame of argumentation in China, too, concerns the decay of traditional folklore discussed earlier by Diarmuid Ó Giolláin. The contradiction raised by Hu concerned the building of a road to a small village near the Meili snow mountain in Yunnan province. Academics strongly oppose building the road on ecological and especially cultural grounds, the people of the village, in turn, want a road to link them to the world. The road would, no doubt, affect the culture of the village. What would be a good ethical solution? As Hu Xiaohui pointed out, development means a different thing for the rich and for the poor. For the poor, change is the only way, even if it poses a potential threat to the traditional forms of culture.
Maria Vasenkari
Ethics and politics of heritage
“Ethics and politics” of heritage was the title of two days at the Folklore Fellows’ Summer School at Lammi. Thursday morning started with a paper by Barbro Klein on the topical question of heritage and cultural differences. Titled “The travels of Ernst Klein: reflection on heritage making, museum politics, and cultural difference”, the paper focused on the role of the folklorist in the field. Ernst Klein, educator at the Nordic Museum and creator of films on folk life, defined cultural heritage as being always selected and appointed. Heritage is made in the public domain and tends to be linked up with emotion: it dramatises and exoticises tradition. In hiding the complexity and differences, heritage making is constructed and connected to politics.
Ernst Klein experienced the power of heritage in his own life. He was himself a Jew, but this was never mentioned or discussed. As Barbro Klein said, the Jewish identity of Ernst Klein was taken up as a meaningless attitude. It was not spoken, so it did not exist. For Ernst Klein and the museum run by him, the Jewish identity was significant. Klein was the first scholar in Sweden to publish a study of Jewish tradition and to express the cultural heritage of the Jews.
Articulation was again a central issue in the paper by Professor Stein Mathisen: “From narratives of noble savages to discourse on the ecological Saami”. His subject concerned the Sami people in the Finnmark area of Norway and their opportunities to present themselves in the heritage culture and politics. According to Mathisen, Sami people have been seen and understood as a natural people living in harmony. This construction has deep roots in European, mainly Western thought and media. The Sami way of life, which implies a mythical relation with nature, has been characterised by politics as the “noble savage”. It has been widely associated with the Sami: it has been high-handedly articulated as two opposites, human and animal, civilisation and nature.
Like many before him, the Swedish doctor Carl von Linné (1707–78) constructed an image of the Sami by giving a patriarchal view of them in his diary. The region inhabited by the Sami in Lapland was defined as a hostile country with imbecile people. The image implied immorality and darkness, as Mathisen pointed out. In conclusion, Mathisen asked how ideas of culture and heritage culture are constructed. Ethnic groups such as the Sami are given very little room of their own.
Docent Pertti Anttonen opened the summer school session on Friday morning by asking, “How do we own history? Heritage politics and the concept of tradition in perspective”. He then extended the discussion launched by Barbro Klein and Stein Mathisen, but his approach was theoretical rather than empirical.
First, Anttonen focused on a definition of tradition that is connected to transmission: tradition is the transmittal of elements of a culture from one people to another, from one generation to another. In continuing, he emphasised that tradition always represents collectivity, while creativity is an expression of individualism. In recent years, folklore scholars have started to emphasise the creativity in and of tradition. The view on creativity arrives at the idea of another topical term, variation, that has come to be seen as a prime indication of creativity. As Anttonen pointed out, there is also another aspect of the creative issue that has not been widely discussed: tradition as an active and political process of creating historical meaning. According to Dell Hymes and his idea of traditionalisation, the past is actively constructed and produced. This concept of tradition has raised the question of authenticity as well. Whose ownership and whose identities are we talking about?
In his paper “Political position in the fields of culture”, Professor Jukka Siikala addressed the identities of researchers and peoples in the field, the subject of much discussion in recent years. He defined, interestingly, the term “individualism”: what is the aspect of culture that creates individuals? The question led to culture and to how it works. For instance, according to Anthony Wallace, culture is something shared by members of a society. It also satisfies people’s needs. Is culture then related to harmony, asked Siikala? Opposing Wallace, he suggested that behind the harmony and shared ideas there is huge diversity in and between culture. As he stressed, we do not see things; we see certain things we want and need. The identities and positions in the field are always chosen and are thus political as well.
In subscribing to the view of Edward Said, Siikala emphasised cultural differences and the things that go unsaid. In this point of view, cultures are ordered hierarchically, with Western culture at the top and others below. A culture is thus defined by where we stand: our status as a researcher or informant. Siikala has personally conducted fieldwork in the Pacific Ocean, where globalisation and tradition are trying to find room of their own.
Participant papers
Jurate Semetaite: “Lithuanian folklore group”. The object of Jurate Semetaite’s paper was to describe new ways of using forms of folklore in contemporary Lithuania. Although traditional forms of folklore are not common there at present, people use and pass tradition on in performing, dancing and acting. The folklore ensembles are one way of getting to know tradition and folklore. The roots of these ensembles reach back to the 1960s. The movement was born out of new folkloristic research activities and presented an alternative to the official Soviet culture. Nowadays there are around 500 traditional folk music groups, which are supported by the government.
Johanna Jacobsen: “Malerische Reisen and Oriental fantasies: an initial foray into the relationship between folklore and travel(ogues)”. Johanna Jacobsen addressed the relationship between folklore and travel, a subject dealt with earlier by Pertti Anttonen. She defined the concept of “travelogue” as a discussion and a repository of cultural stereotypes. Folklore genres use travel motifs, and folklore itself travels, too. The aim of the study is to understand the role of folklore in transmitting and representing transnational encounters. Travel has represented an enormous element in folklore research history and discipline, as Jacobsen showed through examples. For instance, the Finnish historic-geographic method concentrated on the spread of folklore items in an attempt to determine the origin of a particular variant. In speaking of the relationship between folklore and travel, Jacobsen emphasised that in discussing folklore and travel, we are discussing the production of folklore in the different cultures as well.
Desmond Kharmawphlang: “The egg divination ceremony of the Khasis”. Desmond Kharmawphlang chose to show a videotape made by him among the Khasis tribe of Northeast India in 2001. The Khasis are a matrilineal community with no official religion. They have their own language and religion, as Kharmawphlang, himself a member of the community, explained. The tape showed a performance of the egg divination. A religious member of the tribe was reading signs through the egg in his hand. The secret, religious knowledge is upheld and transmitted by a respected member of the tribe. During the ceremony, the egg in the performer’s hand danced in order to call forth the myths.
Valdimar Hafstein: “Theorising the copy/right. Culture’s proliferation and containment”. The paper by Valdimar Hafstein began the Friday afternoon session and addressed the problem of copyright and folklore. Hafstein reconsidered concepts of folklore, copyright and authorship. He indicated the ambivalence in the protection of folklore, which is transmitted from one person to another by copying, imitating. But since there is no authentic, original copy of a folklore product, speaking of copyright is problematic. Hafstein gave both the concept of folklore and copyright a historical aspect. The concept of author was given a new meaning in Western societies during the 18th and 19th centuries. Tradition was seen as a reminder of the author concept, and thus an individual subject. The study is based on the idea that in Western, capitalist societies culture is an asset that can be possessed and thus protected. In this sense, a product of folklore is a work of art that requires an author and has an aspect of property.
Anastasia Bouenok: “Folklore and ethnography of Finnish ethnic groups in the Tikhvin region”. Anastasia Bouenok’s paper dealt with two Finnish ethnic groups, the Tikhvin Veps and Tikhvin Karelians in Northwest Russia, their folklore and ethnographic material. Collection of Tikhvin folklore and ethnographic material started at the beginning of the 19th century when the Finnish researcher and explorer A. J. Sjögren (1794–1855) journeyed to the Tikhvin region in 1824 with the purpose of studying the Finnish language. Bouenok argued that all the researchers tried to find some traces of traditional Finnish culture among the Tikhvin Veps and Karelians instead of seeking out Tikhvin’s own culture. Nowadays the question of national identity has arisen among the Veps. One task for future research will be to understand and analyse the culture of the Tikhvin Veps and Karelians themselves.
Victoria Vlasova: “’Holy places’ in Komi Old-Believer tradition: folklore, symbolic texts and the text of the researcher”. Victoria Vlasova continued with the Old-Believer tradition in Komi in Russia. She sought to define holy places among the Old-Believers. The Russian Orthodox Church split into two factions in the late 17th century. Those who did not support the official church were called the Old-Believers. Their oral tradition is strongly linked with the holy places created and identified in folk tales and narratives. The tales of the holy places are collective tradition and an essential part of the Old-Believer community. In conclusion, Vlasova mentioned the reflexivity of her research and self-positioning in the field – an important topic little touched upon in the papers.
Annamari Iranto: “Folk ideas on law and justice”. The basic problem of Anna-Mari Iranto’s paper concerned the feeling of inequality before the law. The research material consisted of letters sent to a television journalist, Hannu Karpo, who has been famed for focusing on injustices of all kinds. People who have suffered legal inequality turn to him. In many cases, they have had bad experience of other courts and they turn to a journalist as their last resort. As Iranto explained, people are well aware of the power of the media, and they know how to use it. The next step in the study is to analyse how the feeling of injustice and inequality has been represented in folklore materials such as proverbs.
Epics and creativity
Saturday’s topic concentrated on epics and creativity. Lauri Harvilahti read Professor Lauri Honko’s paper “The quest for the long epic: three cases”. The three cases of textualisation of epics took place in the Finnish and the Baltic Sea region and in India.
Lauri Honko began with the question of epic length: how long is really long? In oral cultures, the epic has no fixed length. Besides, the length of oral poetry is always culturally and historically bounded. Instead of counting verses, we must study the epic format, long and short, as Honko emphasised.
In Finnish-Karelian epic poetry, the format was short and we could speak of the “power of brevity”. Elias Lönnrot himself felt that he continued the work of his singers in creating the Kalevala. It was assumed that singers might have developed a long epic had they had the opportunity. Since there was no long epic in Finnish-Karelian poetry, Lönnrot followed the mental text of a certain good singer. But why, then, was the Kalevala born a long epic? Lauri Honko continued by saying that “the long epic presupposes an individual [Lönnrot] who wants a long format”. For Elias Lönnrot, the Kalevala developed and lived as a process in his mind for three decades.
The second epic case led us to the Baltic region called Setuland where the Finnish ethnomusicologist A. O. Väisänen met the singer Anne Vabarna at the beginning of the 20th century. Having collected her songs, Väisänen asked her to sing “The song at the St John’s fire”. Anne Vabarna instantly sang a very long epic of 6,621 lines in a culture where a long format consists of around 400 lines (“The song of the sea”). The situation was exceptional because for the first time, a collector was hearing an epic of long format. Now there were two, a collector and a singer, who were both keen on long epic.
The Indian epic singer Gopala Naika and his Siri epic were the last case mentioned by Honko. The Siri epic is mostly sung while working in the rice fields. Secondly, it is performed in the ritual. The performance, context, time, audience, function, etc., limit the epic format. The long Siri epic survived as a mental text in the minds of the performers and participants in the ritual.
Lauri Harvilahti then continued with his own topic, “Creativity in South-Siberian mythological epics”. Harvilahti started to do fieldwork in Altai, Siberia in 1996–97, in an area where living epic tradition and oral epics are still to be found. The epics of Southern Siberia are Maadai-Kara and Ochy Bala, the former of which is better-known. The singing tradition is strongly connected with the shaman-singer. It is maintained by good singers, and as in Finnish-Karelian epic tradition, singers who have magic knowledge.
According to Harvilahti, the epics in Siberia and the Kalevala in Finland have structures in common. They are mythical epics. The cosmos is divided into this world (the upper world) and the other world (the underworld). Mythical subjects and motifs suffuse the epic tradition. The best-known Altai heroic epic, Maadai-Kara, is a full description of mythical time. For instance, the holy tree is a symbol of eternal life. In addition to the mythical contents and descriptions, Harvilahti spoke of the performing technique of the singers. He is interested in the way the performance is constructed. A singer he met in the field said he was capable of singing 40 epics. This is possible using different epic expressions, such as formulas, multiforms and mental text. Using this meaning structure he is able to produce the lines of the epic.
Participant papers
Martin Skrydstrup: “From oral epic to world literature: a generational perspective on the orality–literacy transposition of the Mvet epic”. Martin Skrydstrup’s paper was based on his doctoral dissertation and addressed the Cameroon oral epic, Mvet, performed among the Fang people and the interaction between local (Cameroonian) and global (Western) views on cosmology in epic. The main question, according to Skrydstrup, was whether the egg myth in the Mvet epic was invented or inherited. The egg myth of the Mvet oral epic (1972) about how the universe was created resembles a Western, widely-approved scientific theory (Big Bang) about a cosmic explosion. Skrydstrup suggested that a troubadour of the oral epic had actually composed the egg myth himself though he presented it as ancient traditional knowledge; in other words, he invented a popular variant of the Western theory of the cosmology. The local interpretation met with the global view in the context of an oral epic.
Niina Hämäläinen: “Some remarks on textualisation: Elias Lönnrot’s Kullervo poem”. Niina Hämäläinen’s paper concerned the Kalevala and one of its poems. Her aim was to describe the first version of Elias Lönnrot’s Kullervo poem and the development of its textualisation as a process. She first took a brief look at the folk material behind the first Kullervo poem and then concentrated on the early version in comparing it with the models in folk poetry. Despite his personal interventions in the original folk poem texts, Lönnrot still kept close to them in composing the Kullervo poem. His early edition of the Kalevala (the Proto-Kalevala of 1833) and the folk poems he used in its composition described the character of Kullervo based on the idea of the mythical Kaleva’s son.
Jouni Hyvönen: “Idiosyncratic variation in narrative strategies: Lönnrot’s response to oral coherence mechanisms”. The objective of Jouni Hyvönen’s paper was two-fold. First, he showed how Elias Lönnrot tried to represent charms inside the Kalevala. Second, he brought out one aspect of Lönnrot’s textualising process: his response to idiosyncratic variation. Hyvönen surveyed the Kalevala from the perspective of a mental text. The aim of the study is then to reconstruct the mental representations in Lönnrot’s compilation and compare the coherence mechanisms with the original source material (charms). As a mental process, coherence is produced in creating and decoding meanings, and thus, it is always a compromise. Through analysing Lönnrot’s strategy of compilation, Hyvönen shed light on Lönnrot’s work.
Niina Hämäläinen
Defining “we” in the modern world
Identity is, as Anna-Leena Siikala had pointed out in her opening address, often defined in relation to another and expressed in various ways. In his paper “Culture for the people and culture of the people” Diarmuid Ó Giolláin took up the issue of constructing a cultural identity in a mirror held by outsiders.
First he discussed the position of folklore and the folk, pointing out that folklore, as a concept, was introduced in the discussion between modern and traditional. The traditional culture that presented the past and the undeveloped was folklore. Even today folklore cannot be seen as just something studied by folklorists, but as the culture of subaltern people. Following Antonio Gramsci, Ó Giolláin sees hegemony not as a hierarchy but as cultural and moral dominance. Subaltern culture can be determined not by its contents but by its position: it is a culture that lacks hegemony and autonomy. Folklore, thus, is the worldview of the subordinate social layers and cannot, in this position, be systematically maintained.
According to Gayatri Spivak, there is no room for the subaltern to speak or make their voices heard. Their need to be the subjects of their own history leads us back to the question of heritage politics. Social differences are reproduced and determined by the hegemonic class.
Ó Giolláin gave an example of people making their own culture for themselves in Ireland, but having it mediated by the representatives of the hegemonic culture. At the beginning of the 20th century scholars (such as Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold, Carl Marstrander, R. Flower and Brian Kelly), writers and other enthusiasts found the remote Blasket Islands on the west coast of Ireland. By that time the population spoke Irish and earned their living traditionally by fishing, hunting seabirds and some farming. Many scholars visited the islands and collected local folklore. The contacts with outsiders helped to develop a distinctive cultural identity, which is still maintained with annual cultural conferences of the islanders, today living mostly on the mainland or in the USA. The outsiders gave the islanders literate forms of expression.
Ó Giolláin referred to what Lauri Honko wrote about the second life of folklore and argued, following García Canclini, that folk culture has now gained a larger context through mass production. The channels are different, but traditional items can be seen in, for example, ethnomusic.
Sami culture has long been determined by hegemonic cultures and only recently have the Sami themselves raised their own voice to define themselves – or rather we should say voices, as there is no homogenous Sami culture or homogenous view of Saminess. In his paper Stein Mathisen dealt with the politics of collecting and exhibiting Sami folklore and culture. He started with old Sami-representations, claiming that they still influence our view of Sami people today.
Early ethnography aimed at collecting old Sami beliefs and customs, to be replaced with new ones. From the 19th century until 1930 not only objects were exhibited but Sami people themselves. Professional agents recruited Sami for exhibitions, to which anthropologists came (especially the Chicago World Exhibition of 1893) to observe them.
In the 20th century the exotic interest in the Sami gave way to a scientific one. Changing ethno-politics have subsequently changed the museum policies as well. In Norway the Sami themselves started to oppose the way they were being exhibited among “Negroes, Indians and other primitives” instead of being in the Norwegian section. Many Sami people saw modernisation and assimilation with the majority as the only possible future; removing the Sami section from the museum meant they were officially assimilated.
Participant papers
Ezekiel Alembi: “The construction of the Abanyole worldview on death through Okhukoma poetry”. Death, in Okhukoma poetry performed after death until the burial, is caused by mystical powers or witchcraft. Alembi described the concepts of Etsisila and Ebiila, deaths caused by adultery by family members in innocent victims. Alembi criticised the outsider’s view of most of the anthropological work done in Africa and emphasised the advantages of the interactive method realised by his own position as a member of Abanyole culture. His method was first to participate, record and interview and then to expose the written analysis to his informants’ comments.
Kaarina Koski: “The power of death in Finnish folk belief tradition”. In her paper Kaarina Koski problematised the ambiguous concept of kalma, which means both the power of death and a host of little beings connected to it in Finnish folk belief. She chose to determine kalma as a representation of death in the world of the living and compared two discourses showing kalma in a different light. The first considers kalma as a useful vehicle of healing and magic. In the other, kalma is dangerous and should be avoided. It highlights the norm of keeping any representations of death separate from everyday life.
Eeva-Liisa Kinnunen: “Narrating identity through humour”. In her paper, Eeva-Liisa Kinnunen discussed ways in which humorous devices serve as a vehicle for defining, creating and consolidating identity in autobiographies written by Finnish women in 1990–91. She argued that even though autobiographies reflect an attempt to find coherence, continuity and consistency in life, identity is at the same time seen as a flexible, situational construction with differing perspectives. Kinnunen analysed several types of humorous style in women’s autobiographies as a means of processing their writers’ identity as women. She noted that self-irony is directed not only towards women themselves but also towards the role models and over-demanding expectations.
Merili Metsvahi: “Interpreting life through religious legends. On the example of a Setu informant”. Merili Metsvahi spoke about narrating religious legends and the process of constructing the narrative distinctively each time in the frame held by the narrator in her memory. Metsvahi compared different performances of the legend of Saint George she had recorded from a Setu informant. The narrator used different textual strategies according to her intentions and aims at the time. Depending on the point she wanted to highlight, she performed the same motive as a belief legend or a fairytale-like narrative.
Memory and narrated history
Definitions of “we” vary from one culture to another. In his paper “Society and how it is talked about” Jukka Siikala dealt with the conception of society and the renewal of social construction: how people in different societies understand human sociability. His examples were taken from his own fieldwork in the Polynesian Cook Islands, the Brazilian Indians studied by Greg Urban, the Hawaiian case from Marshall Sahlins’s research and the New Zealand Maori.
Urban had noted that the Indians had no concept of “folk”, and “we” only meant a family or a task-oriented group. A concept of society did not exist. In Sahlins’s example a society was shaped in opposition to the other world. What united people was the submission to a ruling power, the chiefs. The Maoris, in turn, had genealogic hierarchies to determine who is who.
Siikala described the Polynesian system, which had individualistic and differentiating characteristics, the “wipe-out” motif expressed in the warriors’ songs, yet also the metaphor of “coming together” in the chiefs’ songs, symbolised by a tree trunk. The “wiping-out” metaphor does not mean destruction but change: the trunk is torn to pieces, which are then put together in a new way. It is a metaphor of social renewal. The social system is renewed in distinct ways among the Brazilian Indians, as it is in the Maori rites of the inversion of cosmogony and the Hawaiian carnivalistic Makahiki ritual.
Questions of memory and narrated history had already been taken up from various angles in some of the participants’ papers. Pauliina Latvala spoke about the selective process of remembering and narrating family history, and Merili Metsvahi discussed the ways a good narrator uses her memory and produces different versions of the same narrative. Professor Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj focused on variation in narratives and the factors that affect it. How do people memorise? How do emotions affect the process?
Several factors influence the transmission of a narrative: cognitive context, narrative ability, mood, social context, emotions, and cultural and linguistic contexts. Kaivola-Bregenhøj illustrated the importance of contextual factors by analysing two performances of the same story performed by the same narrator, Juho Oksanen, in different situations.
As Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj noted, an analysis like this would not be possible without sufficient information about the contexts. This material, containing several performances of the same narratives in different situations, allows study of the way variation is affected by such factors as mood, context and audience. Kaivola-Bregenhøj argued that repetition plays the most crucial role in shaping the narratives, as they are crystallised.
As was noted by Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj, narrated events are not necessarily connected to time but to places. On a little island, Mauke, in the South Pacific, Anna-Leena Siikala had worked with a narrator who could not be persuaded to tell his story except in the place to which it was connected. No time frame was needed in addition to the spatial, and the place was proof that the events really did take place on the island.
In her paper “Oral history and traces of the past in Polynesian landscape” Anna-Leena Siikala compared the historical, genealogical knowledge and narratives linked to the landscape. According to Gregory Schrempp, the genealogical and cosmological history have a complementary relation: one demonstrating continuity and the other emphasising discontinuity.
In the Cook Islands a network of narrated episodes about lineages and islands represents a horizontal dimension, whereas genealogies represent a vertical one. Genealogies, linking everyone to a divine origin and giving right to the land, have to be repeated, discussed and recreated, and each must learn his or her own. The horizontal dimension is evoked by spatial memory. This means that the landscape acts as a chart or device for memory: the narrative follows the logic of the landscape and the themes are selected by the spatial memory and by visual stimuli.
Tumu koreros, the Polynesian historians, use two alternative strategies: the vertical, genealogical logic, or the horizontal linked with the landscape. Tumu koreros have knowledge not only about genealogies but also about cult places and safe passages from the island to the sea.
According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, spatial memory is created over generations, as people’s intentional acts give meaning to the places and lead to identification through them. When a narrative follows a spatial logic, actors or motives with no trace in the landscape are not credible. The trace brings the past to the present and tells that there was a past. The traces may, however, be interpreted in various ways within the same community. Through their membership of a group, people are allowed to locate their memories.
The landscape of memory is multidimensional with its social aspects. The multi-layered mental maps merge in people’s minds. Bakhtin has used the term chronotope to describe the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships.
Participant papers
Pauliina Latvala: “Narratives and cultural meanings: the family history in Finland”. Pauliina Latvala’s paper focused on written family histories (in a collection “The Great Narrative of the Family” organised in 1997) and their ways of reconstructing the past. She is studying these texts as one branch of oral history and as narratives of roots placed in historical frames. Such narratives are always the result of selection processes and contain the values, attitudes and conceptions of historical events held by the narrators. Taking into account the nature of these texts, written specially for the archive, Latvala also analysed different standpoints of the narrators/writers and the dialogue between the narrator, an imagined reader and the surrounding literary culture.
Taisto Raudalainen: “NL’s visions and apparitions: the application of some story-patterns of popular Christianity to personal experience narratives”. Taisto Raudalainen presented questions of visionary tradition which he has studied in the frame of life experience narratives in Ingria. Here focusing on one informant’s visions and apparitions, he referred to traditional motifs, popular Christianity and the Bible as sources of the visionary tradition. He also emphasised the influence of hard personal experiences on the outburst of religious enthusiasm or visionary activities, arguing that in chaotic and unexpected situations the narration and interpretation tend to become more culturally determined.
Pasi Enges: “Experience, narrative, and interpretation. Supernatural experiences in River Sami folklore”. In his paper about experiencing, narrating and evaluating the supernatural Pasi Enges criticised classical genre analysis and the tendency to overemphasise serious belief in narratives about supernatural experiences. He underlined the complex nature of tradition and argued that narratives about supernormal experiences should be studied in a local discourse where they have several functions not necessarily requiring belief. Interviews in the little River Sami village of Talvadas have also shown that narratives about supernatural encounters are individual rather than communal.
Elena Dubrovskaya: “The memory of the trenches: letters by servicemen of World War I and narratives on the Civil War in Russian Karelia”. Elena Dubrovskaya has analysed Russian servicemen’s letters from Finland during World War I. Her special focus was on the otherness of soldiers stationed in native villages and their position as marginal beings. In analysing letters and adopting folkloristic methods, she has been able to catch the atmosphere and experiences of the soldiers in a way that is rare in historical studies. She has also used archived narratives on the Civil War in Karelia and studied the way its victims have become heroes in family lore.
Merrill Kaplan: “Nornagestr and the burden of memory”. Merrill Kaplan applied the discussion on the relationship between folklore, researcher and informant to Icelandic sagas written in the 13th and 14th centuries. In Nornagestr’s saga, Nornagestr himself is an old pagan – the informant – who sings old runes to a Christian king. Before Nornagestr takes baptism and dies, his runes are written down by a scribe – the folklorist. This is, Kaplan argued, like eleventh hour ethnography: once recorded, the tradition may die out and rest in peace. Kaplan emphasised the informant’s otherness and the gap between him or her and the researcher. In an ideal fieldwork situation folklore is recorded from the informant and then ends up in a collection. Nornagestr’s saga has been created the other way: the writer in the 14th century must have first had the old text, which he then framed as an old pagan’s performance at the court.
Joonas Ahola: “Grettir’s saga: heroic narrative as historiography”. Joonas Ahola’s paper focused on the heroic characteristics of Grettir in the Icelandic Grettir’s saga. This saga belongs to a younger stratum of sagas that are more fantastic than the older ones. It is probably of popular origin, as the resemblance of Grettir to other traditional heroes seems to imply. Many of the motifs in Grettir’s saga belong to the stock of international patterns of heroic biography, as reconstructed by Jan de Vries and F. R. S. Raglan. The similarity with the Karelian epic hero Kaukomieli/Lemminkäinen also raises questions of their possible connection.
Jonathan Roper: “Investigating English verbal charms”. In his paper, Jonathan Roper discussed methods of investigating a genre that has already disappeared. How to create a thick corpus out of a scattered material? Roper’s methods have been systematic contextualisation, typology on foreign analogues, fieldwork in the English diaspora and finding thick pockets in the material. Roper showed diagrams of quantitative data: two thirds of the material were healing charms, mostly for situations that require immediate action. The most common charm was Flum Jordan, for blood staunching.
Blanka Henrikson: “Collecting memories”. In her paper, Blanka Henrikson viewed the history of memory albums and their meaning. The 16th century Stambuch of Noblemen served as a proof of important acquaintances; later memories were collected as signs of friendship. In the 20th century memory albums were transmitted from girls of marrying age to schoolgirls and even to illiterate children whose mothers collect memories for them. The verses are often taken from older memory albums, thus still giving advice on how to get a husband or to live with one. Interviewees ascribe no special meaning to their old album until asked about it, and then they make one up.
(FFN 24, May 2003: 17-26)