University of Helsinki
Anchor study 6, led by Heidi Henriikka Mäkelä, examines adaptations of kalevalaic poetry and mythic knowledge in contemporary society outside of written text editing and reproduction. This anchor study is interested in the intersections between the ‘ancient past’, materiality, nature (often characterized in the materials of the study as something that is separated from ‘human’ and ‘culture’), and contemporary social and political environments. The project suggests that materiality plays a significant role in the reproduction of the ‘kalevalaic’ traditions and interpretations: the multi-layered and multitemporal interpretations of premodern mythic knowledge are commonly narrated in relation to or through things such as natural landscapes and/or natural materials such as wood. The study asserts that these narratives and interminglings of intangibilities and tangibilities are becoming more and more significant in contemporary society, as ‘traditional knowledge’ has become one of the sources from which people seek answers for complex crises such as climate change or having lost connection with nature. These processes seem to re-circulate romantic views of the past, the ‘ancient’ and of ‘nature’. Yet, the premodern nature-related mythic knowledge in the Finnic areas can be described as anthropocentric and even exploitative, as it represents societies that were dependent on, for example, slash-and-burn agriculture, farming, and small-scale hunting.
This anchor study critically investigates such relations and interpretations by analysing, for instance, the ‘Vienan reitti’ hiking route in Eastern Finland near the Russian border (also travelled by Lönnrot), the prehistory exhibition of the Finnish National Museum, and the Finnish forest yoga phenomenon. The anchor study will develop a methodological approach in which (visual) discourse analysis, ethnographic field work, and autoethnographic experiences are put into dialogue. The study discusses the material, spatial, embodied, and discursive dimensions of re-interpreting kalevalaic poetry and mythology in today’s society. By focusing on fairly banally nationalistic and culturally accepted contemporary interpretations of kalevalaic mythology, the study provides a much-needed insight into the materials, spaces, places, and bodies that become chosen to reproduce and re-interpret the ‘furthest past’ of Finnishness.