Colonial Aspects of Finnish-Namibian Relations, 1870-1990

Cultural Change, Endurance and Resistance

This edited collection re-examines the long history of Finnish-Namibian relations through the lens of colonialism without colonies as well as anti-colonialism. The book argues that although Finland never acquired colonies, Namibia was once treated in...

The Grand Duchy of Finland

From Princely Power to National Statehood

Histories of Finland within the Swedish Kingdom and Russian Empire often treat the country's status as a grand duchy as a mere curiosity. This book challenges this trivialization by illuminating the grand duchy's crucial role in shaping how historical actors understood political structures...

Expressions and Impressions

Personal and Communal Aspects of Traditional Singing

Singing is a universal mode of human communication, integral to cultural and social life and serving a wide range of culture-specific functions. This scholarly volume examines traditional singing as both a cultural phenomenon and an embodied vocal practice,...

Confessions and Confidences

Academic and Cultural History Revisited in Letters and Other Documents of Life

This anthology draws readers into the epistolary worlds of mainly 20th-century academic and cultural figures in the Baltic region, especially Finland. At the time of writing, many of these individuals, while pursuing vocations in folklore research, linguistics,...

The Irish Folklore Commission 1935-1970

History, ideology, methodology

Between 1935 and 1970 the Irish Folklore Commission (Coimisiún Béaloideasa Éireann), under-funded and at great personal cost to its staff, assembled one of the world's largest folklore collections. The cultural, linguistic, political and ideological factors...

Fashion Meets Socialism

Fashion industry in the Soviet Union after the Second World War

The Soviet Union was not renowned for its fashionable clothing. However, after the World War II the Soviet Government opened several parallel organizations of fashion design with fashion houses and ateliers all over the country...

Mysterious Minds

The Making of Private and Collective Consciousness in Marja-Liisa Vartio's Novels

Marja-Liisa Vartio (1924-1966) is considered one of the foremost innovators of consciousness representation in Finnish post-war modernism. Mysterious Minds, the first study to examine this subject in depth, explores the portrayal of fictional minds in her novels...

Fibula, Fabula, Fact

The Viking Age in Finland

Were there Vikings in Finland? Fibula, Fabula, Fact - The Viking Age in Finland is intended to provide essential foundations for approaching the Viking Age in Finland. The volume consists of a general introduction followed by nineteen chapters and a closing discussion...

Her Own Worth

Negotiations of Subjectivity in the Life Narrative of a Female Labourer

This book opens up a window on the life of a female labourer who lived and worked in a small ironworks village in central Finland. Her life touches upon many of the core aspects of 20th-century social change in Finland: increasing educational opportunities,...

Memories of My Town

The Identities of Town Dwellers and their Places in Three Finnish Towns

The volume Memories of my Town is an exploration into how town dwellers experience their environment in a complicated way .As people in urban milieus relate themselves to the environment, this takes place on many levels, where especially the time level becomes problematic...

Tradition through Modernity

Postmodernism and the Nation-State in Folklore Scholarship

In their study of social practices deemed traditional, scholars tend to use the concept and idea of tradition as an element of meaning in the practices under investigation. But just whose meaning is it? Is it a meaning generated by those who study tradition...

Divine Rulers in a Secular State

In present-day Africa chiefs interact fluently with modern states, international organizations, and business corporations, and traditional chieftaincy is perceived essentially as a secular institution...

Literacy Skills as Local Intangible Capital

The History of a Rural Lending Library c. 1860 - 1920

This book studies the "grey area" of the success story of rural lending libraries in the Nordic countries through the activities of people's libraries in one area of Central Finland, in the parish of Kivijärvi and its neighbouring parishes...

Novels, Histories, Novel Nations

Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia

Since its emergence along with Western nationalism, historical fiction has been one of the key forms for constructing national histories - and it has not lost its importance even today. This volume highlights the cultural work historical fiction performed in Finland and Estonia ca...

Dynamic Finland

The Political System and the Welfare State

Finland celebrated its 85th year of independence in 2002. It is one of the thirteen countries of the world that have preserved their democracy uninterrupted since the First World War. Despite its modest origins and difficult wartime experiences, this...

Living Lament

Explorations in Shifting Ideologies

This edited volume opens new approaches to lament research by analysing the intersections between ideologies and lament traditions, providing advancements in methodologies and the knowledge of domains that emerge at this intersection...

The Enemy Within

Homicide and Control in Eastern Finland in the Final Years of Swedish Rule 1748-1808

This work explores the quantitative and qualitative development of homicide in eastern Finland in the second half of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth. The area studied comprised northern Savo and northern Karelia in eastern Finland...

Metaliterary Layers in Finnish Literature

In international research, metafictionality and other metaliterary features have typically been regarded as phenomena related to postmodernist fiction, in particular - Metaliterary Layers in Finnish Literature, however, discusses the metalayers of Finnish...

Talk in Interaction

Comparative Dimensions

Talk in interaction - Comparative dimensions is a collection of current conversation analytical work on interactional practices. How do speakers correct the errors made by other speakers? How is disappointment expressed in interaction? How are disputes...

White Field, Black Seeds

Nordic Literacy Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century

White field, black seeds - who can sow? Although the riddle from which this these words are taken comes from oral tradition, it refers to the ability to write, a skill which in most Nordic countries was not regarded as necessary for everyone...

Kalevipoeg Studies

The Creation and Reception of an Epic

This is the first English-language monograph on the poem Kalevipoeg (1857-1861), composed by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803-1882). The poem is over 19,000 lines long, and is known today as the Estonian national epic...

Novel Districts

Critical Readings of Monika Fagerholm

Finland-Swedish writer Monika Fagerholm is one of the most important contemporary Nordic authors; she is known for her experimental style and visionary descriptions of girlhood. Novel Districts. Critical Readings of Monika Fagerholm is the first book to study Fagerholm's works...

The Springs of Democracy

National and Transnational Debates on Constitutional Reform in the British, German, Swedish and Finnish Parliaments, 1917-1919

During the First World War, conflicts between the people's sacrifices and their political participation led to crises of parliamentary legitimacy. This volume compares British, German, Swedish and Finnish debates on revolution, rule by the people, democracy...

Rhetorics of Nordic Democracy

Democracy is today a concept that is overwhelmingly positively evaluated almost everywhere. A lot has been written about socio-economic and cultural backgrounds of democratic regimes as well as their institutional settings...

Linking Clauses and Actions in Social Interaction

This volume is intended as a reader for students and scholars working in the field of grammar and interaction. It deals with ways in which verbal and non-verbal actions are combined and linked in everyday conversation, in institutional contexts, and in written journalism...

Shipping and Commodity Flows in the Late Eighteenth-Century Baltic

Vessel traffic and commodity flows expanded at a remarkable pace from the 1750s to the late 1780s, making maritime trade one of the most dynamic sectors of the international economy in an era otherwise marked by slow growth...

Contested Knowledge

Political Dimensions of European Ethnology and Folklore Studies in Post-War Europe

In post-war Europe, European ethnology and folklore studies became entangled with political tensions, ideological control, and competing national narratives. This volume explores how ethnographic knowledge was produced and reshaped in contexts where scholarly autonomy was under pressure...

Across the Oceans

Development of Overseas Business Inforrmation Transmission 1815-1875

In the early 19th century, the only way to transmit information was to send letters across the oceans by sailing ships or across land by horse and coach. Growing world trade created a need and technological development introduced options to improve general information transmission...

Oral Tradition and Book Culture

A new interdisciplinary interest has risen to study interconnections between oral tradition and book culture. In addition to the use and dissemination of printed books, newspapers etc., book culture denotes manuscript media and the circulation of written...

Hidden Rituals and Public Performances

Traditions and Belonging among the Post-Soviet Khanty, Komi and Udmurts

Why are Khanty shamans still active? What are the folklore collectives of Komi? Why are the rituals of Udmurts performed at cultural festivals? In their insightful ethnographic study Anna-Leena Siikala and Oleg Ulyashev attempt to answer such questions...

Words as Events

Cretan Mandinádes in Performance and Composition

Words as Events introduces the tradition of short, communicative rhyming couplets, the mantinádes, as still sung and recited in a variety of performance situations on the island of Crete. Recently, these poems have also entered modern mass media and they...

Peasants, Pilgrims, and Sacred Promises

Ritual and the Supernatural in Orthodox Karelian Folk Religion

Lying on the border between eastern and western Christendom, Orthodox Karelia preserved its unique religious culture into the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was described and recorded by Finnish and Karelian folklore collectors...

The Emergence of Finnish Book and Reading Culture in the 1700s

Book culture has emerged as an extremely dynamic and border-crossing field of research, internationally and in Finland. The editors and most of the writers of this book were members of the organizing and program committees of the 18th Annual Conference...

Where is the Field?

The Experience of Migration Viewed through the Prism of Ethnographic Fieldwork

The book sheds light on the experiences of immigrants in different parts of the world and other insightful reflections on the art of carrying out fieldwork in the present day, when the task of locating the 'field' seems to present a particular challenge for researchers...

Narrating, Doing, Experiencing

Nordic Folkloristic Perspectives

How do people tell of experiences, things and events that mean a lot to them and are unforgettable? Eight Nordic folklorists here examine personal experience stories and the way they are narrated in an attempt to gain an understanding of the people behind...

Strategies of sanity and survival

religious responses to natural disasters in the middle ages

Natural disasters have long been a neglected subject in the study of history. At most they have been casually mentioned as a background material for political or social history. During the 90s this state of affairs has slowly began to change...

Minimal reference

The use of pronouns in Finnish and Estonian discourse

This book presents some of the most recent research on Finnish and Estonian pronouns and other minimal forms of reference. The articles deal with features particular to the pronoun systems of Finnic languages, such as logophoricity and the use of demonstratives...

Myth and Mentality

The recent fascination in Finnish folklore studies with popular thought and the values and emotions encoded in oral tradition began with the realisation that the vast collections of the Finnish folklore archives still have much to offer the modern-day researcher...

Continued Violence and Troublesome Pasts

Post-war Europe between the Victors after the Second World War

In most European countries, the horrific legacy of 1939-1945 has made it difficult to remember the war with much glory. Despite the Anglo-American memory narrative of saving democracy from totalitarianism and the Soviet epic of the Great Patriotic War,...

Changing Scenes

Encounters between European and Finnish Fin de Siècle

Six articles in Changing scenes represent the ongoing reassessment of fin de siècle literature in Finnish research. The period was seen in earlier research as something of a national renaissance or golden age and interpreted in the light of its national symbols and meanings...

The Limits of Patriarchy

How Female Networks of Pilfering and Gossip Sparked the First Debates on Rural Gender Rights in the 19th-Century Finnish-Language Press

In the mid-19th century, letters to newspapers in Finland began to condemn a practice known as home thievery, in which farm mistresses pilfered goods from their farms to sell behind the farm master's back...

On the Border of Language and Dialect

This volume considers the linguistic borders between a language and a dialect as well as the administrative, cultural, and mental borders that affect the linguistic ones. The articles approach mental borders between dialects, dialect continua, and areas...

Edhina Ekogidho - Names as Links

The Encounter between African and European Anthroponymic Systems among the Ambo People in Namibia

What are the most popular names of the Ambo people in Namibia? Why do so many Ambos have Finnish first names? What do the African names of these people mean? Why is the namesake so important in Ambo culture? How did the nation's long struggle for independence...

Representations of Finnishness in Sweden

More than half a million Swedes - one in twenty - is of Finnish descent. This book explores Finnishness, multilingualism and identities of young people with Finnish background in Sweden. What does it mean to grow up in a Finnish family in Sweden? Who...

Noble conceptions of politics in eighteenth-century Sweden (ca 1740-1790)

Noble conceptions of politics in eighteenth-century Sweden (ca 1740-1790) is a study of how the Swedish nobility articulated its political ideals, self-images and loyalties during the Age of Liberty and under the rule of Gustav III...

Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions

Gender and Sexuality in Niskavuori Films

Films are essential to national imagination and promotional publicity markets "domestic films" not only as entertaining, exciting, or moving, but also as topical and relevant in different ways. When assessing new films, reviewers make reference to other...

Storied and Supernatural Places

Studies in Spatial and Social Dimensions of Folklore and Sagas

This collection of articles addresses the narrative construction of places, landscapes and their supernatural dimensions, the relationship between tradition communities and their environments, and the spatial conditions for encounters with the supernatural...

Registers of Communication

In any society, communicative activities are organized into models of conduct that differentiate specific social practices from each other and enable people to communicate with each other in ways distinctive to those practices...

Identities in Practice

A Trans-Atlantic Ethnography of Sikh Immigrants in Finland and in California

Identities in Practice draws a nuanced picture of how the experience of migration affects the process through which Sikhs in Finland and California negotiate their identities. What makes this study innovative with regard to the larger context of migration...

Personal Agency at the Swedish Age of Greatness 1560-1720

Personal Agency at the Swedish Age of Greatness 1560-1720 provides fresh insights into the state-building process in Sweden. During this transitional period, many far-reaching administrative reforms were carried out, and the Swedish state developed into a prime example of the "power-state...

Moving in the USSR

Western anomalies and Northern wilderness

This book deals with 20th century resettlements in the western areas of the former USSR, in particular the territory of Karelia that was ceded by Finland in the WWII, Podolia in the Ukraine, and the North-West periphery of Russia in the Kola peninsula...

Names in Focus

An Introduction to Finnish Onomastics

Names in Focus delves deep into the vast field of Finnish onomastics, covering place names, personal names, animal names, commercial names and names in literature. It provides the history and current trends in this area of research, and also supplements...

The Culture of the Finnish Roma

This anthology is a needed collection of chapters intended for the international audience. The editor of the anthology, having participated in many international conferences and seminars, have often been asked: Is there Roma research in Finland? What...

Nodes of Contemporary Finnish Literature

This book examines phenomena from Finnish and Finnish-Swedish literature written in the years between the 1980s and the first decade of the new millennium. Its objective is to study this interesting era of literary history in Finland and to sketch some...

Aino Kallas

Negotiations with Modernity

The collection, first one ever on Aino Kallas in English, highlights her significance to the artistic and intellectual horizons of modernity of Finland and Estonia as well as those of Scandinavia and Europe...

Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature

Urban Experiences in Finnish Prose Fiction 1890–1940

Literary Helsinki: a city of leisure and light, divided along the fault lines of gender, class and language; a dizzying and dazzling threshold of modernity; alienating, mesmerizing and endearing. This first monograph to examine experiences of Helsinki...

Passages Westward

The West has always been a resource for the Finns. Scholars, artists and other professionals have sought contacts from Europe throughout the centuries. The Finnish experience in Western Europe and the New World is a story of migrant laborers, expatriates and specialists working abroad...

Gendered Rural Spaces

Rural spaces are connected with different cultural, economic, social and political codes and meanings. In this book these meanings are analysed through gender. The articles concretely show the process of producing gender and the ways in which accepted...

Defining Self

Essays on emergent identities in Russia Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Kansainvälisen tutkijakaartin artikkelit tarkastelevat identiteetin muotoutumista Venäjällä, yhdessä maailman suurimmista monikansallisista valtioista. Teoksessa kuvaillaan, miten identiteettien moninaisuus alkoi näkyä jo Venäjän keisarikunnan aikana,...

Mythic Discourses

Studies in Uralic Traditions

Mythic discourses in the present day show how vernacular heritage continues to function and be valuable through emergent interpretations and revaluations. At the same time, continuities in mythic images, motifs, myths and genres reveal the longue durée of mythologies and their transformations...

Riddles

Perspektives on the use, function andchange in a folklore genre

Riddles are a journey into a fascinating world rich in delightful metaphors and ambiguity. This book is based on material drawn from all over the world and analyses both traditional true riddles and contemporary joking questions...

Rhyme and Rhyming in Verbal Art, Language, and Song

This interdisciplinary collection explores the forms and aesthetics of rhyme in a variety of languages and from a variety of perspectives. A wide-ranging introduction that ends with a list and associated bibliography of rhyming traditions of the world is followed by thirteen chapters...

Sport, Recreation and Green Space in the European City

Green space has become a major issue in European cities in recent years as a result of enhanced environmental awareness, urban marketing, planning policy and growing population densities. Up to now, however, the subject of sports areas and grounds has...

Beyond the Horizon

Essays on Myth, History, Travel and Society

Society is never just a localized aggregate of people but exists by virtue of its members' narrative and conceptual awareness of other times and places. In Jukka Siikala's work this idea evolves into a broad ethnographic and theoretical interest in worlds...

Genre -Text - Interpretation

Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Folklore and Beyond

This book presents current discussions on the concept of genre. It introduces innovative, multidisciplinary approaches to contemporary and historical genres, their roles in cultural discourse, how they change, and their relations to each other...

On toponymic constructions as an alternative to naming patterns in describing Finnish lake names

Monitieteinen artikkeliväitöskirja yhdistää nimistöntutkimukseen tietojenkäsittelytieteen menetelmiä ja tarkastelee tuloksia kognitiivisen kielentutkimuksen kautta. Tutkimus lähtee peruskartan järvennimien analyysistä, jonka tarkoituksena on löytää säännönmukaisesti...

Lake Ladoga

The Coastal History of the Greatest Lake in Europe

This multidisciplinary volume offers a spectacular view and the first overall presentation of the history of Lake Ladoga, of the greatest lake in Europe. The focus of the study is on the northern parts of the shores of the lake, which belonged to Finland's rule between 1812 and 1944...

Arctic Hysteria and Other Strange Northern Emotions

Case Studies in Finnish Literature

This volume opens a new perspective on the thriving area of research on the imagined North by studying emotions in the light of case studies in Finnish literature. It addresses the cultural history of Arctic hysteria and maps other strange emotions depicted...

The Finnish Case System

Cognitive Linguistic Perspectives

The Finnish language is perhaps best known for its rich case system. Depending on the definition of a case, Finnish has at least fourteen, possibly fifteen or even more cases. This volume is the first comprehensive English-language account of the Finnish...

On the Legacy of Lutheranism in Finland

Societal Perspectives

This volume analyses the societal legacy of Lutheranism in Finland by drawing on a multidisciplinary perspective from the social sciences and humanities. Involving researchers from a wide range of such fields has made it possible to provide fresh and...

Versification

Metrics in Practice

Versification describes the marriage of language and poetic form through which poetry is produced. Formal principles, such as metre, alliteration, rhyme, or parallelism, take precedence over syntax and prosody, resulting in expressions becoming organised as verse rather than prose...

Conversation Analytic Perspectives to Digital Interaction

Practices, Resources, and Affordances

When do people greet each other on WhatsApp? How do people start chats on Tinder? How are emotions displayed in video-mediated workplace interaction? How do people converse with a social robot? This volume offers a state-of-the-art collection of article...

Registers of Communication

In any society, communicative activities are organized into models of conduct that differentiate specific social practices from each other and enable people to communicate with each other in ways distinctive to those practices...

Dwelling in Political Landscapes

Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives

Dwelling in Political Landscapes contributes to the anthropology of landscape and the field of political ecology. Environments change at speeds never before experienced. Massive species loss is just one transformation affecting life forms and their interactions,...

Sociolinguistic Variation in Urban Linguistic Landscapes

Urban linguistic landscapes reflect and create sociolinguistic, societal and urban dynamics. This book explores these relations scientifically and, focusing on the linguistic landscapes of selected cities in northern and southern Europe, sheds light on...

Handwritten Newspapers

An Alternative Medium during the Early Modern and Modern Periods

This book is the first edited volume focusing on handwritten newspapers as an alternative medium from a wide interdisciplinary and international perspective. The primary focus is on handwritten newspapers as a social practice...

Responsibility and Language Practices in Place

Responsibility and Language Practices in Place investigates 'responsibility' in and through language practices as inspired by the roots of the (English) word itself: the ability to respond, or mount a response to a situation at hand...

Transnational Death

Transnational Death brings together eleven cutting-edge articles from the emerging field of transnational death studies. The collection highlights European, Asian, North American, and Middle Eastern perspectives, and reflects on people's changing experiences...

Terrains of Imagination in Contemporary Finnish Literature

Harassing Habitats in Maarit Verronen's Fiction

This book is the first study on Maarit Verronen, an award-winning Finnish contemporary author, whose career spans four decades and several genres. The study explores experiences of space in Verronen's writing, drawing from spatial studies, an interdisciplinary approach within the humanities...

Modernisation in Russia since 1900

Modernisation has been a constant theme in Russian history at least since Peter the Great launched a series of initiatives aimed at closing the economic, technical and cultural gap between Russia and the more 'advanced' countries of Europe...

Touching Things

Ethnological Aspects of Modern Material Culture

Material culture is something we can touch and can be touched by. It is simultaneously concrete artefacts and expression of values produced and shared by humans. But what is modern material culture like? Material culture has always played an essential role in ethnological studies...

Shattering Minds

Experiences of Mental Illness in Modernist Finnish Literature

Shattering Minds is the first broad study on representations of mental illness in modernist Finnish literature. Through four case studies, it shows how in modernist texts mental suffering is not understood as something that is "inside" a person's mind...

On foreign ground

moving between countries and categories

The essays in this collection explore classical anthropological questions in modern sites, from Ghana to Karelia, from India to Italy, from Kuala Lumpur to St. Petersburg. They examine change and continuity through the lens of memory and sense of place,...

Migrants and Literature in Finland and Sweden

Migrants and Literature in Finland and Sweden presents new comparative perspectives on transnational literary studies. This collection provides a contribution to the production of new narratives of the nation...

Beyond the horizon

essays on myth, history, travel and society

Artikkelikokoelman lähtökohtana on ajatus kulttuurista pragmaattisten kontekstien ja kokemuksen tasojen välisiä suhteita jäsentävänä maailmankuvana. Artikkelit tarkastelevat etnografisten esimerkkien valossa, mikä määrittää kunkin yhteiskunnan horisonttia...

Genetic Criticism in Motion

New Perspectives on Manuscript Studies

Genetic criticism investigates creative processes by analysing manuscripts and other archival sources. It sheds light on authors' working practices and the ways works are developed on the writer's desk or in the artist's studio...