Northern European Folklore: Fieldwork, Heritage, and Embodiment

In the fall of 2011, Indiana University hosted the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society. For three days in October, scholars gathered in Bloomington to celebrate the dynamic breadth of folklore on a campus that has been the home for the serious study of folklore for over sixty years. As a faculty member in the Folklore Institute, I was asked to serve as discussant for a panel on embodying Nordic spaces. Two of those papers are part of this volume; two more papers have been added since, and I read them now for the first time. The Journal of Folklore Research has a long history of publishing international folklore scholarship, and we continue that service with this volume on northern Europe. The four papers presented here add a diversity of voices—both of scholars and informants—and present new topics within familiar folklore genres, exposing readers in the United States and abroad to the concerns and approaches of contemporary scholars in northern Europe today.

The papers in this special volume converge around a few key themes: folklore and embodiment; the importance of place; heritage and tradition. Implied in each article is the topic of methodology—most importantly, ethnographic fieldwork (Goldstein 1964). In Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch’s article, fieldwork literally enabled folklore collectors to walk to visit each informant in the Swedish-Finnish countryside. Ethnographic interviews allowed Lizette Gradén to document the choices made about folk costume in the Swedish diaspora in the United States and enabled Kristin Kuutma and Helen Kästik to document the choices made about folk singing on different regional stages of Estonia. Even scholars focusing on historical phenomena benefit from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the past, which can supply them with richer data on which to build generalizations. Had ethnographic data on the Swedish turn-of-the-century dance troupe Philochoros been available, for example, it would have provided Petri Hoppu with an even fuller gauge of the motivations, costumes, and dances—and the degree of self-conscious embodiment and personification—of the cross-dressed students he describes in his article.

The transition from fieldwork to the body, and thus to embodied folklore, is a logical next step, for we are human beings studying other human beings (Georges and Jones 1980). Österlund-Pötzsch begins the volume by reminding us that fieldwork involves the bodies of the researchers—their physical presence in the field, among other human beings in their places and homes, experiencing their weather and their terrain. Fieldworkers must rely on their eyes, ears, hands, and feet to gather and document, to write and draw, to interpret and analyze. The study of folklore has always consisted of a series of embodied acts. And the information we seek is also embodied, literally, as the body dances while wearing costume; as the hands make festive garments; as the body gathers experience and expels it in a song so others can listen, clap, dance, and absorb a directed communication of shared heritage.

All bodies are in place, and place becomes the next theme that unites the papers in this volume, a gathering of articles that center on folklore of, in, and from the northern countries of Sweden, Finland, and Estonia. One question that arises is, what is a place, and how is it demarcated and conceptualized? Many of the articles here reference Artur Hazelius, who set a pattern for folklore—and material culture studies in particular—to be localized, the ideal being to display objects in context, presenting “folk life in living brushstrokes” (Skansen 6). What is a place? How does Swedish folklore in Sweden compare to that found in the Sweden in Finland, or the Sweden in Kansas? What is the relationship between the core and the periphery? Can a folk-dance troupe originating in Lund represent the folk dances of the various other regions of Sweden? In Estonia, how does the Viljandi music scene relate to the Seto community? And in these places, who are the actors, the performers, the culture brokers? Often regarded as the social or intellectual elite, they help shape the way that folklore is...