Paper short abstract:

Archived folklore about vernacular healing emphasises magical healing methods over more ordinary ones. Such biases cause challenges in studying mental worlds of the folklore informants. The paper proposes that cognitive science can provide methodological tools for overcoming these challenges.

Paper long abstract:

In the Folklore Archive of the Finnish Literature Society, archived instructions for healing skin burns in domestic ways include, e.g., incantations, complicated ointments and symbolic acts but rarely just putting something cold on the burn. Why?

In this paper, I consider the problems and challenges in studying archived folklore materials that are not collected by a contemporary researcher who studies them in the 2020s. How can a researcher reach the thoughts, ideas and the mental world of the informants behind folklore texts and through the work of collectors?

I demonstrate the biases of folklore materials with a case study on healing instructions for skin burns. Putting something cold on a burn is an effective and simple treatment that surely has been known by the rural people in the late 19th century Finland. Nevertheless, this treatment method is almost completely lacking from the rural healing instructions in the folklore archive. The lack of cold could, of course, be considered as evidence that these people did not use this method in healing burns. However, more likely the collectors have considered this treatment as too ordinary to report, and thus the folklore materials emphasise magical and extraordinary healing methods.

I suggest that although there are biases in folklore materials, there are ways to study the mental worlds of the informants behind the texts. I present examples how cognitive science and studies on intuitive thinking and memory processes can provide useful tools for this kind of analysis.