Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I present a methodology based on social network analysis, and its challenges, for the study of 19th-century incantations in North Karelia. The methodology aims to propose a model of relations between non-human agents and the human body as it is presented in the incantatory texts.

Paper long abstract:

Incantations were still a common practice in 19th-century North Karelia. They were used especially in healing rituals in the context of folk medicine. The ritual specialist called tietäjä would use their mythical knowledge to communicate with non-human agents occupying the surrounding environment, either to call for their help or to conjure them far from the patient’s body.

Incantatory texts have attracted the interest of folklore collectors of the 19th century. The collected texts have later been published and digitised in the SKVR database. In this paper, I propose a methodology for a quantitative analysis of incantations based on social network analysis, examining more in detail challenges of the computational analysis. I use a limited, and yet thick, corpus of 500 incantations collected from the parish of Ilomantsi between 1816 and 1939.

Due to an extreme dialectical and morphological variation, an automated reading of the texts is challenging. Moreover, defining the agents in the texts is not only a linguistic issue, but also an ontological and epistemological one. What categories should we use in interpreting the texts and defining the various non-human agents and their relations? Due to the fragmentary nature of the collected corpus, the description of the network of non-human agents is necessarily partial and cannot give a full understanding of the incantatory practice. Nevertheless, this method has an important heuristic value and offers new paths for the comparative study of genres of Finno-Karelian oral poetry.