Paper short abstract:

Starting in 1804, first attempts to record material and social aspects of everyday life took place in the duchy of Styria. Tracking these attempts, not only the different forms of texts produced can be determined, but also writers and editors who disseminated first results to a wider readership.

Paper long abstract:

Under the influence of similar French and Swiss enterprises, in 1804 the conceptualisation of a big questioning campaign regarding economic, social and cultural conditions in the duchy of Styria were initiated by Archduke John. To a large degree, the written outcomes are available in the Styrian state archive. Even if the main goal was to enhance economic and social conditions, over time the cultural aspects gained greater importance. The quality and quantity of the answers given to the voluminous questionnaires ranged from nearly non-existent to a comprehensive monograph. Especially the poor answers caused a second campaign in order to enhance the results of the enterprise. Writers and painters were involved in the production and the dissemination of outcomes.

The interests of contemporaneous authors very much shifted to romantic aspects and widely neglected social and economic ones. These, on the other hand, were central to the descriptions of rural areas, published in the journal of the agrarian society, whose publications can be seen as an early example of a medium aiming especially at the rural population.

Over time, distinct parts of the material of the questioning campaign and the connected enterprises where taken into account for scientific as well as cultural and political purposes and under new epistemological contexts. As an example, the so-called Knaffl-manuscript can be seen, which was edited in the 1920s.

Paper short abstract:

In my presentation, I will show how rural correspondents´ letters from mid 19th century press can bring insights from rural life and modernization of Finland as seen by the peasant themselves. The analysis for tracking changes of culture is based on cognitive anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

Until recently, rural correspondents letters from mid 19th century press have not been widely used as a source material by scholars of history and cultural studies. Since digitization of old newspapers by the National library of Finland this has changed. The newspapers offer a unique source material for 19th century rural life and modernization of Finland as seen by the peasants themselves - or at least by those who were literate and able to participate in the public sphere.

Using cases from my on-going dissertation, I will show how rural correspondents´ letters can bring interesting insights from 19th century rural life for researchers of writing culture and history from below. Rural correspondents´ letters dealt with such everyday topics as weather, health conditions and farming, but also national education projects such as founding of schools or libraries. They also made remarks about behavior that was considered uncivilized or obscene such as drinking, adultery or superstition. Some writers even questioned the need of reading and writing skills among lower classes and mocked peasants who tried to imitate the upper estates by naming them "half-gentlemen" or "half-civilized".

I will also present methodological tools from cognitive anthropology that can be useful for tracking changes of culture from above and exploring mechanisms of marginalization. Using categories (prototypes, stereotypes and ideals) as a basic unit of analysis, we can track both dominant cultural models for (ideal) behaviour and new alternative models, which challenged, adapted or replaced older models.

Paper short abstract:

The focus of this paper is on the life narratives of the members of Jakob Hurt's (1857-1934) folklore collecting network. I am going to look at the different devices they use to overcome the feeling of marginality and unworthiness, while trying to fit themselves into modern world.

Paper long abstract:

19th century was an era of modernization in Estonia. One part of this modernization was interest in the nation's past, which brought about widespread folklore collecting campaigns in the last decade of the century. As well as being sources for folklore studies, these materials also serve as excellent examples of vernacular literacy. This angle is supported by the fact that quite a large part of the collectors was poorly educated and had little experience in writing for a public cause. Participating in folklore collecting campaigns was a rare possibility for them to experiment with written word, to show their attitudes toward modernization.

In this paper I am going to focus on one special layer in these materials: life narratives of the members of Jakob Hurt's (1857-1934) folklore collecting network. These texts were sent to Hurt as answers to his call to get material for the book about the history of collecting campaigns. As only small part of the collectors (about 60 out of 1500) answered to his plea, the book did not come into being. But even this small sample of life-narratives is a fascinating representation of ordinary people speaking about their lives in public context. These are stories of people who are strongly affected by modernization, but who are not sure if they really belong in this new world. We can see different devices they use to overcome the feeling of marginality and unworthiness, but also concern about finding the right words and generic models.

Paper short abstract:

In my presentation I try to analyse how and for what reasons and latent folklore concepts were Tiboldi, a 19th century folklore collector marginalized. The name of Tiboldi in the folklore literature of the mid 20th century comes up as the synonym for a bad collector.

Paper long abstract:

In my presentation I deal with István Tiboldi, a 19th century folklore collector, and with the process how researchers from different ages tried to construct a good or bad collector out of him. István Tiboldi operated as a Unitarian teacher in Transylvania, and in the 1850's he joined the collector network led (mostly by correspondence) by the Unitarian pastor of Kolozsvár, later bishop, János Kriza. As the result of the research only one book was published (Vadrózsák [Wild Roses], 1863), the collected texts mostly remained in manuscript. The name of Tiboldi in the folklore literature of the mid 20th century comes up as the synonym for a bad collector.

In my presentation I try to analyse how and for what reasons and latent folklore concepts were Tiboldi marginalized. Many things contributed to his rejection: his usage of other, earlier folklore collections (which were also thought to be unauthentic and not folkish enough by the 20th century folkloristic public opinion), his choice of informants (with preconceptions about the good informant and the good storyteller), and how his collected and submitted tale texts met the expectations of the leader of the collection, Kriza (and then those of the 20th century folklorists).

Paper short abstract:

The paper seeks to reveal women's gendered experiences recorded and shared retrospectively using the diaries written before almost hundred years. Women's diaries as sources of autobiography are accommodating women's stories and women's strategies for writing the self.

Paper long abstract:

Women's diaries as sources of autobiography are accommodating women's stories and women's strategies for writing the self. The paper is a case study of two diaries written before almost hundred years and found only this year. Both diaries are written by young Latvian women (Emīlija Vecvagare and Margarete Grosvalde) starting from 1917 and 1919, time of establishing an independent state of Latvia as well as other Baltic countries. Great importance makes the fact that both women were working women which was not a typical case for average women at that time and they both holds a position of secretary in politically important institutions (Interim Government Office and Latvian Embassy in London). If we use retrospective reassesment of those texts they provide a rich insight which is two-leveled, the first level is a narrative of an eyewitness of different political, historical and diplomatic events, the second - intimate level showing a personal life of a young woman. Covering almost the same time period we can follow the alarming events in Latvian domestic and foreign policy, government changes. Both had written a lot about personal feelings, relationship and life events in their diaries, we are silent observers of love stories, fashion news, etc., for which Catherine Delafield proposes a term 'hidden interiority' of a woman diary as a form of self-representation and performance and challenge to recover her self-worth. Finally, the physical appearance and preservation of the diary as integral issues in the process of its production as well as contemporary analyses.

Paper short abstract:

The paper offers a discussion of the stage-book of Shalom Aleichem's story "The Treasure", directed in Tel-Aviv by Aleksey Diky (1928). An examination of director's records in the margin of the text, allows to study the process of turning the marginal notes into meaningful art language.

Paper long abstract:

A director's stage-book comprises the text of the play, written by a playwright, and the director's notes in the margins. Usually this is a unique document that reveals both the process of creating the performance and the competitive relationships between the verbal and performative elements. Whereas the play is presented on the stage, the words become the behaviour, and the characteristics of this behaviour relate not only to art issues, but also to social and cultural phenomena.

The paper offers a discussion of the stage-book of "The Treasure", a controversial Hebrew performance staged in 1928 in Tel-Aviv by a Russian director, Aleksey Diky. The play was based on a funny and poetic story written by the prominent Jewish writer, Shalom Aleichem. However, its performative language was highly grotesque, and part of the public saw in the behaviour of the characters a cruel parody of the Jewish world. Diky offered laughter as an instrument for debunking the mythopoetic world created by Shalom Aleichem. The performance was accepted as a masterpiece of theatre art, while some voices accused Diky of an anti-Semitic approach.

An examination of Diky's stage-book, his notes and drawings in the margin of the text, allows us not only to reveal his implicit artistic intentions towards Shalom Aleichem's text, but also to study the process of turning the marginal notes into meaningful art language. The historical perspective of the discussed stage-book, comprising the issues of immigration, collective memory and the Second World War, stresses its importance.

Paper short abstract:

Romanian old texts with their prefaces and marginal commentaries are examined carefully to see what is there hidden from the intolerant society. What is authors' reason(s) for such a choice is something we need to find out.

Paper long abstract:

Europe is now a melting pot of cultures due to globalization. I like to think that we are now more open-minded than centuries ago so we are now ready to adapt to diversity and change of different kinds. But let's have a close look to what happened in the past; and for that, we have texts as witnesses. Reading between the lines, we can draw some conclusions on how willing people were to tolerate (if not to accept) others'opinions, beliefs (either religious, cultural or scientific) and aspirations. In the marginal texts or in the prefaces there are some things hidden from the intolerant's eyes that we can now discover after careful analyses. I shall examine some Romanian texts written by "marginal" communities to see the truth beneath.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation discusses the shame of domestic violence and poverty experienced in Finnish homes after the WWII. For decades this subject has been kept silent and left in the margins of history writing and public remembering.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation discusses the shame of domestic violence and poverty experienced in Finnish homes after the WWII. For decades this subject has been kept silent and left in the margins of history writing and public remembering. However, only recently the difficult war and post-war memories of women and children have reached publicity. The memories have opened up new perspectives to long-lasting consequences of war and cultural trauma. The traumatic experiences that the Finnish men faced at the front often showed their presence in acts of violence towards the other family members during the post-war era. Domestic violence was so shameful that it was not revealed outside home. Furthermore, material poverty caused by the war made the lives of families even more difficult. Typically, many children were not able to educate themselves because they were obliged to work in the farms of their families already at the early age.

Material of this research consists of personal written narratives about shame, domestic violence and poverty in post-war Finland. The narratives were written in 2015-2016 mostly by women and men who were children in the post-war era. The main research questions are: How has shame been addressed in families during the post-war Finland? How the difficult memories of domestic violence, poverty and shame are narrated about today? The analysis is based on the narrative research methods and concepts of shame and cultural trauma.

Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates how the formal marginality of pioneer female welfare workers of the early statehood of Israel later turned into subversive oral personal narratives about past institutional policies.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I analyze archive interviews of two women who belong to a group that so far did not receive much scholarly attention, namely, educated women who immigrated to Israel from Morocco in the 1950s, the first decade of the state, and who worked in welfare professions although they had not acquired professional training beforehand but rather learned the profession while working.

These women have a unique and dual positionality: on the one hand they represented the Welfare Ministry, and on the other hand they belonged to the same ethnic group that most of their patients belonged to. Thus, their narratives express critique toward bureaucratical policies at that time. Their critical point of view motivated them to become agents of change and to found various local welfare institutions, even though they forever remained "anonymous founders" who never received due recognition of their projects.

In the presentation I analyze the women's employment of two sub-genres that appeared frequently in their oral-history narratives: constructed dialogue (or direct speech) and work incidents, to show how these shorter stories add to the women's self-justification and even glorification of their real-time actions and perceptions.

In retrospect, the ethics of the two women can be seen as the roots of today's feminist approaches to the profession of social work and may illustrate the claim that women's marginality can lead them to innovations and creative action.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation reflects on vernacular literacy in Tibetan language among ritual experts (Bonpo) of the Baima people. It examines how monopolized accessibility to ritual texts grant Bonpo religious and social authority within the frame of "marginal Tibetaness".

Paper long abstract:

Baima is a group of ten thousands people living in western China that are officially classified as Tibetan. As it is the case for other minorities in the context of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands (Gros 2014), their identification is controversial: Tibetan scholars advocate for the "Tibetaness" of Baima (Upton 2000), whereas Baima themselves argue for their recognition as a separate ethnic group.

Baima speak a non-literary Tibeto-Burman language, which in its oral form is unintellegible to the surrounding Tibetan communities (Kirchova 2005). However, apotropaic, good-fortune, divination, and healing rituals performed by the local ritual experts (Bonpo) involve the reading and chanting of a corpus of texts that are written in literary Tibetan language.

Bonpo master their reading skills as an integral part of learning about specific rituals: texts are not independent from the performance but are taught and memorized as phonetic codes whose meaning remains largely obscure to Bonpo. The reading itself owns the evocative power of the sound of chanting and reciting, in such a way that the phonetic level empowers the ritual actions and overpowers the semantic dimension.

Based on fieldwork carried in summer 2018 in K. village, this presentation aims to reflect on the use of vernacular literacy in Tibetan language among ritual experts in a Baima community. It further argues that in the absence of formal education in Tibetan language and institutional religious establishment, the monopolized accessibility to ritual texts grants Bonpo religious and social authority within the frame of "marginal Tibetaness".