Category: Blog

This article offers a folkloristic analysis of telling personal experience stories in the Estonian Midwives Association’s Family School discussion forum (www.perekool.ee), focusing on the Conception, Pregnancy and Childbirth sub-forums. In the article women’s My Stories about their journey to motherhood are under discussion. The central question is how the practice of telling these stories is shaped and affected by the peculiarities of the online community, its communication space, traditions, and daily operation. The article seeks to answer this question in relation to the following topics: accepted and non-accepted topics and experiences; the message of the stories; the structure of the stories; vocabulary competence; and the style of storytelling. From the theoretical perspective, the focus is on participatory storytelling, that is, on the interplay of the specific online environment, narrator, story, and group, as well as the process by which the teller and the audience co-create the stories.

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3. Vol 8 No 1 (2014) /
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Processes of comparison are central when we make our decisive choices of ways of living. This article is based on an interview with an immigrant who negotiates with himself over why he went away from Finland and why he stayed in South Africa. His line of argument can be analysed using Abraham Maslow’s theory of human motivation. Conduciveness turns out to be his main motivation, and comparison is, implicitly or explicitly, a tool for verbalising this conduciveness. 

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3. Vol 9 No 1 (2015) /
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This paper focuses on the meanings assigned to Tatar language among the Tatar diaspora in Estonia. According to interviews with Estonian Tatars as well as descriptions of field material from Tatarstan, language is an important aspect of Tatar ethnic identity. This paper will track common discourses about the Tatar language and the way it is connected to Tatar ethnic identity. Issues concerning Tatar language are used to demonstrate various ways of enacting Tatarness in Estonia. It is shown that Estonian Tatars worry about the vitality and purity of Tatar language, but for some, marginalization of dialects is also an issue. People categorized with the same identity labels by self and others can experience and enact their Tatarness in a variety of different ways.

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3. Vol 2 No 2 (2008) /
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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.

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3. Vol 3 No 1 (2009) /
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This paper explores the raison d’être of the only proper Estonian ecovillage, Lilleoru. Exceptional in the Estonian context, this relatively small and young community is a member of three established international networks uniting similar communities. Based on fieldwork and ethnographic interviews, the present article describes some focal aspects of the community and investigates how Lilleoru functions as a community. After a brief overview of the formation of the community, the following questions are touched upon: what is its significance for its members, how are they differentiated from other similar groups, what creates coherence among its members, how is the community managed, what are the everyday practices and how does it fit into the global context. As a result of the study it might be said that although from the outside Lilleoru is mainly seen as an ecovillage, from inside being an awareness training centre is central. The ecological lifestyle is regarded as a side result of a conscious lifestyle.

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3. Vol 1 No 1-2 (2007) /
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The article deals with the impacts of the policy of the 1940s-1950s Soviet authority on the Estonian National Museum. The first, introductory part observes the general frameworks of the (ethnographical) museums in the Soviet Union, thus providing an overview of the goal of Sovietisation policy – what was the system’s perception of the institution that the ENM was supposed to become. The main part of the article focuses on Sovietisation practice in the ENM: what kind of reorganisation took place within the work of the museum in connection with political changes, whether and how the new norms were adapted to and to what extent they were adopted. The source material used for the treatment of the subject matter comprises, in addition to the ENM’s archive materials, the memories of three ethnologists who worked in the ENM during the observed period.

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The Finn Forest Republic is a three-day celebration of cultural heritage and local identity among the Finn Forest population, a people living in small rural communities on both sides of the border between Sweden and Norway. This festival has been celebrated since 1970, and has been an important element in the revitalisation and constitution of a Finn Forest identity. The article investigates how elements of the cultural heritage of the area have been used during the days of the Republic to constitute the idea of a common ethnic identity and a shared past, through a wide range of public displays and performances. The Finn Forest Museum plays an important role in the festival, both with collections manifesting a genuine material culture, as an arena for the performance of intangible heritages, and as a venue for telling narratives about the historic background of this culture. The character of the festival and the cultural heritage it celebrates implies historical references to the immigrant border culture, as well as to conflicts with the other dominant national majority cultures of the area. These cultural relations are presented in sincere as well as humorous ways, and allows for a wide range of identifications with the project of building a Finn Forest cultural heritage.

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3. Vol 14 No 1 (2020) /
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Book review: Tat’yana Vladykina. 2018. The Udmurt Folklore ‘Worldtext’: Forms, Symbols, Rituals. Izhevsk.

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Witchcraft and barrenness are two critical issues that African women have had to grapple with since precolonial times. Therefore, the focus of attention in this paper is the songs of the Legi voluntary association among the Ịjọ of Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region. The Legi women’s group is made up of adult women who are barren and/or have been tagged witches by their community. The women of the association compose songs about their experiences in society and sing them at burials. For the women of the Legi Association, art is a means of showing support for or solidarity with a member of the group whose father or mother has died. Moreover, the members of the association perform their songs at burials that are unconnected with them to celebrate with those who invite them.

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 What children count as their favourite things tell us not only about children but also about their social and cultural experiences. This study, based on the outcomes of a children’s drawing competition organised by the Estonian National Museum and applying a combined framework of visual sociology and participatory research, proposes an innovative angle to using the museum’s experimental approach to contemporary collecting of cultural heritage. This large-sample (n=926) content-analytical study of children’s favourite gifts gives a rich ethnographic and sociological perspective on children’s life-worlds. On the one hand, the children’s wishes reflected contemporary global trends in technology and commercialisation. On the other hand, the children’s prevailing dream of having a pet shows loneliness shaped by societal changes, including urbanisation and changing family models and time regimes.

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