RESPONSE: The Legacy of Folklore Collections: Navigating Historical Uncertainties and Contemporary Relevance

‘History’ is an ancient word, unambiguous and relatively low in real or potential ideological weight. /…./ ‘Folklore’, however, is a word bulging with ideological weight /…/ Scholars have constantly questioned its definitions and indeed the very usefulness of the concept itself.(Ó Giolláin 2000, 2).

Folklore and folklore studies are words with many connotations. Folklore has been extensively documented and utilized for various agendas. It has been framed as a representation of national or local culture but also as an expression of the creativity of particular social classes or groups. Traditions and archived folklore texts can justify legal consequences, such as the preservation of cultural sites. The political and ideological uses of folklore have varied significantly over time and across regions. During the 19th century’s nation-building processes, tales and songs were celebrated as symbols of national identity. In contrast, during the Soviet era, folklore of the same people could be studied and valorized as an expression of the creative spirit of workers across the diverse Soviet states. The various ways of instrumentalizing folklore and folkloristics have created uncertainty about the subject matter.

Modern folklore research emphasizes reflexivity—recognizing the constructed nature of research objects and questioning the narratives created by earlier scholars. Historians and folklorists grapple with the impossibility of fully reconstructing the past, as Leopold von Ranke’s aspiration to present the past as it truly was — wie es eigentlich gewesen ist — is unattainable. Reflexive approaches highlight the limitations of what can be asserted about history and culture, adding different layers of doubt.

However, with so much uncertainty about the goals, subject matter, and methods of folklore studies, the folklore collections—tangible sets of objects that describe the intangible culture—continue to exist as material proof of the work carried out in the past. The early 20th century saw the founding of ‘tradition archives’ in Europe. Institutionalizing folklore studies marked a broader trend across the continent, where documenting traditions became a prominent cultural and scholarly endeavor. Folklore collections “demonstrated the weight of the discipline” (Bendix 1997, 156). After the performative turn in folkloristics, the institutional landscape has shifted; the number of “tradition archives” is not growing but rather diminishing.

However, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages and minutes of recordings belonging to folklore collections continue to be stored in various archives for traditional culture. The development of folklore studies might reveal a variety of doubts about theories, methods, or goals. However, the authors of the articles in this volume have concentrated on discussions related to some of the most important folklore collections in several peripheries of Europe: Estonia, Finland, Ireland, and Turkey. These are countries with strong traditions in folklore studies while being historically “marginalized in relation to the dominant political, economic and cultural powers of Europe” (Ó Giolláin 2000, 31). The history of folkloristics and ethnology in these countries has been thoroughly documented and analyzed. The texts in this volume read against the grain, showing alternatives to the dominant narratives about the motives and methods of documenting folk life and managing the collected materials.

Understanding the content and context of folklore collections is essential for their modern relevance. As Kelly Fitzgerald states: “The impact of tradition archives through the advancement of digitization and a focus on the digital humanities merit examination to recognize aspects that the original players may not have intended” (Fitzgerald, p. 89). Digital accessibility allows a fresh view of the collections and collectors, as Fitzgerald has shown in her article about the views held by the Irish Folklore Collection’s founding members. Once digital, folklore texts can be used as data for research purposes on a scale the collectors could not have imagined, spiking interest among wide audiences. For example, Jamshid J. Tehrani’s study of the evolution of two types of folk tales (Tehrani 2013) was one of the papers that gained the most public attention from the open access mega journal PLOS One in the year when it was published. It was widely discussed because of its innovative interdisciplinary approaches, also in scientific journals like National Geographic and Nature (Dohm 2014). However, the critics also highlighted the limitations of its dataset (Lajoye et al. 2013). While the number of readers or amount of media coverage are not indicators of the value of research results, this kind of attention is unusual for a folklore-related article. Such examples demonstrate the potential and challenges of digitized archives for large-scale analysis. Access to folkloristic text corpora allows exciting results that are discussed in an interdisciplinary fashion. However, creating a well-balanced corpus of texts is complicated because of the situatedness of folklore texts that have been denoted, archived, digitized, or published.

There are inherent biases in documentation processes that create doubts about the usability of the materials. Sanna Kähkönen’s article highlights the difficulties a researcher encounters when dealing with historically fragmented data, showing that “uncertainty arises when the research material does not allow us to know how the knowledge was received, how it changed in the process, and what impact it ultimately had” (Kähkönen, p. 53). The lack of self-reflection of the researcher is typical for the fieldwork that was conducted before the Writing Culture debates: we do not know about the doubts of the collectors in their communication with interlocutors, from whom we only might know their names, ages, and occupations (Birkalan-Gedik, p. 12). From the general goals of researchers or collecting campaigns, we can deduce more about why specific texts are incorporated in the collections. For this, Kähkönens analysis of the ethnographic descriptions of Carelia in the media during the Continuation War in Finland is enlightening. While ethnologists and folklorists were important actors in the social debates, the research communication was easily blurred with propaganda. Awareness of the political agency of researchers might lead to uncertainty about the credibility of ethnographic knowledge production at times of crisis, but also in general.

The articles in this volume show how uncertainties rise when society is going through transformation periods. The transformation can be gradual. For instance, Katre Kikas explores 19th-century Estonian modernization, while Hande Birkalan-Gedik analyzes how nationalism disrupted the lives and career options of the Turkish folklorists in the 1930s. More acute conflict situations create the background of the other articles: the Continuation War in Finland, the Irish Civil War, and the regaining of independence of Estonia. The complex social situation creates doubts about the goals of documenting and studying folklore and the possibility of pursuing careers in times of change. Even in times of upheaval, collectors persisted. For example, the Irish Folklore Collection members, with their opposing views about the political course of Ireland, agreed on “capturing and promoting Irish culture” (Fitzgerald, p. 90). It is important to see the uncertainties present in creating folklore collections to understand the content of these texts’ corpora today.

The usability of folklore collections—created with so many agendas in mind—has been one of the significant uncertainties of archive-based folkloristics. As Risto Järv has emphasized, the general goal of the collectors (despite the miscellaneous circumstances) was to document folk culture. This goal can be seen as the uniting element of the history of archival collections (Järv 2005, 37). Therefore, this number of Culture Analysis is also a collection of articles about people who were certain in their mission to document and study culture. Despite societal upheavals, folklore collectors persevered, driven by a shared goal of documenting and preserving cultural expressions. The historical situatedness of folklore collections continues to pose challenges for contemporary researchers. Nevertheless, understanding the contexts of these collections’ creation enhances their relevance and usability, aligning with broader interdisciplinary insights.