Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines the Finno-Karelian tradition of healing incantations through the prism of corporeality. What can we say about the bodies and their performance based on the archival written record?

Paper Abstract:

Incantations were commonly used to heal wounds and cure diseases throughout the 19th century in North Karelia. A great number of incantatory texts have been collected by folklorists, due to the importance of mythological figures and motives in them. Many of those have later been archived and published by the Finnish Literature Society.

The prime concern of the healing incantatory practice was the well-being of the human body. A ritual specialist, the tietäjä, would communicate with non-human agents and interact with their patient during the healing ritual. Most of the collected texts are representations of its verbal part, and information about the physical performance is relatively scarce.

In this paper, I propose a methodological exploration of the corporeality of archived incantations. Relying on phenomenology of the body and linguistic theories of enunciation, I examine the traces left by the bodily performance in written texts. I am especially interested in the ways the incantator comments on their own performance, actions, and gestures, and how their voice is constructed in the texts. My analysis is based on a corpus of around 400 healing incantations collected in the parish of Ilomantsi between 1816 and 1939 and published in the SKVR corpus.