About – Materiality, Verbal Art, Mythic Knowledge and the Lived Environment (ASME) project

The Materiality, Verbal Art, Mythic Knowledge, and the Lived Environment project (ASME), funded by the Kone Foundation (2021–2025), explores materialities linked to verbal art and mythic knowledge in premodern Finno-Karelian and Scandinavian traditions. Such materialities are considered from a variety of angles in contexts ranging from their historical environments through to their modern reinventions and reuses today.

The ASME project breaks from current paradigms of thinking. Materialities have been widely overlooked and neglected in the rich and extensive research on Finno-Karelian kalevalaic poetries and magic, their transformations through publications such as Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala (1835; reorganized and radically expanded 1849), and the embodied performances of contemporary runo-singers today. Research on Scandinavian traditions has given materialities more attention. On the one hand, runic writing is preserved on stones, swords, and so on and Viking and medieval poetry and prose are linked to the physicality of manuscripts. On the other hand, the turn of interest to performance and living practice requires, in the case of medieval and Iron Age Scandinavia, the reconstruction of situations and consideration of connections to spaces and rituals that are reflected in the archaeological record. Attention to such connections and materialities in Scandinavian research nevertheless remains limited in scope. Materialities are a rapidly-rising topic of interest, yet the materialities of oral verbal art and orally-transmitted knowledge and beliefs have remained invisible to research, owing to established paradigms of thinking. The ASME project brings this phenomenon into focus, filling a significant gap that both meets current interests and opens onto new knowledge.

We began by reconsidering empiricism as a point of departure for considering materialities. Materialities are commonly conceived from an etic perspective of scientific thinking: they are approached as things in the world, both natural and cultural, that can be empirically known through touch, taste, sound, smell and sight, from trees in a forest or the sound of thunder to the smell of baked bread or glow of a smartphone at night. Current interests in Finnish folklore studies have led to a pioneering reconceptualization of materialities from emic perspectives – i.e., perceived and imagined materialities. This approach includes the physicality of a written page but also non-empirical materialities, such as the materialities of unseen agents and forces, oral poems as objects that people can own, sell, or even lose and find, and so forth. Transferring power, knowledge, or memory to drink or food is found in both Finno-Karelian and Scandinavian traditions, but how this relates to verbal art or poems as texts has been left unexplored. Earlier approaches to materialities excluded the possibility that people may conceive of knowledge as no less material than the sound of thunder or the smell of bread. Rethinking non-empirical materialities reciprocally requires rethinking materialities that may be taken for granted in our own society, which is pervaded by digital media and virtual encounters.

Since its emergence in the 19^th century, folklore studies has focused on traditions as intangible texts and beliefs – i.e., verbal art and what is now discussed as mythic knowledge. This focus has reciprocally shaped research, leaving several dimensions of the traditions under study invisible. Our turn to emic materialities breaks from this paradigm: we aim to tear down the walls of the box inside which researchers are accustomed to think by demonstrating, exploring, and explicating the importance of materialities with which verbal art and mythic knowledge are bound, both in how they are perceived and how metaphysical beliefs are concretely tethered to the lived environment of material culture and natural surroundings.

As the emic materialities of vernacular traditions are brought into focus, it becomes necessary to interrogate what happens to them as they are transformed into heritage in contemporary milieux. People continue to engage with texts of verbal art and traditional knowledge as things to which some people but not others might have rights, or for understanding the experienced world, or for creating relationships not with supernatural agents but with nations. The ASME project examines materialities in both Finno-Karelian and Scandinavian cultures alongside one another, following traditions of verbal art and mythic knowledge normally considered intangible, and we thoroughly explore their changing relations to emic materialities in the lived environments of different times and places. Our comparative dimension augments the empirical studies by shedding light on types of sameness and difference between the two cultures and also between premodern and modern cultures as traditions of the former are selectively taken up and reinvented as heritage in the latter. Through this research, we set out to develop ground-breaking new knowledge of international and multidisciplinary relevance by theorizing how the dynamics of the three components’ interaction form a system, and how that system participates in reciprocally constructing the significance of each component.

The ASME project recognizes unseen materialities of premodern oral traditions and places these in relation to the materialities of heritage production, their embodiment by people, objects, the environment, or by print and digital media. The insights, new understandings and theoretical perspectives produced by the project will change the way people understand these traditions.

Organization and Aims

The ASME project is organized around six anchor studies that follow the arc of history, from premodern traditions through the present day. The six anchor studies are organized complementarily, with two pairs of studies each focused on Finno-Karelian and Scandinavian traditions, respectively, as well as one study that focuses on the life of each originally oral tradition in writing and one study that focuses on heritagized performance and practices. The project is centered in folklore studies, but the seven researchers each bring different approaches and expertise that also connect with other fields, including linguistic anthropology, religious studies, musicology, philology, and cultural semiotics.

The ASME project advances beyond simply exploring materialities of verbal art by proposing and testing three hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: The materialities of verbal art and associated knowledge are bound up with the lived environment and people’s interactions with it.

Testing this hypothesis requires the anchor studies to consider how changes in the lived environment, including those effected by technologies like electricity, book printing, and social media, affect materialities. This connects the anchor studies to the second hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2: Heritagization strips oral verbal art and knowledge from the materialities of their premodern lived environments and reconstructs them in relation to the materialities of new media on the one hand, and enables them to produce new meanings by linking them to the materialities of the contemporary society’s environment on the other.

The roles of selection and reinterpretation in relation to meanings leads to our third hypothesis:

Hypothesis 3: The dynamic interaction between materialities, verbal art or knowledge, and the lived environment reciprocally relate to the social significance of the three parts as a system.

By empirically testing these hypotheses through the anchor studies and comparisons across them, the ASME project aims to develop theoretical perspectives that can be applied and further developed by scholars working with the same and other traditions.

Synthesis

The six anchor studies are tightly linked by their topics and the phenomena that they address, and they are being developed in dialogue with one another. Coordination and collaboration across the anchor studies is organized through workshopping and research collaborations. We are currently planning a larger multidisciplinary seminar-workshop on the theme of the project. In addition to publications by individual researchers in diverse venues, the project team is planning a collaborative book that will offer a synthesis of research findings.