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
Memory, recollection and creativity
The Folklore Fellows’ Summer School 2002
(FFN 24, May 2003: 17-26)
(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.
Kaarina Koski
Publisher:
The Folklore Fellows
by courtesy of
the Finnish Academy of
Science and Letters
and
the Kalevala
Institute
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