Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj
Experience and Interpretation: Emotion as Revealed in Narration

I discuss in this article some key narratives of women I interviewed in Ingria 1992–1993. The narratives of those women were about dramatic stages of their lives during the World War II. The main themes of the life stories were forced transfers and deportation suffered by the Ingrian Finns. I examine with some examples how various paralinguistic devices, such as speech tempo, emotional outbursts or silence, were tied in with the verbalisation of experiences. The three factors I discuss here are woven into the narratives of the women I interviewed. The first factor is «impassioned narrating», which shows how a narrator reveals how she is reliving the event, she told about. The second factor is weeping and we may ask how the tears affect the narrator. The third factor is silence and reticence. In retrospect I have thought about the therapeutic effect of speaking, forgetting and remaining silent.

Art Leete
Notes about Possessing a Heritage in a Komi Village

In this article I try to analyse some aspects of heritage management in the Turya village of the Republic of Komi, Russia. I attempt to demonstrate how the local museum curator, Olga Shlopova, treats her fairy tales, museum exposition and collection of local heritage. My aim is to interpret some dialogue situations
between local village people, scholars and officials which indicate how people manage differences in understanding of heritage administration. I presume that local people's ideas and methods of dealing with cultural phenomena and institutions may obtain their own specific value in the course of culture processes. The question is, how flexible can official cultural specialists be in adapting and reflecting these, sometimes, slightly unconventional approaches. I suppose that an ethical approach helps a researcher to distance him or herself from possible prejudices or, at least, to be more conscious about stereotypes or pre-settled patterns of thinking. Unconditional recognition of an indigenous way of understanding local phenomena also helps a researcher to reach a more culture-specific model of interpretation.

Andreas Kalkun
A Woman Voice in an Epic: Tracing Gendered Motifs in Anne Vabarna's Peko

In the article the gendered motifs found in Anne Vabarna's Seto epic Peko are analysed. Besides the narrative telling of the life of the male hero, the motives regarding eating, refusing to eat or offering food, and the aspect of the female body or its control deserve to be noticed. These scenes do not communicate the main plot, they are often related to minor characters of the epic and slow down the narrative, but at the same time they clearly carry artistic purpose and meaning. I consider these motifs, present in the liminal parts of the epic, to be the dominant symbols of the epic where the author's feminine world is being exposed. Observing these motifs of Peko in the context of Seto religious worldview, the life of Anne Vabarna and the social position of Seto women, the symbols become eloquent and informative.

Mairi Kaasik
The Category of Time in Fairy Tales: Searching for Folk Calendar Time in the Estonian Fairy Tale Corpus

The article examines how folk calendar holidays are represented in Estonian fairy tales. It introduces some views presented in folklore studies about the concept of time in fairy tales and finds parallels with them in the Estonian context. The analysis relies on the digital corpus of Estonian fairy tales (5400 variants), created from the texts found in the Estonian Folklore Archives by the Fairy Tale Project of the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore, University of Tartu. Folk calendar holidays occur in Estonian fairy tales relatively seldom; most often these are holidays that occupy a significant place in the Estonian folk calendar (Christmas, St. John's Day, Easter, St. George's Day). Calendar holidays are notably mentioned more often in tale types which remain on the borderline between the fairy tale and the legend or the fairy tale and the religious tale. In Estonian fairy tales, calendar holidays are used on three levels of meaning: (1) the holiday is organically associated with the tale type; it has an essential role in the plot of the tale; (2) to a certain extent, the holiday could be replaced by another holiday having an analogous meaning; (3) the holiday forms an unimportant or occasional addition to the tale.

Irma-Riitta Järvinen
Perspectives to the Relations between the Estonian Folklore Archives and the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society

The origin of the relations between Finnish and Estonian folklorists goes far back to the days of Elias Lönnrot and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald in the first half of the 19th century. In this article, however, I shall concentrate on those decades since the 1930s, when the two archives, the Estonian Folklore Archives and the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society have existed as institutions. I shall highlight some events, joint projects, historical turning points, and pay attention to individuals, who have had more influence on developing these relations. There were periods of time when the contacts were not possible between the institutions, but still, the continuity of relations existed between individuals. My point of view is micro-historical, as the study of micro-history is interested on the small scale level on the individual, in opposition to macro-history that concentrates on the great changes brought along by political events, on the history of «great men and women», as well as on the history of institutions. In the history of the folklore archives in Finland and Estonia, we can recognise both of those levels and pay attention to the way how they are intertwined.

Ave Tupits
Data Collecting and Research of Folk Medicine in Estonia During the Soviet Era

Folk medicine in Estonia has been studied more thoroughly within the last 30 years. Still, the respective data has always been on the folklorists' work-list, when publishing questionnaires or going out on fieldwork. It has to be taken into consideration that the times were hard for folkloristics both during the Soviet occupation in 1940–1941 and the German occupation in 1941–1944. Also the new political situation had its demands on scholarly research throughout the second Soviet occupation in the years 1945–1991. Nevertheless, by far the biggest collection campaign of Estonian folk medicine took place in 1959. Focused interest of folklorists in this topic grew significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, the last decades of the Soviet era, when official access to folk healers was allowed and New Age phenomena spread. The article is an abridged version of a chapter in an upcoming doctoral dissertation analysing the collecting and research of folk medicine in Estonia in the 20th century.

Piret Paal
Patient's Attitudes Towards the Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Finland: an Ethnomedical Insight Based on Cancer Narratives

As in many other countries, the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century marked times of modernisation in Finland. Rapid changes also took place in the health care system at this time. Until the 1920s most health concerns were addressed using the ethnomedical practices. New legislation gave the dominant position in health care to the Western (evidence based) health care system. According to the official record, the majority of ethnomedical treatments were declared marginal and generally useless and the state began to support the construction of hospitals. The slow pace of development in social health care held up the treatments given by legally approved medical practitioners. All of which supported a deliberate shift towards the modernisation of the health care system leading to primary health concerns being solved in local health care centres by doctors trained according to the conventions of evidence based medicine. Unlike many other countries, where the representatives of conventional medicine also consider complementary and alternative medicine as a part of their treatment, the use of non-evidence based medicine is extremely unusual in Finland. However, patients with long-term illnesses are eager to try all available cures in their desire to become well and this leads to a situation in which complementary treatments are used in a somewhat secretive manner. The article follows the discussion concerning the use of complementary and alternative medicine in cancer narratives in order to point out its significance as a part of a self-negotiation process characteristic to the patients with long-term illnesses.