Invisible narratives in the construction
of past and present
The discipline of Ethnology was established at the University of
Jyväskylä in 1964, and the study program of Folkloristics in
1968. Since the founding of these disciplines in Finland in the
19th century, some things have changed and some have remained
the same. Ethnology and folkloristics are still committed to
examining the processes of culture, cultural communication and
cultural meaning, but they no longer limit themselves to the
study of traditional "survivals" disappearing in face of
modernization or 11th-hour attempts to "salvage" and describe
disappearing cultural forms. The past is no longer seen as
"vanished", but as resurgent, resilient. These days, ethnologists
and folklorists understand that the constant emergence of
tradition – including beliefs, values and stories – in current
contexts is a driving force behind the shaping of human society
and culture.
The future of ethnological sciences depends on what they
contribute, both to thought and to society. The importance of
anthropology, ethnology and folklore studies increases as
innumerable different ethnic, religious and cultural groups
interact and depend on each other now more than ever before.
Ethnology has, over the last century, developed precise
methodological tools for engaging with an increasingly complex
world of cultures, traditions and languages. But we also face
new challenges: we must continually remember that culture is
not static or monolithic but dynamic and diverse, and we must
develop increasingly sensitive methods for studying cultural
change and global interactive effects.
An underlying premise of ethnology and folklore studies is that
the key processes underlying human society and culture are not
always the ones we see most clearly. Scholars in the human and
social sciences have come to recognize that one of these hidden
processes is narrative. Stories are built into our daily lives and
our understanding of our world, but often remain invisible to us.
While this is not news to folklorists, who have all along studied
how cultural life is constructed through narrative passed from
person to person by word of mouth, what is new is an interest in
how narratives are interwoven with ethics, politics, ideologies,
cognition, history and aesthetics, and how hidden narratives
have serious implications for how we order and evaluate
information about reality and human action. In late modernity,
stories and tales have not been marginalized by science and
rationality.
First, collective myths have not died: people's familiarity with
collective stories of the nation's or group's history are highly
important in making distinctions between "us" and "them",
between "outsiders" and "insiders". Such stories of shared
wartime trauma and perseverance, of great leaders and defining
moments of triumph, are hardly ever recounted in full:
politicians, journalists and social commentators in the media
might refer to them only indirectly through passing references,
but a primary definition of “what culture is” is that those on
"inside" understand these clues and references to a culture’s
shared stories, while those on the outside do not.
Second, it must be remembered that science is not the opposite
of myth: it is itself a grand tale, or set of tales, about progress
and discovery. Science has gained the status it enjoys today
because it has managed to mythologize itself: it has created its
own mythic heroes such as, for instance, Albert Einstein, and it
has promoted exciting stories about itself which are today
known to nearly everyone: the story of the discovery of DNA,
the story of the birth of the human species, the origins of the
universe, the destruction of the dinosaurs, and of course THE
grand narrative, evolution. Scientists have used the power of
stories every time they go to politicians or foundations to ask for
funding: Science is compelled to create stories which persuade
us to be interested in the knowledge it produces, or which
explain how its work can improve the situation of humankind.
It has been said that anthropology's study of the "Other" living
in exotic cultures has provided an important mirror by which we
gaze upon ourselves. What is less often understood is that
research into the past provides the same sort of mirror for
constructing ourselves as 'modern' in contrast to “traditional”
forms of human organization and knowledge. This occurs
through hidden stories we tell ourselves about the past, stories
that seem to make sense because they support our picture of our
'modern' self and society. Because these stories are rarely
explicitly articulated, they are hardly ever the object of
intellectual analysis. Assumptions about the past are rarely
exposed to the same scrutiny as assumptions about the present,
probably because the present contains so many more
eyewitnesses who can express their opposing views. Thus even
academic scholarship contains generalizations about past eras
that we would never make about our own, for instance:
(1) that communities in the early modern European
countryside were characterized by a greater solidarity
and harmony than are urban communities today.
Empirical sources from the past few centuries in Europe can
shed a great deal of light on this question. For instance,
narratives that have come to us from 19th-century rural Finns
with little or no education tell a very different story of early
modern society. One reason why it has been easy to overlook
their stories is that anti-social sentiments were often not
expressed openly in older rural communities, but were
communicated through covert acts such as secret vandalism,
rumor, informal networks and especially witchcraft and sorcery.
What no history books mention, and what might have remained
unknown if Finland did not contain one of the largest folklore
archives in the world, is that just over a century ago the Finnish
countryside was in the grip of a witchcraft epidemic as intense
as any reported in the 16th or 17th centuries. Rural villages
seethed with witches, healers and quarrelsome neighbours who
believed they were able to cause each other magical harm.
Thousands of first-hand descriptions of magic and sorcery
housed in the Finnish Literature Society Folklore Archives
provide a window onto a dark and violent side of early modern
rural life that has seldom been probed very deeply. Underlying
this were the ecological and social conditions of a world very
different from our own.
Poverty and lack of societal protections meant that in many
cases there was a sense of competition, rather than cooperation,
among neighbors. Police and criminal detectives were unknown,
and the courts could not always compel persons to appear before
them. This meant that vandalism, theft, assault, fraud and
slander often went unpunished and left victims feeling helpless
in the face of their neighbor’s malice and deviousness. For this
reason, aggression and revenge were accepted, even admired
qualities among many ordinary persons, although the Church
preached against them. Persons plotted harm against their
“enemies”, and when this harm could not be threatened out loud,
it was whispered in rumors and gossip as plans to carry out
magical harm. Persons used stories about their own acts of
harmful magic to show superior strength and create a reputation
for supernatural aggression. People only felt themselves
protected and safe if they could create for themselves a
reputation as a dangerous person not to be trifled with.
(2) because past communities were tied together through
ritual, custom, religion and economic dependency, the
individual was more tightly bound to society than are
modern individuals, who are freer to express their
individuality.
It must be recalled that the ties that bound early modern
communities together were not always ties of shared labor and
cooperation. The 19th-century countryside, for instance, was
hierarchically stratified even at the level of farmers and laborers,
and communal ties were often bonds of economic dependency
and unequal work arrangements such as those between master
and servant or landowner and tenant farmer. In traditional
agrarian Finland, the farm was the only self-sufficient unit of
economic production. Anyone who did not own his own land or
produce his own food was in some way dependent on the good
will of farm masters and farm mistresses. This good will was not
always forthcoming, however, and ties of dependency were
often interwoven with resentment and distrust.
The coming of the modern age did not involve a simple
loosening of the individual’s bonds to the collectivity or a
freeing of the individual from the shackles of social convention
and irrational beliefs. This is a story perpetuated by our modern
ideology of individualism. What happened was actually a
dramatic transformation in the form taken by the individual’s
ties to society. Today, modern individuals are actually bound
more tightly to society through the laws of the state, the
curricula of educational institutions, and the forces of the
market. We are tied to regimens of work, schooling, hygiene,
health care and taxes, all of which pervade the everyday lives of
modern citizens to an extent unimaginable in previous centuries.
It may be argued that individuals are taught a large measure of
self-control through schooling and popular literature so that they
can then direct themselves in an open, democratic system, but
the fact remains that this self-control is only achieved because
we surrender a large amount of our autonomy – and several
decades of our lifespan – to educational institutions and
regimens which, it is hoped, will instill in us modern social
conventions to such a degree that the suppression of our desires
and impulses becomes automatic and unconscious.
(3) And finally, we come to the notion that the traditional
past was characterized by a simpler, more holistic world
view which has since been fragmented in modern times.
19th-century narratives leave the researcher with the strong
impression that the early modern world view was just as
complex and fragmented as the late modern world view, if not
more so. The view that premodern mentalities were somehow
simpler than our own is an artifact of the methods and
approaches through which we are often forced to view the past:
reductionist lenses which help us to re-create unified and
straightforward storylines. But just because we are more familiar
with the informational content of our own culture than we are
of, say, premodern peasant cultures, does not mean that we can
assume that social intercourse in the premodern era carried less
or more homogeneous informational content than our own.
In fact, our world view could be said to be more unified than
that of our predecessors, due to the introduction of mass
schooling and the spread of mass media such as newspapers,
radio, film and television. Prior to the advent of mass education
in the countryside, premodern visions of reality were highly
diverse and multiple, and ideas about how to handle disputes,
and how to treat others, differed widely. Modern education
teaches a common measure of fact, a “universal conceptual
currency” for understanding and speaking of human experience.
In primary education at least, this conceptual currency has
tended to be a realist and materialist view of the universe, but it
also contains certain core Western democratic values such as
equality, basic human rights, and civic responsibility.
In order to understand their implications, the invisible stories
woven into our culture must be brought to light. And here is
where ethnologists and historians can work together to develop
more sensitive theories of how representations of the past are
constructed. Without critical reflection on the narratives which
represent the very blind spots that remain unexamined and
unarticulated in our culture, without understanding how our
"invisible stories" shape our visions of our past and thus
ourselves, we are less able to navigate the challenges of the
future.