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Paper short abstract

Place-lore has been used for mapping and interpreting the nature. Now it is increasingly used to market a place or to establish conservation restrictions. Archiving enhances the lore’s credibility and significance initiating a process of heritagization. What is the nature of archived narratives?

Paper long abstract

Place-lore — narratives connected to places and toponyms — expresses local and popular, as well as public meanings related to the environment. People have used stories to map the landscape, to make a place feel familiar, to domesticate it. In Estonia, most place-lore is nature-related — connected to natural objects, stones, extraordinary trees, bodies of water, and landscapes. Place-lore has been considered as part of the national heritage and preserved in archives together with oral poetry and fairy tales.

Place-lore is seen as evidence of history; it connects a person to the landscape, and its existence or awareness of it demonstrates a person’s attachment to a place. Nowadays, place-lore increasingly becomes part of discussions, an argument expressing values, used both to market a place in the tourism industry or attention economy, as well as to establish nature conservation restrictions and to oppose industrial production or infrastructural constructions.

Although place-lore is part of community-based communication, archived narratives reach a wider audience and circulation, gaining certain added value. Place-lore stored in archives is considered scholarly verified, as if the folklorist’s attention is a mark of quality that increases the narrative’s credibility and importance. Moreover, archiving itself initiates a process of heritagisation; stories not archived may be dismissed as insignificant.

The presentation discusses who is given a voice when local stories are archived. What is the nature of the narratives that are archived? Does all archived stories hold a similar status in terms of truthfulness or argumentative value? Who gets to decide this?