FOR THE FOLKLORE FELLOWS
No. 24 / May 2003
In this issue:
- Anna-Leena Siikala: The Folklore Fellows’
Network and international cooperation
- Anna-Leena Siikala: Lauri Honko 1932-2002
- Lauri Honko:The five performances
of the Kalevala
- Niina Hämäläinen, Kaarina Koski, Maria Vasenkari: Memory, recollection and creativity
Lauri Honko 1932–2002
by Anna-Leena Siikala, Academy Professor
Director of the Kalevala Institute
(FFN 24, May 2003: 3-5)
Professor Lauri Honko, Director of the Kalevala Institute, died on 15
July 2002. The news came as a sad shock to participants in the international
Folklore Fellows’ Summer School gathered at the Lammi Research Station,
where he was shortly expected to deliver a paper. The messages of condolence
that flowed in from all over the world as the news spread demonstrated
that his passing was a major loss both to Finnish and to international
cultural research. The week was made all the gloomier by the news of the
death, only four days later, of another distinguished Finnish folklorist,
Emeritus Professor Leea Virtanen of the University of Helsinki. Both were
leading Finnish members of the Folklore Fellows’ Network. His active
work to revive and organise the Network was a logical consequence of Lauri
Honko’s geographical and theoretical interests and of his high position
in many learned international organisations. The foremost forum for folklorists,
the International Society for Folk-Narrative Research, elected him Secretary
General for the period 1974–89; he held leading posts in the International
Association for the History of Religions for many years and had a reputation
for being the organiser of splendid congresses and seminars.
The close tie between folkloristics and the comparative study of religions
is one of the distinguishing features of Finnish folklore research. It
originally sprang from a need to gain an understanding of the mythical
elements of the national epic, the Kalevala, and poetry in the archaic
Kalevalaic metre, and their connection with unwritten ethnic religion.
Even as a student, Lauri Honko was already addressing these two research
fields, regarded elsewhere as two separate disciplines. He further inherited
the folkloristic research legacy of Kaarle Krohn and the comparative study
of religions of Uno Harva (Holmberg) from his teacher at the University
of Helsinki, Martti Haavio: Professor of folkloristics, highly esteemed
poet and later Academician. Although Harva was known in Finnish cultural
circles for his Finnish sympathies, his research orientation was broadly
comparative, theoretically and methodologically enlightened. What is more,
he sought to foster internationalism in practice by sending his pupils,
among them Elli-Kaija Köngäs-Maranda and Lauri Honko, to study
and work in the United States. Following in the footsteps of Kaarle Krohn,
Uno Harva and Martti Haavio, Finnish folkloristics adopted the custom
of publishing major works in Finnish, other Nordic and world languages.
Not only was Lauri Honko Martti Haavio’s most illustrious student;
he also served as his assistant. The mutual respect of teacher and student
is evident from the fact that, for example, many of the research themes,
myths, rites, laments, etc., and functionalistic and tradition-ecological
thinking had already been raised by Haavio. Lauri Honko took over from
Martti Haavio as Editor of the Folklore Fellows’ Communications
series in 1969. He nevertheless made his university career at the University
of Turku, which introduced both folkloristics and comparative religion
in the 1960s.
Honko’s dissertation, Krankheitsprojektile. Untersuchung über
eine urtümliche Krankheitserklärung (FFC 178, 1959), earning
him a Doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 1959 was a comparative
study of folk belief that laid the foundations for his lasting interest
in folk medicine. It addressed problems not only of folklore but of comparative
religion, too, and he was accordingly appointed Docent in the two subjects
at the University of Turku in 1961, interest in the subject having waned
since the days of Uno Harva. The same university was later to install
him as Professor of Folkloristics and Comparative Religion in 1963. The
two years in between these two appointments added significantly to his
research profile, since he spent them as a visiting professor at the University
of California and returned with both new ideas and close contacts with
US scholars of benefit to all the Nordic countries.
In preparing for his professorship, Honko turned to the belief tradition
of the Ingrians living in the St Petersburg region south of the Gulf of
Finland. He drew on both archive sources and fieldwork conducted among
refugees in Sweden. The result was the broad monograph Geisterglaube
in Ingermanland I (FFC 185) published in 1962 and marking his international
breakthrough, since it had a strong impact on the development of folk
religion research. It was a work focusing on the process by which religious
experiences are generated and the contexts in which tradition is actualised,
and it introduced new methods of use in research. Like Kaarle Krohn, Lauri
Honko gave his reader a clear methodological model that was easy to follow.
In concentrating on the people bearing traditions and the contexts of
experience narratives, he placed himself among the pioneers of the “new
folkloristics” originating in the United States. Here in the North
the work introduced a perspective that emphasised the empirical study
of living tradition and subsequently led to a mighty wave of field research.
He activated folkloristics based on fieldwork by, among other things,
helping to organise the fieldwork course for Nordic folklorists and ethnologists
held at Vöyri in 1965. The course was to be a major shared experience
for an entire generation of researchers and laid the foundations for even
closer Nordic cooperation.
Introducing two disciplines simultaneously at the University of Turku
in the 1960s demanded considerable energy, especially since the young
Professor was also teaching in Helsinki. As a university lecturer, Lauri
Honko was concerned with training in methodology and with the motivation
and theoretical competence of his students. The joint postgraduate seminar
in folkloristics led by him for the two universities addressed various
topical research trends and discussed their premises. The students who
attended it recall it as a lively discussion forum, and it planted new
research models in Finnish folkloristics. Honko also encouraged women
to dedicate themselves to a career in research, which was by no means
common in the university world of the 1960s.
Comparative religion never ceased to fascinate Lauri Honko. In the 1960s
he published not only notable articles but also two weighty works on research
into Finno-Ugrian religions: Finnische Mythologie (H. W. Haussig
[ed.], Wörterbuch der Mythologie II. Stuttgart, 1964) and
“De finsk-ugriske folks religioner” (J. P. Asmussen and J. Laessøe
[eds.], Illustreret Religionshistorie I. København, 1968).
The subject was felt to be more interesting than ever in the increasingly
international world of the 1960s. As a result of the strivings of Honko
and his colleagues, comparative religion became accepted in Finland as
a discipline in its own right: the University of Helsinki followed Turku’s
example in establishing a chair in the subject. To satisfy the needs of
the new branch of scholarship, he published a book called The Science
of Religion: Studies in Methodology (Mouton de Gruyter, 1979).
From 1972 onwards Lauri Honko was also the Director of the Nordic Institute
of Folklore domiciled in Turku and coordinating dialogue between folklorists,
organising seminars and joint publications. He was particularly concerned
with the development of tradition archives and the study of cultural identity.
In addition to this attempt to strengthen the Nordic academic community,
the early 1970s were characterised by a growing awareness of global problems
and the pressure to adopt international perspectives. In dealing, in a
number of articles, with problems of development cooperation, Honko became
increasingly conscious of the social consequences of research into cultures.
One of the topics for examination was the role of folk medicine in the
changing communities of the developing countries.
The position of Research Professor of the Academy of Finland 1975–78
gave Lauri Honko a chance to concentrate on questions of theory and method,
and on fieldwork. His broad documentation of laments was a continuation
of an interest that had already been aroused in the 1960s. In 1963 he
had published a long article on the performance, stylistic devices, ritual
contexts and metaphorical language of Karelian laments. His recording
of living tradition in Tver Karelia and elsewhere nevertheless represented
a completely new approach to the subject. The living contact with tradition
made in the field led to an emphasis on the tradition-ecological perspective.
A number of articles and the book Tradition och miljö (1981)
edited with Orvar Löfgren initiated debate on the adaptation of tradition
and tradition processes. Later, Honko’s interest broadened the role
of the fieldworker to cover the methods of empirical cultural research
and ultimately research ethics.
On transferring to the full-time post of Director of the Nordic Institute
of Folklore in 1979, Lauri Honko assumed responsibility for the development
and coordination of folklore research in the Nordic countries. The Nordic
Institute of Folklore arranged scientific conferences and postgraduate
education, set up join projects and publications and promoted collaboration
between institutes and researchers. Trends in Nordic Tradition Research
(Studia Fennica, 1983) edited with Pekka Laaksonen traced the history
and development of Nordic folkloristics and ethnology and helped to identify
underlying trends. Through its news bulletin it kept the international
academic community informed of Nordic research. The globalisation of the
Institute’s vistas in the 1980s and the act of taking concrete research
projects out into developing countries were proof of Lauri Honko’s
concern for the fate of cultural traditions in a rapidly changing world.
His work for UNESCO was fruitful and led, among other things, to a declaration
on the safeguarding of folklore and cultural traditions.
The 150th anniversary of the Kalevala aroused interest in the study of
epic, and The Kalevala and the World’s Epics (Mouton de Gruyter,
1990) edited by Honko established a new line of thought by placing the
Finnish national epic on a par with other world epics. On being reappointed
a Research Professor of the Academy of Finland in the 1990s, Lauri Honko
set his sights more and more firmly on comparative epic research and epic
poetry theory. In 1998 he established the Kalevala Institute at the University
of Turku to promote research into poetic tradition. This Institute is
primarily concerned with the planning, execution and publication of studies
in the world’s epics, epic and ritual poetry.
The work done by Lauri Honko in the course of his life as a builder of
institutions is so vast that the scope and versatility of his scientific
output is nothing short of astounding. In addition to myths, rites, laments,
folk medicine, narrative tradition and epic poetry, he addressed questions
of cultural identity and development. His writings on such topics as the
genres and performance of folk poetry have had a major influence on folkloristic
debate. Despite his emphasis on theory and method, his research was founded
on sound documentation using modern technologies. His fieldwork, resulting
in massive materials, in Lapland and Tver Karelia was followed by research
projects conducted in developing countries: Africa, China, and above all
India. Of the hundreds of titles in his oeuvre, some of the most significant
are perhaps The Great Bear, A Thematic Anthology of Oral Poetry in
the Finno-Ugrian Languages (with Senni Timonen, Michael Branch and
Keith Bosley, Finnish Literature Society, 1993), and the three-volume
opus telling about the Siri epic of India and its textualisation: The
Siri Epic (I and II, Lauri Honko in collaboration with Chinnappa Gowda,
Anneli Honko and Viveka Rai, FFC 265–266, 1998) and Textualising
the Siri Epic (Lauri Honko, FFC 264, 1998). Among the last of the
works to be published by him were Thick Corpus, Organic Variation and
Textuality in Oral Tradition (Studia Fennica Folkloristica 7, 2000)
and Textuality in Oral Epics (Mouton de Gruyter, 2000).
Lauri Honko took a visible role in both the Finnish and the international
academic community. He was Secretary General of the Finnish Literature
Society (1975–88) and the Finnish Society for the Study of Comparative
Religion (1969–90) and a member of the Board of the Finnish Academy
of Science and Letters (1987–2002) and its chairman 1989–90.
In directing the work of the scientific societies Lauri Honko paid special
attention to the development of publishing. He was Editor-in-Chief of
Temenos 1965–68 and 1975–90, Editor-in-Chief of Studia
Fennica 1981–89, and took over from Martti Haavio at the helm
of Folklore Fellows’ Communications, a series of folkloristic
monographs founded in 1910 and in wide distribution. He was to hold this
post for over three decades. During his period in office he further enhanced
the scientific image and international visibility of the series.
His fieldwork in India and focus on the problems of oral poetry led Lauri
Honko to reassess the role of the Kalevala as a traditional epic. The
Kalevala Institute, of which he was Director after retiring from his post
as Professor in 1996, supplied an opportunity to continue his comparative
study of epic in the nearby regions of Finland. His latest topics included
the genesis of the Kalevala, and the epic poetry of the Setu people of
Estonia. Although many of the projects at the Kalevala Institute were
interrupted by his sudden passing away, every attempt is being made to
execute them according to plan. It may, however, be several years before
the results of his last research projects are ready for publication.
Publisher:
The Folklore Fellows
by courtesy of
the Finnish Academy of
Science and Letters
and
the Kalevala
Institute
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