[Gandur] Eija Stark: Masters and servants - Intertextual power relations in the Finnish proverbs and the personal narratives

[Gerður Halldóra Sigurðardóttir]

Eija Stark: Masters and servants - Intertextual power relations in the Finnish proverbs and the personal narratives

Monday, 16. April 2012 at 17.00 in Oddi, room 106


Just as many European societies in 19th and early 20th century, Finland was a society of the four estates. The estate society was a certain class division of society where the two higher estates were nobility and clergy and the two lower estates burghers and land-owning peasants. Each was free men, and had specific rights and responsibilities, and the right to send representatives to the Assembly of Finland. However, large number of people did not belong to any of the estates. Most of the people, about 70 percent of the population, were outside the estates. Those who did not belong to any of the estates were cottagers and tenants of farms owned by the land-owning peasants, farm-servants, rural craftsmen and the rising number of industrial workers. The estates and the outsiders of the estates had a cultural hierarchy among one another: upper classes knew they were higher in social order than cottagers and landless day-workers, and those were well aware that the clergy and burghers were ahead of them. Social and economic conditions have had a great impact on folklore and popular thought. In my presentation I will give an example of the intertextual analysis of the proverbs and the personal narratives about the concept of master (“herra”). The presentation introduces vernacular - those outside the estates’ - views and perspectives on the upper classes. The useful concept is the culture of contestation introduced by Luigi Lombardi-Satriani in 1974. The term contestation refers “to adduce opposing testimony” towards the hegemonic culture that was defined by the people in power in a given historical society. 

Eija Stark has a MA and PhD in folkloristics from the University of Helsinki. The PhD-topic was about the rural poverty in the personal narratives and proverbs. The data consisted of 99 autobiographies and 500 proverbs that were mainly from the Finnish Literature Society's Folklore Archive. Few autobiographies were also from the Labour Archives.

Post doc 2012-2014: current study is about the concept of class in the interdisciplinary project called "Exploring Social Boundaries from
Below: Class, Ideology and Writing Practices in 19th Century Finland". 
The project is funded by the Academy of Finland and it is led by a docent Anna Kuismin, literary scholar.