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- Convenors:
-
Alf Arvidsson
(Umeå University)
Line Esborg (University of Oslo)
Marie Steinrud (Stockholm University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- NARRATIVE
- Location:
- Room H-206
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Re-telling the thoughts and sayings of others in historical scholarship includes negotiations of authorship and agendas. Tensions will always appear and have to be addressed. How are historical and recent power structures to be negotiated by the contemporary researcher?
Long Abstract:
The practice of re-telling (publishing, analyzing, performing, presenting) the thoughts, sayings and writings of others in historical scholarship includes negotiations of authorship and agendas. The thoughts collected in the archives are not only lacking context but also, for the most part, represent a selection made in the past, often without any trace remaining of the selection criteria applied. The agency of letting yourself be interviewed and observed may stem from personal agendas of individual or collective identity or cultural policy. Equally, the decision of what to preserve lies in the past. Today, the importance of the ethical implications of interpreting the historical material is increasingly being emphasized and even challenged. The researcher's intentions on the other hand may or may not be compatible with those of the collaborator, but tensions will always arise and have to be addressed.
Using interviews, answers to questionnaires, and autobiographic texts in ethnological/folkloristic research has been a process of moving between the positions of "giving voice to other people" and "making space for other voices". But whose voice is heard, which voices are given priority? How are historical and recent power structures to be negotiated by contemporary researchers?
For this panel, we welcome proposals including topics such as: Research as cultural translation; Negotiating authorship in publishing; Searching for subjects behind fragments; The careers of "star informants"; Making room for voices of dissent in representations of the collective; The cultural politics of answering questionnaires; The scholarly practice of validating tradition-bearers; Making sense of historical fieldwork practices.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 16 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with how to tackle an 18th century autoethnographic text: as a field report from social life by one of its members, or as a deeply personal statement by an author reaching out across time with a scientific mission.
Paper long abstract:
This paper deals with the recently published Pehr Stenberg’s Life Description, written over the period 1780-1824. Presenting an author who has produced a 4000 page manuscript, an autobiography in diary format with strong attention to personal emotions, can have several ethical complications. As an unsecure class climber, his thoughts and actions reveal much about the emotional pressure of handling social expectations, bordering on embarrassment. With how much respect is he to be treated, even if he is quite outspoken on contributing a source material for research? Furthermore, he had scientific ambitions and the manuscript is just one of his works being posthumously noticed and evaluated in an extremely slow publishing career. What responsibilities do we take on when recontextualizing and publishing manuscripts by other writers?
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how archived material collected in the past can be interpreted in modern research by taking Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnian folklore as a case study. Focus is on the character of Lovisa Törndal who was interviewed by collector Valter W. Forsblom about magical healing.
Paper long abstract:
Various archived material about Lovisa Törndal, who lived in the Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnia, Finland in the late 19th century, exists and has been published over the years. During her lifetime, she defined the norms of her community set for married women by living without her husband and behaving unruly. She was gossiped to practice witchcraft, both healing and malevolent. When folklore collector Valter W. Forsblom arrived in the region, he was warned by the locals that Törndal would not share her craft with him. Nevertheless, Forsblom interviewed Törndal and was so impressed by her knowledge that he validated her as a last remnant of the magical healers. According to Forsblom, Törndal told him all her magical knowledge to be preserved in the archives and wanted even to have her picture taken with him, which was later sent to the archives as well.
In this presentation, I will look how Törndal appears in Forsblom’s collection as a tradition-bearer and in his letter exchange with the head of the archives, Ernst Lagus. Focus is on how Törndal’s character is approached by him as a folklore collector and how a contemporary scholar who is writing about her today can evaluate and understand material connected to her. I argue, that by looking at the archived material stemming from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, we can see that Törndal’s character has been othered in the local narratives about her, in the eyes of the folklore collector as well as in modern research.
Paper short abstract:
Great grandmother kept the diaries, creating the ethnography. I am the second ethnographer, employing empathy to translate her proficiencies, how strive for position balanced against personal wishes. In this, interest in the everyday conditions of the past has to be weighed against family privacy.
Paper long abstract:
Empathy is a way to get closer to experience of the Other – to be balanced by ethical considerations. Great grandmother Clara made the ethnography as the first subject. I am the second, filling in the family history.
By referring to auto-ethnography, I acknowledge the presence of myself analyzing personal experience – broadly humane to share with readers.
Drawing on the non-representational-research/methodologies is to justify my need to go beyond matters to suggest the interpretation while considering matters of ethics.
Born a soldier’s daughter, Clara rose to manager of an estate, married and inherited a fortune. Her first marriage did not turn her into a person of rank but her second did, to the son of a clergyman, together with that legacy. She wanted a nice, bourgeois home, I assume. When this was built in a modern railway village, furnished with well-to-do furniture and utensils from the manor house, photos were taken of the family at home. Here I see the social ambition she never mentions. I traced it by her care about the ritual visits for coffee-at-eleven and the social life of the village. The staged photos confirm her position. Clara herself being a professional housekeeper raised her daughter to become a bourgeois lady who could play the piano, embroider, arrange fine dining. None of them knew that they were heading for the new middle class, while she expressed her lived experience towards the backdrops of social groups, women’s agency, and the upcoming modernity in Sweden from 1890 onwards
Paper short abstract:
My paper focuses on how a new elite, the ironmasters of Bergslagen in Sweden in their autobiographies create and recreate a common collective identity. At the same time, other sources tell other stories and by combining different types of sources it is possible to discover other conflicting, images.
Paper long abstract:
In 1828, one year before his death, the merchant, politician and ironmaster Johan Niclas Schwan (1764-1829) wrote an autobiography, a short text in which he describes his life from childhood to old age. Similarly, other ironmasters have written autobiographies that are preserved in various archives.
The autobiographical texts are of course all different. They are of different lengths; they are intended for different audiences and sometimes they are written down as short stories on pieces of paper while others are carefully rewritten on thick folio sheets. However, the content shows many similarities. They all follow a pattern that describes their existence from the cradle to the grave. It is an image of the self-made man, successful and with definite goals. Mistakes, failures and setbacks shine with their absence.
Contemporary sources such as diaries, letters and documents from different courts tell a different story. Here it is possible to follow the people almost in real time.
This paper focuses on these autobiographies and the common identity that the ironmasters carve out in their stories. In a sense it is about the tension between these images, these positions and these narratives.
By combining different types of sources, it becomes possible to clarify this tension between the image they themselves wanted to show and the image that emerges in other sources. It is a tension that arises between different sources but also between different intentions in the authorship.
Paper short abstract:
Martiska Karjalainen was a Karelian runosinger, Elias Lönnrot’s informant and a thief. An analysis of his autobiographical song uses various ethnographic sources and official documents to unveil how “tricstering”, mythology and poetics make sense of and validate controversial patterns of agency.
Paper long abstract:
The paper re-tells the story of Martiska Karjalainen (1768-1840), a Karelian runosinger and one of Elias Lönnrot’s key-informants for the Kalevala.The posteriority knowns him as a notorius criminal drawn to excessive alcohol use – a singer whose songs were plenty but too disorganized to be used in the national epic. An analysis of Martiska’s autobiographical song uses various ethnographic and oral history sources as well as official documents to unveil an intricate poetics of validating cultural patterns of agency, “tricstering” and mythologizing historical realities. Rather than a fragmented, boastful and intoxicated chronicle on a life of reindeer thieving, court sessions and imprisonment, the song is a poetically coherent and mythologically resonant testimony. It situates the Viena Karelian practice of reindeer thieving and the choices made by one individual in multiple social contexts as well as on the arena of state politics, as the case of Martiska’s court case was made a precedent for the settlement border disputes and the conflict-ridden relations between Russia and its autonomous grandduchy, Finland. Detailed textual analysis, multiple contextualization, data triangulation and recentering marginalized performances offers new insights on the life of poetry and the lives of the poem-makers in the early nineteenth century and beyond.