Tuija Saarinen
Sickness, Hygienic Education and Village Practice:
Tuberculosis in the Life of a Cobbler

The understanding of sickness and health depends on culture and age and is a part of our worldview. Sickness and health are thus in a central position in human life. Tuberculosis, for example, was formerly a common disease in Finland. Before the Second World War there did not exist medicines that cured people of tuberculosis. The first concord of antibiotics was received in 1947. Vaccinations against tuberculosis started on a mass scale in the following year.

The article focuses on one person, who suffered from tuberculosis. He was a village cobbler called Juho Mäkäräinen (1892–1967). The study draws on a variety of sources including the villagers' interviews, Juho Mäkäräinen's autobiography and letters. All sources deal with the writers', their relatives' or neighbours' health. Life in a village society was concentrated on health and its care. Very much attention was focused on hygienic education, as well. Because infectious diseases like tuberculosis were feared, most people tried to hide their disease in order not to be ostracised. Thus tuberculosis and its influence on the course of human life is a part of our common history of everyday life.

Outi Fingerroos
Places of Memory in the Red Vyborg of 1918

The Karelian Isthmus belonged to Finland until 1939. The period between the World War I and the World War II was a time of rapid contextual change and ended the difficulties caused by modernisation aggravated in the year 1918. Divine-like authorities were posed in a new light and the Civil War of 1918 set the whole nation before direct aggression and «Red» revolutionism. The »Whites» won the war at the expense of the »Reds». Young nation (Finland gained independence in 1917) was compelled to define its relation to Reds and Whites – Whites were chosen. Also the Lutheran church was officially against Red anarchy and bolshevism.

The situation around the reminiscence concerning the Red victims of the Civil War 1918 in Finland is complicated. The question of the problem of meaning and publicity plays a central role in the logic concerning the ritual performance and memory of the Civil War 1918 in the city of Vyborg. There is public and private silence and even prohibition to be connected with deaths, memory and places. It has continued until these days. At the same time the official history was put on a favourable form and there were clear limits for the official narratives. The victory of the «Whites» was interpreted as a victory for the independence of the Finnish nation. The history of the «Reds» became a national anomaly: forgotten and invisible.

The atmosphere of concealing continued until the 1960s, when especially Finnish literature took pioneer steps towards the more open minded interpretation of history. On the other hand, the inheritance of concealing still exists – especially when it comes to oral history.

Riina Haanpää
From a Fratricide to a Family Memory

When a research deals with researcher's own family history, a significant challenge is presented: «What is the significance of the familiarity the researcher has for their object of research? What is the researcher's role and how their own memories influence their work?» In this article I explore the possibilities my own family history offers by observing a fratricide that took place in my family, as well as the narrations it has created.

My grandfather's brother Veikko, while drunk, stabbed and killed his brother Väinö in Kauhajoki in 1974. In my family, the event has been handled in various ways, and due to its uncommonness it has also been the theme of many stories which unveil our family's history and present lives as well as the relationships inside the family. I have chosen three interviewees as an object of closer inspection.

With these interviews, I explore Väinö's death and the attitudes towards it: «How has the killing been interpreted inside the family and what has it meant to the
family?» I also examine the reactions towards the death in the society and the South-Ostrobothnian culture. Because the examined manslaughter is also inside my family viewed as an unusual death, it is interesting to raise conversation on divergent deaths in general. I will thusly also observe the point of views presented in the interviews and examine them in correlation with the researches done on divergent death.

Helena Ruotsala
Does Sense of Place Still Exist?

In this article my aim is to discuss place, locality and their role and changed significance in the ethnological studies. I argue that although the meaning and role of place have been changed, place still is an important concept in ethnology. Researches are now paying more attention to the changed nature of the concept, e.g. for the multivocality of places. The anthropological literature on space and place forms my theoretical framework, with which I study some empiric cases from my familiar environment, from Finnish Lapland and from Kola Peninsula.

‘Place', in my examples the sieidi of Taatsi, Lake Seidjavr, the Pallas fells or the tourist centre Levi, can have a unique reality for each inhabitant and visitor. While the meanings may be shared with others, the views of the place are often likely to be competing, and contested in practice. According to Margaret Rodman (2004: 207), researchers should empower place by returning control over meanings of place to the rightful producers, and empower their own analysis of place by attending to the multiplicity of local voices found about place.

Kristin Kuutma
The Making of Sami Ethnography:
Contested Authorities and Negotiated Representations

This contribution analyzes the interplay of ethnographic and poetic agendas, the negotiation of synergetic or conflicting objectives in the production and editing of a seminal representation of the Sámi, Muitalus sámiid birra. My main focus is on the collaborative effort of the publication process, to investigate the emergence and negotiation of representational authority, of cultural poetics, of social and cultural critique, in order to defy the preconception of a passive informant of a cultural experience. The Sámi narrator Johan Turi is discussed, instead, as an active agent in providing a voice to the Sámi people in the collaborative process of ethnography writing. My approach is interdisciplinary, being inspired by different inquiries in anthropology and cultural history, while adding a subjective interpretation in discerning the production of a multifaceted ethnographic representation, both by the cultural insider and the inquisitive outsider.

Karina Lukin
Nenets Folklore in Russian:
The Movement of Culture in Forms and Languages

In this methodological article the question of authenticity of folklore material is discussed. The article deals mainly with the research history of Nenets folklore studies and examines critically two of its paradigms, namely the so-called Finno-Ugric paradigm and the Soviet studies. It is argued that in these paradigms there existed biases that prevented the students to study certain kind of folklore material. The biases were related to the language and the form of the material: due to these biases folklore performed not in Nenets and not in forms defined traditional were left outside collections and research. Furthermore, it is shown that Russian speech and narratives embedded in speech are part of Nenets everyday communication and thus also material worth studying and collecting. Instead of the criticised paradigms the Nenets discourse is examined within the notions of communication centered studies that have gained attention since the 1980s.

Elo-Hanna Seljamaa
Remarks on the Historic-geographic Method and Structuralism in Folklore Studies: the Puzzle of Chain Letters

Structuralism in folklore studies was in many ways a reaction against the previous scholarship and the historic-geographic method in particular. In this paper the relationship between the two is analysed through a comparison between Walter Anderson's historic-geographic and Alan Dundes' structuralist treatment of chain letters. Anderson published his article on types of Estonian chain letters in 1937, whereas Dundes dealt with chain letters repeatedly in the 1960–70s. Drawing on T. Kuhn's concept of paradigm as a «way of seeing the world», the article examines the concept of folklore and folklore studies proposed by either scholar in his discussion of chain letters and seeks to interpret his reasons for taking interest in such a phenomenon. It argues that rather than being incommensurable, the historic-geographic method and structuralism as represented by Anderson and Dundes share an understanding of folklore as a collection of classifiable single items
characterised by simultaneous variation and stability.

Ergo-Hart Västrik
Votian Village Feasts in the Context of Russian Orthodoxy

This article considers Votian village feasts that evidently belong to the sphere of Christian folk religion. Village feasts are analysed as expressions of collective activity in pre-industrial rural society that enclosed certain religious, social and economic functions. This phenomenon of celebrating collectively certain days of church calendar, which included ritual activities in village chapels or other local sanctuaries, common meals and heavy drinking as well singing and dancing in the course of 3–4 days, was a part of common Russian Orthodox tradition shared by several ethnic groups throughout North-West Russia in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Despite the fact that this phenomenon was familiar to the wider community of Russian Orthodox believers, there were obviously certain local characteristics and variation typical to Votian tradition. However, Votain village feasts are studied in the article in the context of Russian Orthodoxy, without favouring assumed pre-Christian elements of the Finno-Ugric religions.