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.