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- Convenors:
-
Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch
(Society of Swedish Literature in Finland)
Susanne Nylund Skog (Institute for Language and Folklore)
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- Stream:
- Archives
- Location:
- KWZ 2.601
- Start time:
- 29 March, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The archive is often seen as a home of national cultural heritage and as a dwelling place for tradition material. How have different policies and archive practices shaped the collections and the work of the archivists throughout the ages?
Long Abstract:
The purpose of a tradition archive is to collect and keep records of popular expressions and everyday life. However, this may be done in a myriad of different ways and with different agendas. For example, while the collection policy in the early 20th century tended to focus on documenting homesteads and farm tools, there was also growing interest also in other aspects of domestic life such as cooking and gardening. Later on, documentations were extended to include e.g. urban life. How have different policies and archive practices shaped the collections and the work of the archivists throughout the ages? The archive is often seen as a home of national cultural heritage and as a dwelling place for tradition material. The political aspects circumscribing both the collection and dissemination of cultural heritage have always been looming large in the cultural archive. What are the present day challenges? And what layers of policies, practices, institutional and social structures do we need to be aware of in working with older archive material?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
In our presentation, we look firstly the policy of collecting folklore in the Estonian Folklore Archives and secondly, a collection of children’s games from the 1930s. How do the guidelines create the content of the archive’s collections and if and how texts reflect children’s attitude and voice?
Paper long abstract:
Any given folklore archive is a home to its collections. Our presentation's background is the policy of folklore collecting on Estonian territory since the 19th century and within the Estonian Folklore Archives since 1927. Folklore collecting in Estonia is historically connected to creating and keeping national identity. After the WWII, the Soviet Estonian folkloristics adapted to Marxist reforms, but the main principles were still retrospective and folklore helped to oppose Soviet ideology.
We do not quite agree with criticism saying that text-centred collecting has been 'tearing folklore away from its original environment' and producing 'dead material', making folklore archive a home to texts that live their own life and do not represent their initial social and textual reality. Today of course, the sense of tradition is more wholesome, not simply an assemblage of orally reproduced or archived texts. We observe how the archive has created the vision and expectation of folklore and directed its collecting accordingly.
Our case study is the collection of children's games in the Estonian Folklore Archives in the 1930s. Considered a marginalised folklore in some measure, games that children play connect to their homes and identities. Nationalist myths and romanticised allusions influenced the collecting strategy. The guideline stressed home circle as the main collecting target, leading to the expectation of personal experience attached to the texts. Instead, impersonal attitude and orientation to past prevailed. The case study examines whose vision and voice the 1930s games reflect.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will examine home as reflected in the archival collection of interviews conducted with Canadian immigrants of British, French, German and Ukrainian ancestry in 2003-2004, which documented everyday life on the Canadian prairies until 1939.
Paper long abstract:
Many Europeans came to Canada at the beginning of the 20th century to settle the vast prairies, to make a new home and build a new life. A hundred years later, the Local Culture & Diversity on the Prairies project aimed to document everyday life on the prairies until 1939, as early immigrants remembered it from first hand experiences. In 2003-2004, a team of folklorists and historians conducted interviews with immigrants of British, French, German and Ukrainian ancestry, which resulted in hundreds of hours of audio recordings that are now housed at the Ukrainian Folklore Archives at the University of Alberta. This presentation will examine how and what information about dwelling was collected during this project. I will look at training and instructional materials for fieldworkers, different methods used for interviewing, questionnaires, as well as processing instructions and, finally, at the actual interviews, and try to understand: on one hand, what information about dwellings the research team was interested to collect, and on the other, what was remembered by early immigrants. How respondents remembered a house where they grew up, how it looked and felt to them, types of dwellings first settlers lived in, resemblance to houses in the Old Country, how and when the house would become a home - these are questions that will be explored. I will try to identify patterns and see the narrative about pioneers' home on the Canadian prairies as it is formed by this archival material.
Paper short abstract:
The paper will concentrate on details of interiors and exteriors of dwellings characterized by folklorists in field diaries in the 1950ies. What kind of ideological and aesthetical reasons were behind the appraising aspects? How did the judgements affect the folklorist-informant relationships?
Paper long abstract:
In Estonian folkloristics, the 1950ies there climacteric in the research policy. Rapid changes took place in the subjects, forms and methods of the folkloristic fieldwork. Life-style of informants changed in these years as well: in rural areas, there was a total transition from single farms to collective farming and, in response to the latter, massive urbanisation among youth.
Still, folkloristic fieldwork in countryside continued increasingly these years. Besides professional folklorists, numerous students of Estonian philology took part in fieldtrips. As a complementary to written and sound recorded interviews, almost all fieldworkers wrote fieldwork diaries, which documented biographical data about informants, economic-statistical and cultural-administrative data about collective farms etc. Ethnographic or informal notes about everyday life of informants were quite infrequent and heterogeneous.
The paper will outline main types of dwelling characterized in the fieldwork diaries - dwellings of informants and lodgings of folklorists during fieldwork; in addition to administrative buildings of collective farms, schools, village centres etc. Close attention will be payed on details of interiors or exteriors described; which of them were considered positively, which negatively? The paper will try to answer the fundamental question: what kind of ideological and aesthetical reasons were behind the appraising aspects of described dwellings, and even more remarkably, behind unwritten. How did that kind of domestic conflicts or, vice versa, positive judgements affected the folklorist-informant relationships in the course of the interviews?
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relationships between places and persons in a folklore collection. The paper conclude that the theoretical and ideological premises for the collection demand that a person’s customs and traditions, in order to be understood as such, need a geographical place of origin.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between places and persons in Karl Gösta Gilstring´s folklore collection. Karl Gösta Gilstring´s collection at the Department of Dialectology and Folklore Research in Uppsala (DFU), consists of more than 8000 original letters (DFU 40265), as well as many recordings, from which Gilstring has made 70 000 records, divided in approximately hundred parish collections and organized according to content (ULMA 34838).
In this paper, the focus is on how the informants when contributing to the collection, also came to be connected to places, such as a small village or part of a parish, and how they thereby came to represent traditions and customs in a specific geographical area. Who could represent the places of interest for the archive and Gilstring? How were the connections between persons and places established? What were the effect of this process, both for the persons and for the places?
In the paper, I analyze the theoretical and ideological premises for the collection, and conclude that the naturalized connection between home and authenticity, demand that customs and traditions, in order to be considered as such, need a geographical place of origin, a home.
Paper short abstract:
Studying how archival records such as texts, drawings and photographs were created complicates the picture of dwellings in the past. Exploring the ethnological gaze of field-workers in the first decades of the 20th century sheds new light on both rural homesteads and past practices of ethnologists.
Paper long abstract:
In the first decades of the 20th Century, ethnologist stormed the countrysides of European countries in the hope of "saving" a peasant culture considered to be on the brink of extinction. The aim was not only to preserve the memory of something vanishing but also to produce material for future research. These young fieldworkers created drawings, descriptions and photographs under the instructions and guidance of older colleagues; adhering to strict rules of that time of scientific objectivity and impartiality.
Today, it is obvious that the perceived scientific objectivity that guided the etnological fieldworkers was an ideal rather than reality. The fieldworkers had to make choices in the field of what to document and how. One criteria stood out: what was considered old enough, and therefore authentic, was documented. Other reasons can also be found. The people who did the field work in Sweden were mostly from bourgeois families and thus brought up in quite different physical and mental milieu in comparison to the rural homesteads they documented. The ideal bourgeoise home at that time consisted of dual spheres; a stage where status was performed publicly, and as a contrast a parallel private sphere were no visitors were let in. The rural homesteads did not have this duality, here the home as a whole was public. What kind of expectations did those fieldworkers bring with them to the field when confronted with rural homesteads so far away from their own experiencies? How did their own preconceptions about homesteads influence their selections?
Paper short abstract:
The renowned scholar SD Goitein studied the people of Al Gades, a Jewish village in Yemen. The ethnographic material he collected was kept in his archive. 60 years later, this archive and the way it was created allow us to ask questions regarding cultural property, archival memory and performance.
Paper long abstract:
In the Early 1950's the renowned scholar S.D. Goitein launched a wide ethnographic survey among the Jewish-Yemenite community which had arrived in Israel. Through his survey, Goitein wanted to document a "typical" rural Jewish settlement in Yemen. He chose the community of Al Gades - a small village in southern Yemen, whose inhabitants migrated to Israel in 1950. Goitein engaged an 'indigenous' research assistant, Yussif Sayyani, in order to interview these Jews in their own language - Yemenite Arabic. Sayyani left hundreds of hand written reports, containing a detailed description of the village, its history, houses, domestic and social life, as well as the folktales, proverbs and songs of its people.
These collected materials - texts, pictures and sounds - are stored in Jerusalem as a separate section of Goitein's Archive, where they remained, uncatalogued and mostly unpublished for 60 years. During that time, the culture of the people of Al Gades underwent dramatic transformation. Therefore, the decedents of Goitein's informants approach the archive as a source of knowledge about the culture of their own ancestors. In my discussion of this archive, I will address questions of cultural property (Bendix 2007), and questions regarding the role of the archive as a guardian of memory and performance (Taylor 2003).
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the ambiguous role, dilemmas and opportunities of an archival researcher when planning and designing the streams in and out of archives.
Paper long abstract:
Archives are never mere collections of documents, there are always purposes, intentions for creating and using these collections, the ideologies and public interests behind these intentions, and last but not least the real persons, researchers and archivists who implement, factualize the intentions, having power to control and direct streams in and out of archives. The paper focuses on the ambiguous role, dilemmas and opportunities of an archival researcher in fulfilling the public task, responding the requirements of a funder, and performing his or her personal agenda. When planning and designing the collection and intake of materials, organizing the materials, deciding what is relevant and what is not, and mediating these materials back to the public or to the international research community, researcher has to find its way how to negotiate and reconcile different aims, interests, ideologies and expectations. The paper seeks to analyze such instances of the reconciliations in different historical periods of Estonian folkloristics.
Paper short abstract:
One’s domiciliary environment may serve well for collecting folklore. What have been folklorists’ advantages and challenges doing fieldwork at home and recording their relatives’ folklore repertoire? The historical study is based on the materials of the Archives of Latvian Folklore, ILFA, UL.
Paper long abstract:
Recording the folklore repertoire of the closest family members may be challenging, still, it may be a great success as well. Since early 1920s up to these days, not all but quite a number of Latvian folklorists have been fascinated by their own childhood homes as the places for collecting folklore. Repeatedly, they have done fieldwork in the familiar domiciliary environments assigning their parents and other relatives the roles of folklore narrators. The paper seeks to analyze the history of shaping those collections as well as reflections and attitudes folklorists themselves have had towards collecting folklore at home.
In the paper, a special attention will be paid to Anna Bērzkalne's (1891-1956) manuscript, LFK [49]. A considerable amount of folklore texts she recorded and included into her collection at the Archives of Latvian Folklore were brought to Riga from her parents' home in Vidzeme, "Čiglas". With romantic pathos, Anna Bērzkalne, the founder of the Archives, considered "Čiglas" a paradise-like area for folklore collecting. Bērzkalne's main storyteller and singer of folksongs was her mother Ede Bērzkalne (1862-1951). The folklorist not only recorded fully her repertoire but also carried out a comparative study of her mother's songs and the fundamental publication of Latvian folksongs, "Latvju dainas" (1894-1956, Vol. 1-6).
The research is based on the materials of the Archives of Latvian Folklore, ILFA, UL.