Paper Short Abstract:

While Folklore Studies position similar to many European nations, in Finland the discipline achieved strong enough a position to make the country global centre of folklore research. I explore the diverging paths of Folklore Studies in the two locations.

Paper Abstract:

The metadiscourse of Folklore Studies in Europe has focused on seeing the field’s origins in Johann Gottfried von Herder’s (1744–1803) view of folklore as the expression and icon of the ‘folk,’ which led to the use of folklore in Romanticist-Nationalist nation-building projects. The concept of ‘folklore’ is therefore usually viewed as a monolithic entity in popular and scientific discourse. However, this kind of view ignores the fact that folklore, as a concept, has been discursively constructed in environments that differ in geographical and socio-historical factors.

One of the problems that entail the view of ‘monolithic folklore’ is that folklore is either seen as something that comes into being separately from its socio-historical environment and the discourses circulating in society, or it is alternatively viewed as something that has uniform roots of origin, which are then applied to completely different geographical and political areas. For example, in ‘nations without states,’ such as Finland, where the National-Romanticist currents of 19th-century Europe awakened desires to form independent nation-states, folklore was used in the building of imagined communities. At the same time, the situation was decidedly different in centers of colonial power, such as England, where folklore was seen as something that belonged to the peoples of the past who had not achieved ‘civilized’ status. I will explore these differences and examine the discourses behind the diverging paths in two environments.