RESPONSE: Uncertainty in Folklore and Ethnology in the Age that Trusted in the Future

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This special issue of Cultural Analysis traces various encounters with specific uncertainties in the history of Folklore and Ethnology, whether those of folklore collectors operating in Estonia towards the end of the nineteenth century, who had to confront their neighbors or the uncertainties that Irish cultural activists negotiated in response to the Irish civil war and the way these shaped the work of the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1920s–1930s. Other uncertainties seem more existential, such as those endured by Finnish ethnologists in the occupied territories of East Karelia in the 1940s, or political threats that impacted family ties, such as the collaboration of the Boratav couple who had to operate creatively around these. Finally, the uncertainties of post-Soviet Estonia in the 1980s–1990s began with regime change and the restructuring of departments and archives in manners that have become ubiquitous in our current academic climate.

Together, these articles demonstrate how Folklorists and Ethnologists have had to negotiate different anxieties on different levels of experience regarding changes imposed by various “external” factors. These may seem at first “external” compared to those “internal” uncertainties that shaped any modern negotiation with cultural change: folklore and tradition are, in fact, two concepts that were articulated in modern times in the face of change (this is particularly noticeable in Kikas’s contribution).

However, given the uncertainties that modernity has brought about and the particular uncertainties that have been engaged in this special issue, perhaps the premise can be reversed. It seems that the experience of cultural stability has to be accounted for rather than cultural change. Furthermore, one is tempted to take these historical episodes to the present and contemplate the transformation in the perception of stability and uncertainty. In this regard, revisiting these modern episodes sheds light on how various forms of uncertainty were experienced in modernity and how such experiences reflect current negotiations with uncertainty. One immediate difference comes to my mind on the emic level—modern imagination bracketed experiences of uncertainty as if they deviated from the expected path. When one perceived progress as an active force (Koselleck 2002), it was still possible to imagine that there were “bumps on the road” to the future and that one had to find ways around them. In this way, folklore and ethnology were crucial stabilizers. Accordingly, the role of folklorists and ethnologists—their very vocation as modern intellectuals—to document national traditions and analyze them seemed to be much more precise and purposeful to them (even if not to their peers) in the grand advance towards modernity they were part of. After all, the twentieth century, with all its horrifying turmoil, brutality, and uncertainty, was—in Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s (2011) terms—“the century that trusted in the future” (17).

Still in the twentieth century, a few decades after the Irish Civil War that Kelly Fitzgerald relates to in her contribution, the situation in Ireland became known as “The Troubles” (1960s-1990s). Compare this plural form to the singular use in Donna Haraway’s account of the present, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene(2016). Haraway relates to the present age, whose very name is still unclear—Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene. It is worth quoting from the opening paragraph of her inspiring book:

Trouble is an interesting word. […] We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times […] Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy—with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings. (Haraway 2016, 1)

It is such an inspirational paragraph that makes me wonder how “making kin,” in Haraway’s terms, has changed for folklorists and ethnologists from those discussed in this issue to the present. I recall the words of D., an activist I met near the Israeli parliament as part of the group of protestors who set up a tent there on November 7, 2023, calling to end the war in Gaza and disband Netanyahu’s government; D. has lived most of his life through the uncertainties of modernity and he is making kin with people who join the tent temporarily or others who—just like him—are on a hunger strike for many days now: “Every morning I wake up and I feel I am in a surreal world; nothing makes sense anymore. It is as if I live in a Salvador Dalí painting.” This is perhaps another sound description of what Haraway might mean by overflowing disturbing times. Consider that the surrealist movement paralleled the engagement of folklorists and ethnologists with everyday culture (Highmore 2002). However, D. related to a world where surrealism is not a mode of critique based on an engagement with the everyday through processes of destabilization and defamiliarization, but a world and an every day that have become unknown. Just as Berardi relied on futurism to comparatively define the present, D. uses another avant-garde model.

From the vantage point of present uncertainties, modernity’s uncertainties appear here in the background of a general sense of orientation, which was lost to us. To paraphrase a common contemporary American slogan—wars have become great again in brutality that reminds one of the twentieth century, that century that trusted in the future. However, we are only looking back at it with complete disbelief. The world is recovering from a pandemic that reminded everyone of the Spanish Flu or nineteenth-century Cholera. Yet, this time around, in a post-human age, it changed our perception of cultural analysis—e.g., the special issue of Cultural Analysis on microbes included Bernhard Tschofen’s response to the topic: “at the time this journal [CA] was founded, now a quarter of a century or even ten years ago, it would hardly have been expected in a journal dedicated to the study of culture” (2024, 142). Every day, we hear populist politicians pushing for ‘alternative facts’ at the expense of science, coping with the murky present and bleak climatic future with the racism and oil capitalism of the past (Kitta 2018). Those in the twentieth century had their concerns regarding the change in human cultures, but with the emergence of algorithmic culture, the definitions and boundaries of human creativity are unclear; if Herder differentiated between Naturpoesie and Kunstpoesie in ways that formed the basis of folklore studies, artificial intelligence brings us to the domain of künstliche-Poesie (Bense 2023) and as such AI is “based on the principle of deception from the start” (Bajohr 2023). These symptoms point to a much more radical uncertainty in the present than in the previous century.

The articles of this special issue show how operating in the field or archives and coping with problematic ideologies, institutional restructuring, and conflicting political agendas bring about tremendous uncertainties and various coping mechanisms. Despite that, folklorists and ethnologists a generation ago could trust in the future. The idea of folklore was constructed in relation to this certainty—that folk culture is all that would be left behind once humanity would make it to the future. Folklore and Ethnology constructed their subject matters in relational terms. Implicit in these projects was the idea that one ought to care for human expressions and traditions. Making kin in this troubled present builds on this legacy and continues these scholarly traditions. Although we acknowledge that culture keeps transforming and our temporal orientation is lost, we care.