Suomen Antropologi Volume 32, 4/2007
Special Issue: Memory and Narration— Oral history research in the Northern European context
In cooperation with the Finnish Literature Society, Finnish Oral History Network and Institute for Cultural Research, University of Helsinki
Articles
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Introduction: Memory and Narration— Interdisciplinary discussions of oral history methodology
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2007 32(4): 4-10
Abstract
Oral history research, micro-history and women’s studies have all deepened our understanding of the past by demonstrating many innovative ways of formulating new questions on familiar subjects. The Italian microhistorian Giovanni Levi has stressed the fact that all social action—including narration—seems to result from continual negotiation and manipulation, the choices and decisions in the face of an individual’s normative reality, which despite its apparently endless selection of options, does not offer much scope for personal interpretation or freedom (Levi 1991: 107). Oral history has become an important part of the humanities and social sciences in Finland since the mid 1990s. Interdisciplinary initiative has come from folklore studies, history (especially history of mentalities and micro-history), gender studies, literature, anthropology, ethnology, comparative religion, psychology, sociology and linguistics. Several doctoral dissertations based on oral history have been published and defended since 2000. The first interdisciplinary collection of articles on oral history methodology was published in 2006. Oral history has also been strong in Estonia and Latvia where many archival and research projects have been organized during the last decades. The symposium ‘Memory and Narration—Oral History Research in the Northern European Context’ (15−17 November 2006, University of Helsinki) was an important marker in the co-operation of researchers oriented to oral history in Northern Europe, and a stimulus for further projects. The symposium was organized by the Finnish Literature Society, the Department of Folklore Studies (University of Helsinki) and the Finnish Oral History Network (FOHN). The idea of the symposium originated in the meetings of the Nordic-Baltic network ‘Oral History and Biographies as resources for Local and Cross-cultural Studies’. The purpose was to stimulate methodological discussion in oral history research. During three intensive days 47 papers were presented in 15 sessions on various themes: conflicts, survival and silence; experience and narration; identity and narration; oral and literary narration; social and collective memory; memories of work and environment; life-stories and genre; everyday life and popular culture; popular historiography; fieldwork methodology.
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Reflections on the Practice of Oral History: Retrieving what we can from an earlier critique
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2007 32(4): 11-23.
Abstract
Oral history research as an academic discipline emerged in the 1940s and 1950s; this article explores its development and continuing challenges. During its first decades, the main focus was on the production of documents and new information, especially on the lives of people previously ignored by historians. a new perspective emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, when the oral history interview was reconceptualized as a dialogically constructed text, rather than a factual document. The interview is also discussed as a public and performative event, and as a blending and negotiation of individual and collective remembering. The author emphasizes the complex and creative relationship between history and collective memory. oral history is defined as a conversational narrative created by the interaction of the interviewer and the interviewee and determined by linguistic, social and ideological structures. Finally, the contemporary challenges of oral history are discussed. The practice of oral history is moving to the stage of internet and digitalization, while oral historians are participating in the actual debate on colonization and “social death”.
Keywords collective memory, conversational narrative, cultural construction, dialogic interview, intersubjectivity, oral history research
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Narrative and Reality
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2007 32(4): 24-33.
Abstract
The article explores the narrative construction of reality in life stories. First, the context of the research is introduced and second, the concept of reality is discussed. Third, narrative construction of one life story is analysed, turning to the relationship between performance and content. As researchers, we have no access to the reality of past events, but only to memories, stories and documents. In oral history, both factual information and the meanings attributed to the past by the people who have lived through it are of equal importance, and both are constructed through emotional, involved, figurative production by the authors of life stories.
Keywords life story, narrative, oral history, reality
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“To Be Honest I Don ́t Think She Has Much to Say...”: Gender and authority in memories of the Second World War in Denmark and Norway
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2007 32(4): 34-44.
Abstract
This article is based on the research project ‘traditions of historical consciousness’ in which three generations of Danish and Norwegian families were interviewed about their memories of the second World War. The interplay between private (family) memories and public (national) narratives of the past plays a crucial role here. The starting point of analysis is the fact that gender plays an important role in structuring the ‘national basic narrative’ of the German occupation of Denmark and Norway which has emerged in these countries since 1945. This gendered narrative offers very different possibilities of identification for men and women in the culture of memory. Based on the theoretical assumption that knowledge about the past is both regulated and reproduced by power relations, the authors investigate which kinds of topics and stories are told by, and expected from, men and women in order to grant them authority as speakers. Finally, it will be discussed how the younger generations ‘make use’ of these stories in order to think about values and morality. Gendered patterns of memory are contested and change over time.
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After-effects of War and the Narrative: Depictions of war in Estonian and Finnish life histories in the twenty-first century
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2007 32(4): 45-58.
Abstract
The article compares descriptions of the period of the second World War in the Estonian and Finnish life histories narrated in the early twenty-first century: how the Estonian and Finnish narrators describe the boundaries of wartime and peace time, and what made people talk of the war and what made them not to talk about it. While Finnish story-tellers in their narratives specify the moment of the beginning and the end of the war, expressing it through the description of weather, sounds, his/her activity at the moment and similar motifs, the Estonian narratives reveal that the war is not an independent historical event in the popular approach to history—it is understood as a part of soviet colonization. ‘The continuation of war’ in estonia (due to the establishment of soviet power and its duration after the war) also kept alive the tradition of storytelling about the war. in Finland, however, people focused on peacetime problems after the war.
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“Many a Time Blood Has Flowed in Northern Finskoga”:
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 32(4) WINTER 2007, pp. 59-73.
Abstract
Tales about alleged persecutions of Finnish slash and burn cultivators who migrated to central sweden between 1580 and 1640—the so-called ‘Forest Finns’ of Sweden, specifically those settling in the Värmland area—were popularised in the common understanding of ‘Forest Finnish’ history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The aim of this paper is to examine the process of popular history production in order to understand this phenomenon. What meanings did these tales convey to their narrators? Drawing on the theoretical findings of oral history research I will argue that while these tales may initially have been based on historical facts, they are less interesting in terms of offering reliable historical evidence than because they are psychologically true for the narrators. I suggest that ever since the tale-telling tradition became established among Värmland Finns during the nineteenth century—a period that coincided with their assimilation into the Swedish population—these tales have offered a metaphorical way for an ethnic minority to express its feelings of frustration in face of the death of their culture and language.
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Oral History as an Articulated Meaning in Soviet Karelia ́s Literature
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 32(4) WINTER 2007, pp. 74-84.
Abstract
The paper studies prose literature which was published in the Finnish language in Soviet Karelia from the 1950s to the 1980s and the discussions of its documentary value. The term oral history is seen here as a cultural and political value, which is either given to, or denied from, a text in literary critiques. In Soviet Karelia, the role of fiction in representing locally significant history reflected negotiations in power dynamics, and must be understood in historical and ideological contexts. immediately after the second World War, or the great patriotic War 1939−1945 as it was also called in the Soviet Union, the locally significant articulations of history were repressed, as the construc tion of a unified soviet culture, society and history were of primary interest. From the late 1960s onwards, and especially since the 1980s, the literature’s meaning as a representation of locally significant history has gradually become more public and finally the dominating one during the post-Soviet period. at the same time the written artistic works are read as sources and preservers of (once) oral history.
Keywords articulation theory, Finnish prose, local history, oral history, Soviet Karelia