BUDKAVLEN 2003

Årets tema för Budkavlen är det forskningsmaterial etnologer och folklorister samlar in och bearbetar. Svenska litteratursällskapets traditionsvetenskapliga nämnd anordnade 2002 ett seminarium där frågelistmetoden stod i fokus och tanken var att Budkavlen kunde utgå från de föredrag som då hölls. Så har också gjorts, men många andra bidrag finns med som processats i andra sammanhang. Här kan t.ex. nämnas den forskarutbildning som vid Åbo Akademi ges i form av kursen Människovetenskapernas filosofi ledd av professor Lars Hertzberg och doc. Olli Lagerspetz. Temat för vårterminen 2003 var att förstå det främmande. Tre artiklar har ventilerats vid proseminarier i folkloristik och etnologi vid Åbo Akademi.


BUDKAVLEN 2003
The theme for the year's Budkavlen is the research material which ethnologists and folklorists compile and arrange. The scholarly board of the Swedish Folk Culture Archives organized a seminar in 2002 which focused on the questionnaire method and it was intended that Budkavlen would expand on the lectures which were held then. We have done this, however there are also many other contributions which have been processed in other contexts. For example, the researcher education which is offered at Åbo Akademi in the form of a course called "Anthropologists' philosophy," taught by Professor Lars Hetzberg and Associate Professor Olli Lagerspets. The theme for the spring term 2003 was understanding the unknown. Three articles have been discussed at proseminars in folkloristics and ethnology at Åbo Akademi.
The main material which is used by the folklorists consists partially of questionnaire answers and interview printouts and partially of historical material which is part of daily or public processes, such as letters, diaries or estate inventories after death. Each type of material has its own manner of origin, which is apparent in the form of the text and which should be accounted for when they are being used. It is this problem which is addressed in this issue.
In the first article, Carola Ekrem deals with the questionnaire as a specific genre and she analyzes narratives which come in the form of written answers to questionnaires or answers to folklore archive questions which the respondent has typed in a computer. Carola Ekrem particularly notes the ambivalence between answer-8 ing "lists of questions" and spontaneous answers, while at the same time she sees each answer as an entity with a special plot in the beginning and a conclusion at the end. The free narrative sections and the scenes which are portrayed -based on questionnaire material about death -are further noted. Different respondents also have their own style of narration, which prompts Carola Ekrem to separate the respondents into special narrator types. The article also addresses the intimate and sensitive nature of the subject matter and is based on compilation work which was carried out over many years using the questionnaire method.
The article which is devoted to the interview method is written by a mature person, Anna Granholm, who looks back on interviews which she herself did ten years ago, when, as a young student, she was to collect memories about Mariehamn. Reflection about the interview method is based on the fact that the material which is gathered is part of a narration of a life history which occurs completely according to its own pattern, in which the interviewer and the interviewee take on different roles in a dialogue which is reminiscent of one in daily life, but which is different in many ways. Particularly regarding the interviewer, Anna Granholm outlines a whole list of roles, which partly point out the active aspect of the examiner, partly the ambivalence between authoritative and attentive aspects. She explains the instructive fact that the interviewer is the receptive party who ought to be able to reach a balance between directing the conversation and listening to the story.
Katja Bellman's article takes us back into the problematics of the questionnaire method. Here she deals with the interpretation of answers. Within what context has the material come about and how can one understand what is said? Katja Hellman, with Hans-Georg Gadamer, maintains that one who wants to understand ought to acquire an affinity for the tradition which is expressed in the communication, the narrative. This can occur through learning the collective concepts and perceptions that come forth in the answers -in Katja Bellman's case, questionnaire answers about urban life during the 1950's. When one sees that separate experiences and memory descriptions agree with one another, one is on the right track to determining tradition. Then it is a question of considering the significance of the time period -that memories which are conveyed during a certain period can assume a different form during another time period, that is to say, the contemporary always tints the view of the past. According to Hellman, an understanding for that which has been recorded means, according to the Collingwood method, that one puts oneself into the thoughts which lie behind the recorded memories of the writer and the context within which the thoughts arose, that is to say, the questionnaire process. For the researcher, the process progresses from the unknown towards the known on the basis of that which is reflected upon -an image of daily life in the 1950's begins to take form.
In contrast to the types of materials presented above, all of which are based on how people remember the past, letters constitute documents which are recorded in the immediate time period, for which they later become historical testimony. Sonja Hagelstam's article deals with letter correspondence during an exceptional time, the war between 1941 and 1944. She focuses on the difficulties of understanding a voluminous body of letter material from that time. In order to understand the texts, many obstacles must be overcome; the researcher must establish his or her own dialogue with the letters, or in some way enter into the dialogue which is in the letters. Sonja Hagelstam addresses the problematics of letter-writing, the frame of the war and how the letters can be interpreted, that is to say, how they can be used as sources in ethnological research. She maintains a view of understanding which is intentional and semantic -that intent and importance should be understood -and she maintains that, for the researcher, it becomes a question of trying to understand the meaning of what is written in the letters and the meaning of letter-writing in general. Here she points out that a swing between the unknown system of references which is found in the war letters and the present understanding possessed by the researcher is important, as if one sees simultaneously both the whole, which is contained within the collection of letters as a whole, and the part, which is each detail. The part, of course, can only be understood within the context of the whole and the whole also comprises the context in which the letters were written.
In Lisbeth Bobacka's article, we already come into an analysis of both interview material as well as questionnaire answers. The theme is "genuine home-cooking." Here the understanding of the researcher constitutes one perpsective of what home-cooking is, but with more detailed insight into what the concept of "genuine" can stand for, she can analyze the collected material in a way which deepens our knowledge of how people relate to everyday food. In these changing times, when food culture has become all the more rich, it is no longer clear that "home-cooking" means the same for everybody. Contrarily, Lisbeth Bobacka finds that for many it has meaning if one can associate the food one eats with some other time and a familiar social context. According to Jean Baudrillard, who Bobacka bases her findings on, mythological objects, old things, and by analogy food which provides memories of past times, provide the most radical forms of escape from present daily life. Bobacka also finds a change in the use of language, from the use of the term "home-cooking" to "real" or "proper" food.
The last two articles are based on the third type of material, historical sources. John Hackman's article deals with the careers of six different rural shipowners, using a variety of source material. Hackman shows how the shipowners operated as entrepreneurs in their area and how well carried-out this entrepreneurship was via training and education, for example, in navigation. Business correspondence, shipping company financing and letter correspondence meant that the shipowners were accustomed to calculating with pen and paper, which was also an advantage when local administration was introduced. It is clear that the resulting source material lends itself to ethnological analysis; the lives of the six shipowners are well-documented and when the documents are placed into the economic and cultural system in which they arose, we get an image, rich in nuances, of a different archipelago economy and of different 10 life possibilities than those indicated by the condition of the remaining buildings and nature.
Like John Hackman, Anna Nyman also makes use of estate inventories to capture the patterns of life in the past. Anna Nyman's article focuses on the way of life of Ekenäs craftsmen in the late 1800's. Based on the estate inventories of ten craftsmen, she explains the material culture of different craftsmen, from estate possessions, furniture, miscellaneous moveables and clothing. She uses Börje Hanssen' s assertion that the craftsmen, as part of the more insignificant middle class, manifest their unique position by dressing in special clothing and having household items that "pagan" groups would not have. The special attributes which Anna Nyman finds are nonetheless different from those found by Hanssen, while her period of study was different from that in the work done about Osterlen. What may have been most astonishing was that the differences in wealth were great even within the same craft trade.
The common denominator in this issue is that the writers strive to determine different ways of life and different types of daily life via their source material. The source material is treated according to the special requirements which exist for each type of material. Therefore, this issue of Budkavlen could even be used as course literature in the difficult art of handling sources and text interpretation.