Gendered understandings of folk poetry and folk narratives

 

The traditional study of Kalevala-metre folk poetry (or folk songs, or runes) is vividly re-envisioned in contemporary research from a gender perspective. New directions for study in particular are presented by Senni Timonen in her pathblazing dissertation Minä, tila ja tunne [184], where, in approaching the world constructed by folk lyrics, she pays particular attention to the “real” time of the lives and social conditions of the singers. She applies perspectives on emotions and theoretical standpoints from anthropology and from gender studies, while the focus is on understanding and explaining the world of those women who produced folk lyrics and discovered them to be a way of expressing emotion. The levels or contexts of her approach are in three parts. First, the meanings of space are examined, by which she means both time and space in folk lyrics, then folk lyrics as a genre, and finally Ingrian women’s indigenous culture. The second aspect is self, by which she means primarily the collective “I” of the lyric songs, and third, emotion, which permeates the whole study and is analysed through universal feelings of sorrow and joy[185].

Another position is taken by Tarja Kupiainen, whose dissertation entitled Kertovan kansanrunouden nuori nainen ja nuori mies [186] attemps to reveal the construction of womanhood and manhood in folk poems as well as in the study of them. She exposes the masculine hegemonic interpretation and deconstructs the dimensions of the gender concept and female subjectivity in folk poetry. Thus Kupiainen examines among other things the taboo of incest, family and gender relations and the sexuality of young women and young men in folk poetry, applying theoretical viewpoints derived mainly from the works of Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray[187]. 

A third perspective of the contemporary study of gendered folk poetry is generated by Lotte Tarkka, who approaches the ancient world created by folk poetry from the anthropological and interpretative perspective. She has earlier interpreted the images of nature and forest as linked to gender and to gendered division of labour in the world of folk poetry[188] and analysed the symbolic meanings of gender in oral poetry[189].

The distance between the world of folk poetry and old folk narratives is in some respects relatively small, and folk poetry and folk narratives depict to some extent the same world. The ethical world produced by old folk narratives forms the main research theme for Irma-Riitta Järvinen, who has explored Karelian Orthodox religious legends in her dissertation[190]. She considered the narrative structures of these legends, and analysed folk beliefs and ethics evidenced by religious legends and their changing developments. The focus was, in the latter part of her study, on one Karelian female narrator of sacred legends and her world view, whence Järvinen broadens her perspective to contemporary narrating and constructing of world views by women in a small Karelian village, and to religious and ethical themes which are found in their collective narrating of dreams and other stories[191].

Remembering and narrating comprise an important research topic in modern folkloristics. Ulla-Maija Peltonen has comprehensively explored the various ways of remembering – and forgetting as well – of the Finnish Civil War in 1918 and of the “black times” that followed after the war. One of her aims has been to investigate the memorising of war widows on the side who lost the war, the “reds”, and their means of surviving in and after wartime[192]. Telling the past by women is also tackled by Taina Ukkonen[193] in her dissertation, where she focused on the ways women workers in a dockyard collectively remembered and narrated their past[194]. Contemporary narration from the perspective of humour and gender is pondered by Eeva-Liisa Kinnunen[195], and also Lena Marander-Eklund[196] (2000) specialised on narratives by women (see below).

 

Body, sexuality and rituals

 

The second theme group, body and cultural aspects of sexuality, comprises an important topic. It is partly prompted by Satu Apo’s influential book about female magic power (1995) as well as discussion about the body by feminist philosophers and theoreticians. Up to now this direction of study has mostly been conducted by reinterpreting ethnographic and folkloristic materials describing the everyday private rituals of women’s life as well as more public collective ritual occasions, with the studies focusing on the cultural signification of the (female) body. This is on the one hand due to the rich folklore and ethnographical materials referring to archaic traditions and rituals we have in our folklore archives. On the other hand, depictions of ritual acts and customs, incantations and magic features make cultural attitudes and values clearly visible: the basic conceptions and mental structures of a specific culture may be interpreted through descriptions of rituals.

Rituals and the cultural meanings of the female body are the focus of Laura Stark-Arola’s dissertation Magic, Body and Social Order [197] in which she examines women’s magic and sexual themes linked to it. By “women’s magic” she refers to magic rites performed by women and for women in traditional agrarian Finland and Karelia. Reinterpreting archived folk belief materials, mainly incantations and ethnographic descriptions, she examines the gender concepts and gender systems expressed. The themes analysed in her study cover sexuality, pairing, marriage and pollution of the female body, which are explained and interpreted in the frame of historical time, social context and the agrarian household. Stark-Arola offers an interesting description of the ritual preparation of a woman for marriage, and how her sexuality is raised in a bathing ritual to help her to become a partner in a socially sanctioned heterosexual relationship.

Another type of contemporary female rituality is analysed in the Russian ethnic context by Kaija Heikkinen in her study of women’s marginality and the manifestation of everyday life (1992), and in her examination of religious rituals of Vepsian women, and the changing image of old women in Russia[198]. These studies, based on a gender-sensitive approach, refer to aspects of sexuality and meanings of gender orders[199].

Aspects of sexuality expressed in rituals have previously been studied within the framework of childbirth, a subject neglected in early research; if examined by male ethnographers, these archaic practices were judged as women’s secret realm and often superstitious by their nature. A comprehensive picture of the childbirth practices in Karelia at the turn of the twentieth century is given by Marja-Liisa Keinänen in her dissertation entitled Creating Bodies. Childbirth Practices in Pre-modern Karelia [200]. Her research material consists of archived folklore materials, ethnographic descriptions and interviews. In addition to childbirth practices and the role of the traditional midwife, she investigated the ideas and practices pertaining to female bodily states, and how women perceived the restrictions and other norms of their behaviour. Her study is closely linked to Hilkka Helsti’s dissertation about the practice of domestic childbirth and maternity education in the early-twentieth-century Finnish culture[201]. Helsti’s aim was to examine cultural conflicts between motherhood and maternity education through three different themes: fertility, the public and the private, and purity and impurity, with reference mostly to Mary Douglas’s works. The main material studied comprises archived remembrances of agrarian women and midwives, and the midwives’ magazine of the time. The picture formed by agrarian women did not have much connection to the high-class ideals of motherhood[202].

The third noteworthy study focusing on pregnancy and women’s concepts of childbirth – this time in contemporary culture – is Lena Marander-Eklund’s dissertation[203]. She analysed personal narratives of women’s bodily experiences in the context of modern (birth) technology. The women interviewed, expectant mothers, were actually in need of recounting their emotions and sharing their experiences in order to reach a better understanding of them in this critical phase of life. Marander-Eklund analysed women’s narratives and ways of narrating as well, and pondered their change over time[204].

Bodily meanings and gender orders in visual “texts” and their performance are analysed in Inka Välipakka’s dissertation[205] concerning contemporary choreography, body and women’s dance. Her analysis is based on phenomenological philosophy and dance semiotics and she tackles the information gleaned from each dance performance (four actual dance performances and one photographic representation). In order to analyse choreographical, ethnic and bodily meanings of performative dance she uses cultural analysis omitted from the sociology of art and anthropological ethnography and ponders various topics such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the lived body, and Luce Irigaray’s “ethics of sexual difference”. In addition Anu Laukkanen’s ongoing study of performing ethnicity and gender in oriental belly-dancing in Finland has resemblances of Välipakka’s work[206].

For the time being gender studies in Finnish folkloristics is mainly conducted by female researchers focusing on women’s ways of seeing the world. Although the basic arguments posed by men’s study are generally known in Finland, we do not have studies disclaiming or criticising the history of folkloristics or the gender aspect in it from that perspective, in fact only a few researchers have payed attention to these issues. At any rate there are two important studies pointing the way by pondering cultural ways of considering masculinity and sexuality, and criticising hegemonic cultural masculinity, both published in the 1990s. First, the masculine way of constructing culture was pointed out by Jyrki Pöysä in his dissertation[207], in which he analysed and interpreted the male-dominant culture of forest workers and the folklore produced by them. He deconstructed the image of the masculine, independent, hard-working and happy fellow – the popular image of a lumberjack – by revealing the formation of social categories through historical situations. Later Pöysä has taken into consideration aspects of forming a masculine identity by eating[208], and connected gender perspective to the discussion about the construction of national identity[209], both fresh and pioneer approaches in a study of cultural gender meanings in folkloristics[210]. A second important study takes into consideration sexual and homosexual discourses of Finnish agrarian culture by Jan Löfström[211], who interpreted various cultural texts and examined the popular concepts of gender differences by means of themes such as gendered division of labour and concepts of body and sexuality. He suggests that the polarisation of genders was not strict or useful, and that modern homophobic concepts were rare in early modern Finland.