Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the value and ownership of oral tradition in times of political conflict and modernization. The case of the “last male bard” in Karelia crystallizes the dilemmas inherent in the shaping of local poetic corpora into items of national heritage.

Paper long abstract:

From the early nineteen-twenties to the early nineteen-forties, the Viena Karelian people on the Finnish-Russian border experienced a series of dramatic historical developments including military campaigns, a civil war, a revolution, the gulag, two occupations by alien forces, and exile. This area, known for its oral poetry in the Kalevala-meter, became an arena for a battle over cultural heritage. Using materials ranging from autobiographical poems to nationalistic propaganda, this paper discusses the processes and tropes of defining the value and ownership of oral tradition. The key figure of the paper, an acclaimed ritual specialist or tietäjä, was hailed as the "last male bard" in Karelia. His collaboration with Finnish nationalistic artists, scholars, and military officers made him a persona non grata in the Soviet Union. It also crystallizes several dilemmas in folklore scholarship and the shaping of poetic corpora into objectified cultural heritage. How does the impact of literacy affect the alleged authenticity of oral poetry in local and elite contexts and how did the elite treat texts tainted by literary influences? Why did the last bard hand over his repertoire for a foreign audience yet refuse to transmit his tradition at home? How did the performer create a holistic representation of his poems and what was the role of such a representation in the local community troubled by political and cultural turmoil? And lastly, who was the last bard known with many names, and why was he recruited as a double agent by Finnish and Soviet authorities alike?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the place of newly composed "folk" songs in socialist Bulgaria. Created initially by ordinary citizens, shaped in form by Party editors, and published as new national "folk" songs, various layers of "authenticity" characterize these texts and the contexts in which they appear.

Paper long abstract:

This paper problematizes the position of newly composed "folk" songs in the national imagination of socialist Bulgaria. These works appear to have been created initially by ordinary socialist citizens, but, at the same time, their textual content was shaped and their curation was carefully managed by political elites. Published in books describing the daily lives of Partisan soldiers and memoirs of youth brigade workers, and catalogued alongside pre-industrial texts in volumes of national "folk songs," these texts were implicitly presented as a new part of Bulgaria's national folklore canon.

But while these songs are typically disregarded by contemporary scholars as worthless propaganda, I find particular value in their potential to illuminate notions of what makes something "folkloric." First of all, by exploring the ostensible process of collection of these songs along with the casting of the soldiers and laborers who supposedly sang them as the nations' new "folk," we can see how socialist governments undertook a Herderian process of constructing a new national identity using folklore. Furthermore, I show how the language of these songs was used to reify the concept of a linguistic "folklore" register, one that combined common motifs from older South Slavic lyrical works with uniquely Bulgarian features. Finally, I demonstrate how the position of these songs in socialist Bulgaria points to the need for a nuanced exploration of the concept of "authenticity." Informed by contemporary theories surrounding this term, I show how these songs nonetheless became "authentic" reflections of Bulgarian socialist identity.

Paper short abstract:

The paper presents in what way the canon of Hungarian folktale collections has been formed retrospectively, applying inconsistent sets of authenticity criteria

Paper long abstract:

The study of folktales as a legitimate subject matter of scholarly investigation got institutionalised at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries in Hungary. Claiming to be recognized as an academic discipline, representatives of folklore studies demonstrated the authenticity of the texts they investigated with creating the idol of the non-interfering collector who, as a sort of machine, simply records folklore texts that are produced by the appropriately selected and then disappearing informants. Relying on case studies investigating the network of folklore collectors in Transylvania, Romania, in the second half of the 19th century in a multi-ethnic and culturally diversified context, the paper presents along what criteria this folklore collection became canonised as the topmost representative collection of Hungarian folk culture, what cultural and intellectual background, training and objectives of the middle-class collectors (parishioners, teachers) had, to what extent they were native or outsider members of local communities, how heterogeneous ideas they held about the ideal folklore text they were looking for from the male peasant informants. Later, in the 20th century, attaching the label of proper/improper collector to participants of this collection without due micro- philological research, certain texts and collectors became marginalised, omitted and silenced in folklore studies, while the heterogeneity of the concepts of folklore text was erased and became invisible.

Paper short abstract:

The paper studies the transformation of vernacular belief narratives into a literary genre and into national heritage. It argues that the construction of legend as a hybrid genre between orality and literacy was born in a dialogue between creative writers, folklorists and their informants.

Paper long abstract:

Philological construction of folktales and legends as distinct folk narrative genres started in early 19th century, when the Grimm brothers outlined their basic features, contrasting poetic and historical modalities of storytelling. Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803-1882) was among the first authors in Estonia to follow this distinction in his "Ancient Tales of the Estonian Folk" (1860; 1866). The massive project of transforming vernacular belief narratives into tales of fiction was started and continued with the large-scale folklore collecting, organised by Jakob Hurt (1839-1907) and Matthias Johann Eisen (1857-1934). The joint project of constructing legend (muistend) as a literary genre and utopian reflection of the pre-Christian Estonia was carried out with the help of hundreds of local folklore collectors. The philological track that was pursued by later folklorists and the Marxist approaches in Soviet folkloristics contributed towards the transformation of vernacular belief narratives into a literary genre. Legends were conceptualised as survivals of the past, as fragments of a larger mythology that had been lost. Diachronically oriented literary framework shaped the views about the generic authenticity, which were introduced by the 19th century writers and folklorized. Later philologically oriented folkloristics challenged the vernacular ideas about authenticity and replaced them with more rigorous standards, which can be seen as an attempt to escape the literary model of the genre and substitute it with the ideal type of unaffected orality.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ideological and personal backgrounds in the process of creation of Nenets shamanistic heritage. It aims at showing that the motives and perspectives of our informants are inherent in the production of research materials and that these can be interpreted from the materials archived.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the ideological and personal backgrounds of one moment in the process of creation of Nenets religious, shamanistic heritage. It aims at showing that the motives, perspectives and viewpoints of our informants are inherent in the production of field work materials and that these can be interpreted from the materials archived.

In summer 1928 a Tundra Nenets, Matvei Ivanovič Yadnye visited Finland for two months. He was invited by Finno-Ugric Society that had been asking the Institute of Northern Peoples in St. Petersburg to send informants for linguistic research since 1927. Initially, the Society asked for a representative of Nenets, Tungus (Even) and a Yenisei Ostyak (Ket), and after some scientific trade, three indigenous Northerners arrived to Helsinki. These men were photographed and "anthropologically metered" and also blood samples were taken, after which linguists worked with them.

Matvei Yadnye was sent to Western Finland to work with Toivo Lehtisalo who had done extensive field work among the speakers of Tundra and Forest Nenets before the October Revolution in Russia. While their work had linguistic ends, Lehtisalo also recorded shamanistic ritual singing that he later also published. In my paper, I shall discuss the nature of the co-operation between Yadnye and Lehtisalo and ask how they conceived it. While Lehtisalo was interested in language and mythology as something that we might today call heritage, Yadnye's motives and aims are not so explicit. What kind of heritage building was he engaging in singing esoteric shamanistic ritual songs?

Paper short abstract:

My paper will analyse two fieldworks among Estonian Swedes (1924, 1940), set in rather disparate political situations. I am interested in how ethnographers saw their work and their interaction with people and how their research subjects conceptualized this.

Paper long abstract:

Besides collecting material artefacts ethnographers wished to concentrate on oral notes at the very beginning of the discipline. Although they relied on typological and cartographical methods which regarded culture as material entity, researchers met people during their fieldworks and were interested in theirs reminisces of bygone "folk culture". Herein I am interested in how ethnographers saw their work and their interaction with people living in the countryside and how people conceptualized this work (as much as it is possible to study from archival materials).

In my paper I would like to examine collector-informant interactions in the 1920s-30s Estonian ethnology (then named `rahvateadus`, folk science or ethnography). I will concentrate on two different fieldworks, set in rather disparate political situations, although both carried out among Coastal Swedes.

Student of ethnography, Ferdinand Linnus, later director of Estonian National Museum, was sent to Ruhnu (Runö) in 1924 by the museum to collect artefacts and oral traditions among people who had lived centuries in this small remote island and preserved their heritage. Gustav Ränk, then professor of ethnography at the University of Tartu, visited Pakri islands (Rågöarna) in 1940 in connection with forced migration of the inhabitants to Sweden by the Soviet powers.

The Coastal Swedes were accustomed of being an object of study to tradition researchers, primarily from Sweden. It is interesting to examine how ethnographers integrated their heritage into Estonian folk culture, and how different and in what aspects these fieldworks were for the researchers as well as for the informants.

Paper short abstract:

The relationship between two very different ethnographers of the early 20th century: Jelica Belović-Bernadzikowska (1870-1945) and F. S. Krauss (1859-1938) reveals the uses of sexuality and gender in the ethnography of the Southern Slavs.

Paper long abstract:

The paper discusses the collaboration between Jelica Belović-Bernadzikowsa (1870-1945) and F.S. Krauss as collectors of both folk songs and textiles after 1910.

Belović was a noted, Croatian-born, amateur ethnographer and journalist who worked in the world of museums and exhibitionary culture in Sarajevo and Zagreb. She helped to establish the ethnographic (textile) collections at Museums in both cities and she also worked to collect and document folk songs. After 1910, she developed a close relationship with the ethnographer Friedrich Salomon Krauss and contributed to his controversial journal Anthropophytia between 1912-1915.

Using archival material in Los Angeles and Sarajevo, this paper presents new information about the collaboration of Belović and Krauss 1910-1927 to light. Memoirs and letters between the two document not only Belović's romantic nationalism and nostalgic approach to collection but also the ways in which she grew to appropriate gender and sexuality as a way of challenging the intellectual and cultural hegemony of Austria in the region.

Paper short abstract:

Notions of ideal folklore genres were strong among the Finnish field collectors still in the 1980s. The paper discusses the clash between the informants and field collectors defining what is worth and desirable to narrate within the collector-informant interaction.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the folklore scholarship and field collection methods as a complex mix of historical continuity and change in encounters between researchers and informants. The legacy of the historic-geographic method, "the Finnish method", for the researchers working with folklore was long evident among the folklore scholarship. Although from the 1960s on, folklore scholars turned their attention to individuals using folklore in their daily activities, informants preferring to narrate their life stories and oral history were not encouraged, and sometimes even forbidden, by the scholars. For example, in Finland as late as in the 1980s, many of the folklore collections were conducted by searching particular, "authentic" genres. The most common method of collecting was for an interviewer to ask a member of the "folk" to mention or recite from memory all the "pure" oral lore or tale types, such as memorates and charms in versed form. The Finnish method was based on the idea of folklore serving as a mirror of a common human or European tradition instead of individual informants as active users of these texts. In this paper, I will examine the views of one Finnish female informant, born in 1902, who was interviewed by the researcher of the Finnish Literature Society in 1984 in order to record her belief legends and narrative folklore. However, the informant was not interested in telling legends and other formulaic tales but rather, her own life story, which from the researcher's side, represented "wrong kind of tradition".