Paper short abstract:

Presentation looks at the ways Estonian ethnologists used to cope with the Soviet rule, at their strategies and practices of accommodation, yet maintaining earlier nationalist traditions of their discipline.

Paper long abstract:

How did Estonian ethnologists cope with the Soviet rule? What kind of strategies and practices did they use to adapt and survive, yet maintaining nationalist traditions of their discipline? The presentation based mainly on academic writings, fieldwork diaries and memories, seeks to put ethnologists´ activities into larger contexts of regional cultural history and historiography.

During the Soviet period (1944-1991), Estonian ethnology, formerly called ethnography and considered a branch of the Estonian studies, was subjected to the Soviet ethnography and its Marxist-Leninist doctrine. The Soviets took ethnography quite seriously in Stalin era and energetically imposed their ideological controls. However, when the hard-line rule relaxed in late 1950s, Estonian ethnography started to flow back into the old channel of Estonian studies.

Leading Soviet ethnographers promoted studying contemporary everyday life was since late 1940s. The results had to support state policies like collectivization of agriculture, industrialisation and related social change, but also Soviet nationalities policy. Estonian ethnographers did not like it much, as it was related to ideological pressure. Some attempts were made but the results remained scant. Instead, Estonian ethnographers preferred to limit oneself to traditional peasant culture of Estonians, but also their linguistic kinsmen in Russia. They cited works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, but managed to remain quite conservative in terms of their research topics and methods. There were niches in Soviet ethnography making it possible. Soviet Estonian ethnography was shaped in a kind of hidden conflict between the Soviet regime and the nationally minded Estonian civil society.

Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to raise methodological and ethical question connected to the history of Czech ethnology in 1960s: How to approach projects and personalities, which introduced anthropology-oriented research into local environment but were stimulated and controlled by communist secret services.

Paper long abstract:

Theory, methodology and research focus of Czech ethnology from late 1950s to 1970s was significantly affected by a group of scholars, which successfully adopted sociological and anthropological theories of "Western" origin. Academic debates and concrete research projects carried out especially in various countries of Africa and Latin America introduced an "up to date" science to the local environments, which were mostly based on outdated nationalistic principles originating in the 19th Century. It is thus no wonder that long after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, this orientation in Czech ethnology/anthropology was regarded as a positive deviation in the gloomy history of the discipline in the second half of the 20th century. However, recently discovered archive sources show that almost all of the projects were from the very beginning stimulated and strongly controlled by Czechoslovak or even Soviet secret services. The main objective of the contemporary research was the gain of political and economic influence in post-colonial countries and exportation of communist ideology. This fact will be demonstrated on examples of several projects and biographies of "pioneers of Czech anthropology", who were co-workers or even agents of Czechoslovak secret services and most likely also KGB or GRU. The main goal of the paper, however, is to raise more general methodological and ethical questions important for the history of ethnology in Central and Eastern Europe: How to approach and rate projects and personalities, which introduced extremely important anthropology-oriented research into backwarded local ethnography but at the same time served the oppressive regime.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on folklore outside the academe, especially on folklore "performed" by the state institutions, this paper re-evaluates folklore's trajectories in Turkey after 1950s—after the establishment and the subsequent closing of an autonomous Department of Folklore at the Ankara University.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnological disciplines, especially folklore, experienced great challenges after the II. World War in Turkey. While Turkey's involvement in the war was very brief, Turkey was not void of the racial/nationalist discourses that prevailed in Europe. Pertev Naili Boratav's attempt to academize folklore at the Ankara University had a relatively short academic journey—ending in 1947-48 because of a certain nationalist view that could not tolerate folklore done "otherwise." In the years to follow, state's influence on folklore had ebb and flow, but never faded away. The post-Boratav period was academically dormant, yet, folklore outside the academe had a lively scene, even creating a ubiquitous "State Folklore" whereby the Turkish State acted as the main agent, site, and source of collecting, storing, and disseminating folklore. The Turkish Folklore Organization (est. 1964), was renamed as National Folklore Research in 1965, aimed forming a nation-wide folklore archive. State-supported folklore journals propagated the idea of "national folklore." Amateur folklorists "performed" folklore through folk-dance groups that were founded inside and outside universities. They translated folklore classics and published original books on folklore. Since 1970s, folklore re-lived another political turn, becoming an issue of debate between right-wing nationalist and left-wing revolutionary groups. Although important, these activities could not meet the impetus that was created in the academe, because of lacking proper methodology and theory. Yet, they certainly deserve a critical re-assessment, as they write an important chapter in the disciplinary identity and history of folklore in Turkey.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation deals with the history of the so-called "UNESCO nomenclature for fields of sciences and technology", its classification of the anthropological disciplines, the role of UNESCO and the impact of the classification in the academic praxis as well as for the disciplinary identity.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1960s, UNESCO started a program on the classification of scientific fields. The aim was to create a system for statistical proposes that allows to compare academia in an international context. In the 1970s and 1980s different versions of the classification was presented. In the 1990s the program was abandoned. In spite of missing updates, UNESCO-codes are still used in the Spanish academia for the administration of several academic processes.

Our lecture will firstly present a short resume of the history of the UNESCO nomenclature, detail its classification of the anthropological disciplines and describe the disciplinary view of the different involved parts.

In the second part we will reflect on the role of UNESCO and analyze the impact of the classification on current academic practice at Spanish universities and the disciplinary identity.

The third part of the lecture is dedicated to a proposal which suggests to restart the program and restructure the classification of anthropological disciplines within the UNESCO-codes.

Paper short abstract:

After World War II, Latvian scholars in exile in Europe and around the world continued Latvian folklore studies. This paper analyses the establishment of a new scholarly infrastructure: cooperating interstate mechanisms, functioning of exile academic organizations, and publishing Latvian folklore.

Paper long abstract:

As a result of changes during World War II, many Latvians who were educated professionals in the field of folklore studies were exiled. This was a fundamental shift in the disciplinary history of Latvian folkloristics which had been flowering in 1920s and 30s. Using approaches learned during the interwar period, the exiled scholars continued teaching others (e.g. starting the Baltic University and teaching in the displaced persons camps in Germany after 1945). In addition, they educated themselves to be open to the folklore practices of countries they now inhabited, and they also worked to enter the academic environment of their new home countries. They formed networks of cooperation and continued researching Latvian folklore in their new homelands, including Sweden, Germany, the United States of America and Canada. Communication between the exiled folklorists and those in Soviet Latvia was limited, especially during the initial period of the occupation; however, news on important events in the field was still able to be circulated.

This paper seeks to analyse the establishment of a scholarly infrastructure for Latvian folkloristics in exile. This included fostering international cooperation mechanisms within the Latvian exile community, founding new academic organizations, and publishing exile editions of primary sources. Thus, they were able to restore the availability of folklore texts which had been previously collected, published, studied and left behind the Iron Curtain.

Paper short abstract:

The paradigmatic shifts in Slovenian ethnology in the 1960s and 1970s were based on epistemological and methodological arguments that rejected "aversion to theory" and insisted that research agendas should reflect the transformative powers inherent to phenomena of (folk) culture and everyday life.

Paper long abstract:

Under the new political system after 1945, sporadic reflections on the academic and social position of ethnology and folklore studies anticipated the quest for a new disciplinary identity. However, this repositioning did not immediately distance itself from the positivist canon of defining the discipline as folk culture research. The investiture of the designation ethnology instead of ethnography/Volkskunde was at first a reflection of approaching the concept of "European ethnology" in the 1950s and substantiated by radical paradigmatic changes in the 1960s and 1970s.

These changes were proliferated in methodological discussions often beset by conflict and with an explicit epistemological stance: they reflected "historicity"; that is, the sociohistorical foundations of both the outdated concept of folk culture and the new concept of "way of life". Reconceptualized and new topics, as well as hitherto overlooked social groups, were introduced into research. A new genetic-structural orientation competing with the cultural-historical and philological model was based on two arguments: on the indispensability of theoretical and methodological reflections, and on the conviction that the dynamic inherent to culture and everyday life is rooted in changing time, spatial (local), and social conditions. Thus, on the one hand, it dealt with the "aversion to theory" and, on the other, furthered the need to study the multiplicity of socio-cultural phenomena and processes that the former ethnography did not or was unable to see (e.g., worker's culture and urban culture). Both aspects were tied to the international circulation of knowledge.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the paradigmatic role of the historic-geographic method still in the 1960s folklore studies in Finland. What kind of political and intellectual reasons there were behind the variable use of the text-critical approach and what kind of contemporary consequences this has had.

Paper long abstract:

My paper explores the historical mechanisms on why the historic-geographic method had a longer-term impact of folklore studies in Finland than elsewhere. The name of the discipline, "studies of folk-poems", was in use at both the University of Helsinki (until 1989) and the Swedish-speaking Åbo Akademi University (until 1973). Kaarle Krohn's text-critical approach remained strong in the discipline's orientation on archived oral lore texts and their specific variations. Moreover, folklore studies and ethnology had been two separate academic disciplines since the 1920s where the former concentrated on orally expressed cultural forms and the latter on the aspects of folklife and customs. Although new theories, such as the structural analysis of the folklore genres or sociopsychological understanding of folklore made a breakthrough in the end of the 1960s, majority of the works in folklore studies continued to focus on the archived materials that were considered ethno-historically important, i.e. Finnish- or Swedish-speaking oral traditions, which oftentimes were elevated into a national dignity. In my paper, I will ask how the aftermath of the World War II, which left Finland independent but with high war reparations to the Soviet Union, influenced on the folklore studies' decreased international orientation, especially toward the West. Another consequence of the WWII, which had an impact on disciplinary history, was the politically charged atmosphere of the Finnish society in which communists as well as the then president orchestrated not only the politics itself, but cultural and academic life, too. How was this reflected in Finnish folklore scholarship?

Paper short abstract:

In the early Soviet Estonia, the folkloristic education was reformed to fit the Soviet system. Practical work often showed the students that there were discrepancies between their skills, expectations, and folk culture. What where the new tracks to follow by the folklorists-to-be?

Paper long abstract:

Since 1919, folkloristics was taught at the University of Tartu. After the World War Two, the university was reformed. In the Soviet years, the students were expected to go through compulsory courses in a certain order instead of picking their own courses like before. In 1947, the Chair of Folklore of the Tartu State University was merged with the Department of Literature, but the possibility to specialize on folkloristics remained. However, the previous teaching staff was had fled the land and the ways of teaching folklore were changing due to the ideological constraints.

On the basis of the course plans and protocols of department meetings, I will show what theories and methods were used in educating future folklorists. Students conducted compulsory fieldwork: their field notes provide interesting information about the kind of folklore they were hoping to document. Although they were acquainted with Soviet folklore, such was often hard to find and some students were more interested in what was called "older folklore" back then. I will also follow the careers of some researchers who were educated in the early Soviet Estonia: what were their research questions and topics in the beginning of their careers.

Folkloristic education is the key to knowledge production in the field and a way to give a new direction to the discipline. In the early Soviet Estonia, the official statements and research practices often diverged and the early-career researchers were searching their own ways through the ideological slogans, the previous folklore collections, innovation and tradition.

Paper short abstract:

The appointment of Walter Hävernick, former scientific student of Otto Lauffer, as director of the Hamburg institute in 1946 seemed to indicate continuity. The lecture will show how Hävernick broke new ground in his self-image as a European ethnographer and in his research on urban anthropology .

Paper long abstract:

The new beginning after 1945 and the reorientation of the discipline, as well as the positioning of the representatives at the German-speaking folklore institutes, was not as uniform as it has been perceived so far. Hence, the lecture will focus on the work at the Hamburg Institut für Deutsche Altertums- und Volkskunde, where the Lauffer student Walter Hävernick succeeded him as professor at the university and as director of the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte. What initially looked like a simple continuity of themes and a very traditional, specific understanding of the subject, which was shaped by the museum's work and strongly oriented towards material culture, becomes much more differentiated when one takes a closer look at both the archival sources and the contemporary publications of the protagonists. Hävernick, however, broke new ground, and the lecture will work out what the innovations in the field of urban ethnography, in the connection between historical and ethnographic research, sociology-oriented methods and the use of technology looked like. But the lecture will also show how Hävernick arrived at conservative results with innovative methods.

Paper short abstract:

My paper aims at analysing the impact of ideologies and cultural policies on the research and exhibitions projects, launched and completed around the Archive of Folklore and the Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania, in Cluj, Romania, after 1945.

Paper long abstract:

My paper aims at analyzing the impact of ideologies and cultural policies on the research and exhibitions projects, launched and completed around the Archive of Folklore and the Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania, in Cluj, Romania. I use these case studies, addressing how and why the policies of the focused on institutions, the exhibition projects and research plans had been altered under the pressure of centralized decisions in difficult historical, political and ideological contexts. Particularly, I aim at approaching the researchers' and museographers' coping and protesting strategies, configured and developed in the totalitarian period, in Romania (during the Cold War).

Radical changes of these perspectives had been produced in the research policies beginning with the 50-ies , I aim to approach the meanings and the follow-ups of the imposed "turn' and to analyze its impact on research and exhibitions tackling them also in the second half of the 60-ies, when another shift is produced. I intend to address how and why certain changes of cultural policies are produced, and to see the ways the researchers and museographers responded to them and to the related challenges of turbulent times: do they adopt strategies of coping or protesting, are they dissidents, do they internalize the new research horizons: if so- why? All these are questions permanently formulated in my paper. I also intend to update the discussion and to look at the nowadays perspectives and policies of the focused on institutions.