FFC 300
Bengt af Klintberg: The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend
The documentation of folk legends in Sweden was begun already in the sixteenth century by Olaus Magnus, the last Catholic archbishop, and reached its peak as late as in the first half of the twentieth century. This rich material has hitherto been accessible to international study only to a limited degree. The over 1800 legend types listed in the present catalogue give a vivid picture of the Swedish peasant society with its trolls, ghosts and witches and illustrates its concept of history. The index is based on unprinted records in the four largest folklore archives of Sweden and about 150 printed sources, covering all provinces in Sweden and the Swedish-speaking parts of Finland. Each section of the catalogue contains an introduction, in which the general background of the legends is described.
FFC 299
Timo Kaartinen: Songs of Travel, Stories of Place. Poetics of Absence in an Eastern Indonesian Society
This book explores narratives of people who trace their origin to Banda, the famous Nutmeg Islands of Eastern Indonesia. They were displaced from their ancient homeland by the Dutch colonization of Banda in 1621 and carry on their language and traditions in the village described in this study. The Bandanese continue traveling to distant places in pursuit of recognition by their ancestral allies. They bring their past into life through rituals and verbal arts which commemorate absent travelers and anticipate their return.
The expressive genres of the Bandanese force us to ask what counts as history and how people’s own interpretations of world-scale political events shape their predicaments and possibilities of action. This book argues that ethno-history can be a source of exemplary acts which inform collective responses to new circumstances. The folk poetry of the Bandanese is neither a subaltern reaction to colonial contacts and state interventions nor evidence of their hegemonic effects. It places real, historical events in several chronotopic frameworks in which they are relived as memory and given a total meaning as history. By analyzing poetic expressions and their effects on society this book contributes to the efforts of anthropologists to historicize the ethnographic realities they study.