Juha
Pentikäinen
NORTHERN ETHNOGRAPHY –
On the foundations
of a new paradigm
Introduction
It was 150 years ago when Mathias Alexander Castrén returned home from
his second field expedition to Siberia. The expedition began in January
1843 and was concluded in February 1849. The then
36-year-old scholar came home to start his career as the first
professor of Finnish language and literature at the University of
Helsinki. When Castrén returned he, however, was a tired man, marked by
the symptoms and the pains of the disease in his body and the signs of
his forthcoming death. It was typical of his broad scholarly mind
that Castrén as the professor of the University of Helsinki
devoted his lectures to the folklore and mythology of the Northern
peoples in a way which allows us to consider him not only as the
initiator of Fenno-Ugristics in its broadest meaning, but as one of the
founders of the discipline of ethnography as well.
This paper attempts to present the chronology of the main events in
this process. My hypothesis is that Castrén with his contemporaries
laid the foundation of the fieldwork -based research on Northern
Eurasia in the 1840s in such a way that we may speak about a new
research paradigm, Northern Ethnography. The concept of paradigm is
used in the sense proposed by Thomas S. Kuhn (1977) as a ”disciplinary
matrix” of ”exemplars” followed in the choice of research approaches
and methods. Three founders of the method are introduced in this paper:
M.A. Castrén, A. Reguly and L.L. Laestadius. How their work is related
to another area of fieldwork -oriented research called anthropology
will be discussed next. A further connecting link between Northern
ethnography and cultural anthropology is to be found in the career of
Kai Donner, the Finnish disciple of the first generation of
pioneering scholars of British anthropology. Donner’s fieldwork, which
took place among Samoyeds in 1911-1914, just at the beginning of World
War I extended Castrén’s and Reguly’s Siberian studies.
M.A. Castrén’s fieldwork and the
search for Finnish nationalism vs. Finno-Ugric identity
There is a Finnish proverb, ”Siberia teaches”, referring to the
Finnish hostages of the 19th century whose fate as citizens of
Czarist Russia since 1809 became obligatory work somewhere in Siberia.
Siberia has been the instructor of the present author as well, who
during his 21 expeditions since 1989 has seen how doing fieldwork in
Siberia is not a picnic even today, let alone during Castrén’s time.
The quotation concerns Castrén’s letter to another great pioneer
in Fenno-Ugristics, A.J. Sjögren, an academician in St. Petersburg at
that time:
On this two months’ journey I have had to suffer more and to overcome
more obstacles than ever on my trips. [...] Obdorsk, however, is for me
like London, Paris, and Berlin together.
Castrén was in Obdorsk (today Salekhard) already aware of his terminal
illness. After having stated this tragic state of affairs he continued
in another letter:
Thus my youth’s spring is already over and the grave will be the goal
which I from this time forwards have to keep in of front of my eyes
(Cit. Estlander 1929, 117).
Reconsidering Castrén’s work we should keep in mind that he returned
from his expedition exactly the same year, 1849, when Elias Lönnrot had
completed his longer version of the Kalevala. It was this (New)
Kalevala which became the book, recognized as the only proper text of
the Finnish epic. It soon replaced the (Old) Kalevala of 1835 which in
1841 had been translated into Swedish by Castrén. They are two
different books in spite of the common name. We should keep in mind
what had happened between 1835 and 1849 in Europe and in Finland. This
process of Romanticism and Nationalism in the spirit of the French
Revolution together came to require not only a new version of the
Finnish epic, but a completely new interpretation of the Kalevala.
The Old Kalevala had been compiled by Elias Lönnrot as the mythology of
the Finns both in the Enlightenment mood of Henrik Gabriel Porthan and
Christfried Ganander in Finland and earlier German Romanticism
represented, for example, by Herder and the Grimm brothers in Germany.
The New Kalevala was labelled as the sacred history of the Finns
following the guidelines of the later Finnicized National Romanticism.
The historical interpretation now adopted presupposed a linear
conception of time according to the model of Christianity and the
Western worldview. The new Kalevala history began with the creation and
ended with the voluntary death of the hero, Väinämöinen, after he had
been humiliated by the son of Marjatta, Virgin Mary, whose son,
Jesus Christ, was that of the new god brought in to replace the
old hero. The pre-Christian Finnish worldview was, thus,
displaced by the faith of the new era. In spite of the consequent
linear plot structure of the epic, the shamanistic, cyclic world view
of the rune singers – with its circulation of life and death – is
still, however, to be seen in the single runes of the Kalevala.
From the historical point of view now adopted, the northern dimension
was seen as the frightening Land of Pohjola, the Northern Land, also
called Tuonela, the Abode.
The Preface of the New Kalevala written by Lönnrot canonized the area
of runic poetry found in the White Sea Karelian forests. Its plot
should have been the war between ”us” – the Finns and the Karelians” –
and ”them” in the North, the Lapps’ Pohjola.1 This kind of war between
the two related peoples had never taken place – actually there is not a
word for “war” in the Sami languages – but it was needed to fulfill the
social order for a narrative of the heroic Finnish past, and it clearly
followed the model of a Viking Age war epic. Everything was culminated
in the Robbery of the Sampo from Pohjola, i.e. from the hands of the
evil Lapps. The shamanistic poem of the singing competition between
Väinämöinen and Joukahainen was, accordingly, reinterpreted as
the battle between ”our” nojd who, of course, was mightier than
that of ”those,” the Lapps. An opinion was at that time also well
established that the Sami had no epic poetry at all – and that
Fjellner’s Lappish narrative on The Son of the Sun’s Courting Journey
to the Land of the Giants which also appeared the same year of 1849 was
unauthentic. This opinion has been reconsidered only as late as the
1990s and shown to be false; there is an epic and shamanistic style
of “juoiggat”.
What caused this profound change in the interpretation? Probably the
patriotic, National Romantic ambitions simply got the upper hand in
Lönnrot’s work in the 1840s. Lönnrot himself along with his
interpretations and the Kalevala on its way from the Old version to the
New became a part of a national “Kalevala process” provoked by
the social order, the expectations, and hopes of the young Finnish
establishment. The change of attitude was made easier by the fact that
Lönnrot’s most immediate circle had also changed. Such persons as
Sjögren and Castrén were absent, for example, both of whom had started
in the spirit of Romanticism but had subsequently become somewhat
cooler in their nationalism. Sjögren had left Helsinki for St.
Petersburg and Castrén, again, went to Siberia with the grant arranged
by Sjögren through the Russian Czarist Academy in St. Petersburg.
Castrén and Lönnrot who had thus far been working quite closely in
their publication and research of the Finnish folklore and mythology,
clearly went into different directions after their joint fieldwork
enterprise – partly funded by Lönnrot – which ended at the White Sea in
1842. Lönnrot decided to return to this field to find epics in Onega
while Castrén went on his trip over the Mezen tundra to Komi Zyryans.
He crossed the Urals – the part of the tour which took two months
thereby ruining his health – and went on his fieldwork among the Ob
Ugric peoples in northwestern Siberia. We can only conclude that the
field became his instructor and opened his view in observing folk
customs and religious rituals and in understanding and interpreting
what was told to him by his language tutors in the Siberian villages.
Castrén’s fieldwork orientation was different from that of Lönnrot, who
was mainly looking for the rune singers. Castrén showed much more
understanding towards shamans than Dr. Lönnrot, whose attitude towards
them was quite negative.
Castrén’s and Lönnrot’s romanticism, often called as Fennomania, also
got different representations and manifestations. At the same time when
Lönnrot was looking after the heroic Finnish past Castrén went to the
Siberian North to trace the “Altaic peoples” - Castrén’s concept
of the Uralic family of languages based on his hypothesis of their home
base at the Altaic mountain range. We may conclude that Lönnrot’s epic
worked for Finnish nationalism not only among the Finns but also among
the Karelians and Estonians (Kalevipoeg) as well. What became manifest
in Castrén’s work accompanied by the generations of researchers sent by
the Finno-Ugric Society was the emergence of Fenno-Ugristics as a
discipline. The search for common Finno-Ugric elements, at first in
language and afterwards in other aspects of human life, even in racial
and genealogical features, sometimes led to Pan-Finno-Ugric attitudes
to be recognized, e.g., in theories on Shamanism as the Uralic
Urreligion,2 as expressed in the debate at the IX International
Congress of Fenno-Ugristics in Tartu AD 2000.
Castrén´s fieldwork in Siberia was quite thoroughly programmed by
Sjögren in his advisory role in St. Petersburg. Castrén was prescribed,
i.e., during his tour among the small populations in the huge, rarely
populated territory between the Uralic mountains and the southwestern
Chinese border, to record local folk songs, proverbs, historical
legends and other traditions. Another linguist, Anton Schiefner, from
St. Petersburg soon after Castren’s death published them in the
magnificent series: ”Nordische Reisen und Forschungen” in 12 volumes
between 1853 and 1862. Most of Castrén’s folklore collecting took place
among the Samoyed and was published by T. Lehtisalo: ”Samojedische
Volksdichtung. Gesammelt von M.A. Castrén.” Publications on
Castrén’s voyages by Aulis J. Joki show how Castrén carried out his
fieldwork. The following quotation comes from Castrén’s less known role
as the collector of Turkish epics among the Tatars of Minusinsk steppe
at Akaban, a Yenisei tributary (1950):
“No rest is possible where several hundred cows, sheep and goats have
been gathered, since plenty of music is born” – in Väinämöinen’s words
– as ”breaks all the ears and chases sleep away for a week”. It was my
luck that the host of the house proved to be kin of the bards, amusing
me all the night long with his heroic narratives. Their proper
performance should be singing accompanied by a harp with two strings.
Because a singer performing this way can never finish his song in
one night - the singer, like a shaman - opens the treasures of his
mouth during the nights only. I let this man tell me the contents of
his best songs only, in accordance with his wish. (Castrén’s diary,
1857, Nordische Reisen II, pp. 305-306, with an epical song text
of 80 folio
pages)
A. Reguly, a Hungarian link between
the Scandinavian and Siberian Arctic
Castrén’s first colleague to enter the territory of the Ob Ugric
Peoples was the Hungarian scholar Antal Reguly, who was doing fieldwork
among them in Siberia in 1843-45. These two men with theirfield work
initiated the discipline of the Finno-Ugric Studies. Interesting
enough, they lived in the same decades and died at the same age of 39
years, Castrén lived 1813-52 and Reguly lived 1819-58. While Castrén
could at least lecture on some parts of his collections, Reguly only
collected. Castrén’s manuscripts, diaries and letters were published
posthumously, 1853-1862, but Reguly’s major collections at the
Hungarian Academy of Science and Letters in Budapest, whose editorial
work was started by B. Munkácsi and J. Pápay, are still closed because
of their processing to publication.
Interestingly enough, both Castrén and Reguly started their Northern
fieldwork career from Scandinavian north. Castrén’s fieldwork was
initiated in his home territory in Finnish Lappland in the 1830s, and
Reguly in 1839-41 built up a direct Finno-Ugric link from Scandinavian
tundra fells, including Castrén’s home base in Tervola, to the Siberian
taiga. Reguly spent a couple of years in Scandinavia, Finland and
Estonia. In May 1840 he started his tour to the northern parts of
Finland and Sweden. His diary includes reports about his experiences
with Finnish peasants in the countryside. When entering in to Elias
Lönnrot’s home territories in Kainuu, he quotes Schiller’s words: ”I
must love this people because of its strength in modesty.” In Nurmes,
Reguly was able to record some information about local beliefs and
sages. Typically enough, his diary completely lacks runic and other
folklore texts in verse. Like Castrén, Reguly was more interested in
prose narratives and ethnographical fieldwork. Reguly also tells about
Lönnrot’s field work. His report includes a rare contemporary report
about what Reguly had heard on Lönnrot’s double role as a medical
doctor and as a folklorist:
Lönnrot collected many songs here. Before his arrival, he used to send
a word in every direction so that rune singers would come to the
vicarage. So they came and Lönnrot wrote down what they sang. Sometimes
they brought ill people for whom Lönnrot prescribed medicine and
powder. He gave them 40-60 copeecks as their payment, in accordance to
their skills in singing the songs. (Tervonen 1944,
19)
Reguly’s diary shows how dependent even he was on the information given
by the local Lutheran ministers on the demography and common state of
the communities he visited. When this information included their folk
beliefs and sorcery, it was not completely trustworthy, however.
Reguly’s final goal was to reach Lapp territories in the North: ”When I
fly away like a night owl in the evening, and wake up in another remote
area, the whole journey is like a dream.” Before entering Kuusamo where
Reguly is finally able, he assumes, to listen to Lappish speech with
his own ears, he then decides to cross the border to visit White Sea
Karelia. His report on the brief stop in Lonkka, Vuokkiniemi, does not
contain any rune, but rather contains observations on the Karelian
dialect and lifestyle. Reguly’s aim was also to check the brave,
although untrue theory proposed by his countryman Mátyás Bell,
according to which Karelia should have been the ancient home base of
the Hungarians.
After this short visit in White Sea Karelia Reguly continues with his
journey on the Finnish side of the border. But, speakers of Lappish
language are neither found in Kuusamo, Kemijärvi nor in Sodankylä yet;
rather, plenty of mosquitos can be found instead. It was finally in
Kittilä where Reguly had his first contact with the Lapps. He even
wrote down a couple of Lapp songs, but did not consider it proper
to record any of the half-barbaric local songs from his Finnish
drivers. Reguly was active in writing statistics about the then
disappearing Kemi Lapps from ministers and lay officials in Kittilä,
also in Swedish. His diary includes folklore, e.g., incantations he
heard from local sages in Kittilä. Muonio(nniska) appeared as a less
attractive stop to Reguly on his way from Kittilä to Karesuando.
Karesuando which, during the Swedish era used to be a part of Enontekiö
parish, was a village community located on both sides of the
Swedish-Finnish (Russian) border river. Karesuando became one of the
peak moments during Reguly’s journey at the emergence of the new
paradigm. In his unpublished diary Reguly relates that he did not learn
as much from anyone else during his whole Scandinavian tour as he did
from Pastor Laestadius during his stay in Karesuando vicarage. Reguly’s
letter to Mr. Kilpinen from Vaasa, November 21st, 1840, gives
additional information about the linguistic aspects of the stay:
I lived with Laestadius two weeks learning as much as I could. The
result is that I am still in Finland. Lappish comes much nearer to
Hungarian than Finnish. I decided to learn it, because it is impossible
for me to return to my home country without achieving at least some
advantage for my future research, as much as possible.
From the point of view of both linguistic and ethnographical research
it was a happy historical accident that Reguly happened to meet
Laestadius during the most active period of Laestadius’ ethnographical
career. After having concluded his tour as the Lapp guide of ”La
Recherche” expedition of the French Academy in 1838-1840 Laestadius had
settled down to write Lapp mythology, the dream he had expressed for
the first time in 1833. After having just finished Volume I of the
manuscript, ”Gudalära”, The Doctrine of Deities, Laestadius let his
foreign guest copy extracts of the text after Reguly had promised ”not
to publish them before they had been published in French or in another
civilized language”. Since Reguly then wrote tens of pages of
Laestadius’ text in Swedish its existence became known to the
scientific world one century and a half before its in extenso
publication: Fragmenter i Lappska Mythologin (1997).
Reguly’s diary with the corpus of Laestadius’ Mythology text are in the
library of the Hungarian Academy of Science and Letters. Interestingly
enough, it also contains Lapp texts recorded by Brita Kajsa Allstadius,
Laestadius’ wife, -- a testimony of her skills in Lappish,
questioned by church historians -- as well as from Anders
Fjellner, ”a Lapp-born teacher and minister living in Maunu village in
Karesuando”. This paragraph indicates that Laestadius had led Reguly to
meet the author of the Lappish epical text.
Besides mythology and lappology, Reguly and Laestadius discussed such
topics as botany -- Laestadius’ expertise -- minerology, geology, some
aspects of psychology as well as the problematical position of Finland
inside Russia. Reguly was active in writing down the bibliographies of
lappological texts he learned about from Laestadius’ library, including
grammars written by Rask and Stockfleth, extracts on Åbo Tidningar,
statistics on Lapp territories, lifestyle, morals, etc. Reguly
concludes the significance of his visit in his letter to Mr. Kilpinen:
I have never discussed with anyone else as much as with Laestadius. I
learned a lot; his speeches were as treasures I had been longing and
seeking for a long time. His every word sometimes solves questions
about which I have been uncertain. How foolish may our education at
home be! How much have I learned while thinking the other accompanions.
Reguly’s search seemed to turn in to a pilgrimage. The next stop was in
Tornio, then Kemi at the vicarage of Mattias Castrén, M.A. Castrén’s
uncle; the stop after that was with S.F. van Born, Governor of Oulu. In
spite of his particular problems, travelling illegally without a
passport in foreign countries and in continuous lack of money,
due to the delay of his grant -- promised by the Learned Society in
Hungary -- he now was ready to define the goal of his life in his
letter to his family in Hungary from Vaasa ”as his patriotic duty with
an advantage to his country” (letter quotation from Tervonen 1944):
After having sent my last letter home I am no more any enthusiast in my
present studies. I have set the goal of my life so that it is my duty
to deal with them as a scientist. I had doubts about my decision to
commit myself to Lappish studies. I could not leave that, however,
because of my inner drive, like a woman who does not listen to anything
other than that. I have, however, quite often asked why I do – and for
what. If one divides his strength between matters it is not possible to
achieve any proper results. I have now decided to commit myself wholly
to this, to live for it and work for this scientifically serious aim. I
am happy after having given this special goal and its own nature to my
life, and the aim I clearly foresee, where to put my effort without
ever surrendering from that.
Young Reguly returned to Helsinki in the fall of
1840. He was eager to proceed in his Lappish studies. His new interests
included Finnish folk poetry so that he even translated an extract of
the Kalevala. Since this seemed to happen exactly at the same time when
Castrén was working with his own Swedish translation it again is a
clear testimony to the intensive interaction of the two young scholars
before their Siberian experiences. Reguly expressed his scholarly
devotion to finding reasons for his existence in Finland which were to
create the preconditions for his future tasks. The following letter to
his friend in Hungary indicates that the source of Reguly’s scholarly
enthusiasm also lay in the principles of cultural Darwinism; it was in
the primitive mind of the man of the cold North where the origins of
culture should be sought:
You know my drive towards the Northern nature, people and everything
there. It is for this reason that I have always wanted to travel to the
North, not to the civilized South about which I may learn enough from
travel reports. What annoyed me was that I could not comprehend Man of
Nature, the primitive circumstances described by history, and with how
few products of the wild nature someone may be satisfied. I am happy
now. This tour has shown the whole history of development of a
country and a people. The Nordic tour is not only interesting for
someone who wants to study magnetism and languages but for every
civilized man, since it gives a proper picture on the origin of
culture. (quotation from Tervonen 1944, 24)
L.L. Laestadius as Sami mythologist
and ethnographer
Lars Levi Laestadius was born in Jäckvik on January 10, 1800, and died
in Pajala on February 21, 1861. His life cycle can be divided into four
epochs. Each of them are distinguished by various physical, social and
cultural environments, special roles and tasks as well as specific foci
of interest, realized at different times. Each of these epochs may also
be characterized by distinctive personal, social, cultural and
religious identities and can be formulated as follows:
1. Laestadius’ childhood was spent at home in Jäckvik, southern Swedish
Lappmark in the vicarage of his half-brother Carl Erik Laestadius in
Kvikkjokk until Carl Erik’s death (1800-1816); 2. He subsequently
studied with another brother Petrus Laestadius – who was later a
journalist with great interest in Lappology – in the high school of
Härnösand and at the University of Uppsala where he participated in the
first joint botanic and ecological expeditions (1816-1824); 3. After
his ordination in February 1825 he acted in a clerical capacity -- as
the vicar of Karesuando and visitor of northern Swedish parishes and as
part of several ecological expeditions – and engaged in scholarly
activities as, variously, a botanist, ethnographer, theologian and
philosopher (1825-1844); 4. After his conversion – dated 1844 on the
basis of his autobiography and correspondence – he functioned as a
revivalist minister, campaigner for temperance, organizer of people’s
education and as a newspaper editor. In this way he established himself
as the founder and leader of the religious movement, which at first was
known as a group inside a former movement, called Recallers, but later
on was seen carrying his name; Laestadianism, first in Karesuando until
1849, then in the Finnish-speaking parish of Pajala on the Swedish side
of the Tornio river valley until his death (1844-1861).
This last period in Lars Levi Laestadius’ life and the role
subsequently connected to it has usually obscured his role as an
ethnographer. And, yet, this career would only be enough to keep his
name in the chronicles.
Apart from being a well-known ecologist and botanist with great
expertise in Northern areas he was, indeed, a remarkable and
eminent representative of the early Sami ethnography. Of special
importance here is his least known work, written in the role of a Sami3
mythologist and mythographer. His posthumously published work
Fragmenter i lappska mythologien (“Fragments on Lapp Mythology”) did
not appear at length in Finnish until as late as 1994 and was
finally published by Nordic Institute of Folklore (NIF) in 1997 in the
original Swedish version.
The volume was produced in response to a request
from France in the late 1830s. The request came from a Mr Gaimard, who
was the leader of the French expedition to the Swedish Lappmarks.
Laestadius was one of the five Swedish scholars hired via the King. His
particular role was to act as a botanist and as a “Lapp” guide to this
expedition. After the expedition team had recognized Laestadius’ huge
knowledge of Lappish history and folklore, Gaimard asked him to produce
a survey of Lapp mythology.
The first part of Fragmenter, entitled Gudalära, or, the Doctrine on
Divinity, was signed by Laestadius on May 8, 1840, and the three other
chapters – including his comments to Fellman – were finally
ready to be sent to Paris on May 1, 1845. Part II dealt with Offer-lära
(“sacrifice”), Part III with Spådomslära (“prophesy”, more exactly Lapp
Nåjdtro, i.e. shamanism), and Part IV covered valda stycken af
Lapparnes Sagohäfder including a selection of Lapp folk tales.
Although the latter parts were ready by November 1844, Laestadius
nevertheless decided to complete the text by appending his comments to
another mythology which had been simultaneously worked out by Jacob
Fellman. Since Fellman published Laestadius’ comments with his own
Anteckningar they became familiar in this form to academic circles long
before Laestadius’ own manuscript, which disappeared for more than a
century, was ever considered on its own.
When considering Laestadius’ Fragmenter it is important to remember
that his personal religious conversion had taken place in early 1844.
To quote the often repeated expression about the rapidly emerging
awakenings in his congregation: “It burned in the snow”. Thus, the
conversion occurred simultaneously with his work on mythology.
Laestadius was well aware of his Sami roots and proud of them; he
considered his profound local orientation as a special strength while
doing his fieldwork among the Sami and writing his mythology. He wrote
himself:
[I] was born up in Lappmark, was brought up in Lappmark, I now live in
Lappmark and I even have, maybe more than anyone else, travelled around
all the parishes in all the Lappmarks [...] (Laestadius 1997, 8; see
also Pentikäinen 1997, 260-261).
Laestadius’ own field experiences and his own intellectual and
spiritual ambitions are manifest especially in the Part III that deals
with the Spådomslära or Nåjdtro, i.e., shamanism. In his descriptions
of the knowledge and practices of the Lapp Nåjd, Laestadius raises
ethical questions about his personal responsibility as a minister who
has presumed to write a textbook on Lapp mythology:
The author who is no Trollkarl and who does not have too much desire to
acquire such a capacity, must carefully scrutinise the evidence and
fairly present even facts which are inexplicable to himself with
respect to the traditions associated with the role (Laestadius 1997,
137).
When discussing further the eternal problem of the existence of the
spiritual world, he reaffirms his belief in its existence by referring
to the French revolution (Chapter 1), according to which thoughts for
“the immortality of the soul should have belonged to the madnesses of
human kind”. He says that a distinction should be made between the
authentic Trollkarlar and the “Charlataner”.
In consideration of these points, Laestadius proceeds to write only
about “such people who have been regarded as Trollkarlar by the Lapps
(Chapter 2) and who have, through their witchcraft, been able to do
something good or bad”. Applying contemporary psychological
insight to his observation of the practices of the Trollkarlar,
Laestadius cites Tornaeus (Chapter 3) on the subject, then relates
detailed “examples nearer to our time” on the basis of his knowledge of
Lapp mythology (Chapters 4-6), even going on to mention Swedenborg of
Stockholm (Chapter 7) before concluding that the evidence suggests
that there are things which are “unexplainable in terms of normal
human understanding”. At the same time Laestadius’ text is a testimony
to his ambitious effort to establish a link between sources on ancient
Lapp Nåjdtro – as a regionalist he never uses the more universal
concept of shamanism – and its psychological, rational or philosophical
interpretations of his era. Ultimately, he deems it appropriate to
leave the more thorough explanations of the trance state in the capable
hands of psycho- and physiologists. It is merely his task to
“demonstrate historically” that “Spåmannen really did fall asleep,
swam, and that in this condition were subject to fantasies, visions and
dreams”.
What was typical of Laestadius’ mythological work
was sharp source criticism. This concerned both the scrutiny of
the sources on Scandinavian Lappology and his own ethnographical data.
He quotes plenty of stories from his informants letting their voices be
heard through their texts which he had heard himself in Lapp kotas
(cabins) – all of them he is said to have visited in his “Swedish
lappmarks” calling this language kåtalapska (Lappish spoken in cabins).
Much information comes from his own family, sometimes from his parents,
grandparents and people in the surrounding Sami family lines and
neighbors; persons whose names are given, and with whom he had played
and talked about the matter. For him Lapp mythology is a reconstruction
of folk beliefs, finally gathered together by himself as an
author, hence the Fragments. An important distinction is made between
the average knowledge of everybody (today defined as collective
tradition) and the esoteric secret wisdom of the experts called
“noaidis” (shamans) in Sami language.
K.R. Donner, a scholar uniting British
Anthropology and Northern Ethnography
In the historiography of cultural studies, ethnography is too often
labeled as an “old-fashioned descriptive research”. It should have been
replaced by “modern anthropology” which finally led cultural research
from the archives and museums to “breathe in the air of the fresh
anthropological field”. The chapters on Castrén, Reguly and Laestadius
above indicate how thoroughly these earlier scholars based their
scholarship on fieldwork. Their research was carried out in the
1830-40s in a way which fulfills any criteria of modern fieldwork
-based research. The example of Kai (Karl Renhold) Donner’s
(1888-1935) Siberian field research is a case which illustrates the
fruitful combination of two research paradigms, those of British
anthropology and Northern ethnography.
Born into a Swedish-speaking family, and as the son
of Otto Donner, Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Linguistics at
the University of Helsinki, Kai Donner was educated into the spirit of
religious liberalism and bilingualism prevailing in the atmosphere of
the Finnish university circles at the turn of the 20th century.
Finnish nationalism got its expression in the search for Finno-ugric
relationships; his father Otto Donner, as the founder of the
Finno-Ugric Society in 1883, created the economic and scholarly basis
for the strong tradition of research which brought a generation of
Finnish linguists to do fieldwork among peoples speaking
Finnish-related languages in Russia. This also became the fate of his
son Kai Donner. In his case this happened in 1911-14, happily
enough, just before the research possibilities of Finnish
scholars among their related peoples became closed for two generations,
due to the events of the World War which led into the end of the
Czarist Empire, the formation of the Soviet Union, and Finland’s
separation from it as a new independent country.
After he had concluded his studies in Altaic and Finno-Ugric languages
and practical philosophy at the University of Helsinki, the Hungarian
language in Budapest in 1908, and anthropology in Cambridge, Kai Donner
spent altogether ca. 3,5 years of his life in Siberia -- just at the
emergence of World War I, and after Otto Donner’s death in 1909.
Following the example of his father, who was a member of the Senate,
Kai Donner became involved in Finnish society and political life in
several roles which filled his life for its last two decades,
1915-1935.
What became important for Kai Donner’s scholarly initiation were two
foreign study periods: in 1908 in Budapest and in 1911 in Cambridge.
The latter visit recommended by Edvard Westermarck, the holder of
Professor Chair in Anthropology at London School of Economics and that
of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, gave him a good
introduction into British anthropology. This stay became particularly
significant in the history of Finnish research, since Kai Donner was
the first Finnish student to have this opportunity just before his
first Siberian expedition started in the fall of 1911. His personal
contacts with several distinguished representatives of the main then
existing schools of British anthropology, and acquaintance with the
huge bibliography written in English about anthropology gave Donner
keys to open new doors to an Anglo-American readership which had been
closed to Finnish scholarship so far. Most of Finnish scholars at the
turn of the 20th century read and wrote mainly in German, and their
nearest network of cooperation took place with German- and
Russian-speaking universities and their scientific world.
There were three main
schools of thought at the turn of the 20th century which British
anthropology named, according to respective universities as their
centers. A.C. Haddon and W.H.R. Rivers acted in Cambridge, S.G.
Seligman, Westermarck and later on B. Malinowski in London,
Marrett and later on A.R. Radcliffe-Brown in Oxford. The first field
laboratory of British anthropologists in the Commonwealth was the study
on the Torres Bay people initiated by Haddon and Rivers in 1898. This
project started functionalism before a new British discipline “social
anthropology” later on defined it more precisely and in social terms by
Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and others. Westermarck’s position in
London opened to his countryman the possibilities to work with
prominent British scholars. His correspondence from and to his home
country indicates how encounters were arranged and how they succeeded.
During his stay in Cambridge, Donner of course became familiar with the
Cambridge school and with the problems and the main results of the
Torres project, which was considered a classical example of “an
intensive research of restricted areas”. It was Haddon who
introduced him to Malinowski, the founder of British social
anthropology. Donner’s satisfaction becomes manifest from his letter to
Professor E.N. Setälä in May 1911: “Haddon, Rivers, Frazer and
Duckworth give me personal instruction. Otherwise I read literature and
study in the museum.”
In Cambridge Donner received both practical training and guidance for
his fieldwork. Sir James Frazer even gave his portable grammophone to
Donner after having heard about his plans for field research. Later on
Donner writes as being thankful for the genealogical and other
sociological questionnaires he had been able to become acquainted with
during his stay in Cambridge. Donner tells in his memoirs in 1931 how
Haddon introduced him to Rivers’ article “The genealogical method as
anthropological inquiry” in the journal Sociological Review of 1910:
They have many practical methods to offer. [...] Its contents and
meaning was explained in details to me orally by its author. Since both
Haddon and Rivers have used this method successfully they advised me to
try it in my forthcoming Siberian studies, and so I did. [...] I have
had only positive results from its use among the Samoyeds and later on
in Finland. Using this method we are able to return our collections to
the period already passed and to everything whose forgettance we want
to hinder through our gathering. Even here it will be the key to open
us the gate to the world already gone. It makes us possible to remember
even in a touchable manner the old beliefs and customs, ancestral
worship etc.
What Donner learned in Cambridge was the practice of the ethnological
fieldwork in the British practice of it. “The Study of Man” by Haddon
in 1908 defines ethnology as “a description of a man, a tribe, people
in a smaller or larger area” demanding special characteristics from the
scholar. Donner’s field data from Siberia were arranged according to
the typological and genealogical model he had learned from his British
teachers. He assumes that these methods might be useful in Siberia in
spite of his doubts that the Samoyeds probably do not remember very
much about their ancestors and parents. The genealogical method was the
way in which Donner, in 1915, described the inheritance of shamanistic
prestige symbols in a Ket river shamanic clan. Another method Donner
finds useful from British anthropology is anthropometry to be found in
the reports of his Siberian anthropological
research.
Kai Donner’s idea to travel to Siberia to study the Samoyeds probably
came at home from his father Otto Donner: Since his father’s dream
about a Siberian expedition was never realized, due to his other duties
and early death, Kai wanted to fulfill it. The deep appreciation felt
by the son for his father’s life’s work becomes manifest from the diary
written by Donner on 1 April 1913, on his 25th birthday, at the
end of his first Siberian tour. Donner made two different expeditions
to Siberia, the first in 1911-13, the second in 1914. Between them he
took part in a research seminar led by Westermarck at the University of
Helsinki. After Donner had introduced the results of his fieldwork to
his teacher and audience, he was encouraged to write his doctoral
thesis on the Samoyed. But in what subject, since there was no chair in
history of religions at the University of Helsinki, neither then nor
before the foundation of the “science of religion” discipline as late
as in 1970? Heikki Paasonen, another contemporary scholar of
Fenno-Ugristics, even suggested that Donner should become unfaithful to
philology and start to write his dissertation on comparative religion
instead.
Donner thus
started his fieldwork at the age of 23 soon after completing his
academic year in Cambridge. What he wanted to do was to follow in
Castrén’s footsteps as faithfully as possible but, on the basis
of the new results of Fenno-Ugristics, to check out some of the false
hypotheses made by Castrén who in his eagerness had found more
relatives to Finnish peoples than there really were, according to the
opinions of Fenno-Ugrists at the turn of the 20th century. Donner
writes that Castrén’s idea on the “Altaic languages” consisting of
Uralic and Mongolian-Turkic peoples with their common home base
at the Altaic mountains was wrong and that their partly common
vocabulary was, according to Donner, rather due to their long-lasting
contacts in the Siberian territories.
Donner’s two tours were planned so that they covered
the main areas of the Samoyedic peoples whose total number was
estimated to be 18000 at that time. His field experiences may be
followed from his travel report written on the basis of his fresh
memories, first published in 1915, and much later on in 1979 with a
preface by his son Jörn Donner. Since Jörn was only 2 years old at the
moment of his father’s death in 1935, his memory only manages to reach
the “continuous longing for the distant” spirit of his home felt and
retold by those who had shared the manifold life with Kai Donner: as a
scholar until 1915; as an activist in the learned circles supporting
the White troops before and during the Finnish Civil War, culminating
Kai Donner’s role as General Mannerheim’s right hand in the concluding
moments of the final battle between the White and the Red in Tampere in
1918; in several duties in Finnish society and politics until the last
years of the 1930s when Donner returned to his field files without
anymore being able to finish their publication, however, due to his
illness and forthcoming death at the age of 47.
Donner’s field tour started from Helsinki by train
to Tomsk in August 1911. Crossing the Eurasian border without even
recognizing the Ural Mountains from the window of the Siberian train
became the cause of his first dissatisfaction. Second was the rapid
Russification process of the Finnish people experienced by Donner
during his contacts with the Samoyeds he met during his first Siberian
tour from Tomsk to Narym, Tymskoye and in the settlements he visited by
the Ob and Tym rivers. In his diary Donner reports his contacts with
Russian officials, Orthodox priests and missionaries, encounters with
European emigrants, sometimes his own countrymen working as merchants,
and ministers as prisoners sent to exile in Siberia. Donner’s account
of his first tour is a personal story including experiences
eyewitnessed and reported with an ethnological view and mind, which was
more typical of British ethnology than that of the more
material-culture-oriented fieldwork carried out by Dr. U.T. Sirelius,
the first professor of Finno-Ugric ethnology at the University of
Helsinki. In Siberia Sirelius was known as “Uuno Davidovich”, whose
steps Donner recognized he was following at the river Ob, on the basis
of stories told by a couple hosting him after Sirelius in the village
of
Kargasok.
In his fieldwork Donner was following along the
lines of Castrén, in trying to find “ a good Samoyed professor”, who as
a language authority could guide him to the sources of the vocabulary
in the respective languages and, as an ethnographer, to help him
understand the meanings words had in different Samoyed languages. After
having spent two months with his “master” in Tymskoye Donner understood
that “the very best way to learn their language was to live as isolated
a life as possible with them in the territories where Russian influence
was not yet observable”. As an ethnographer he also found it
significant to take part in their wedding, Christmas and other
ceremonies and soon found himself to be their “medical doctor” whose
help was often needed. He writes: “After having learned Samoyedic
enough I decided to move in with them and started to live in the way
they did.” After having done so Donner soon became aware that the ugly
stories told about the Ostyaks – meaning the Samoyed – by Russians were
untrue ethnic folklore about neighboring peoples. Donner recognized
that the new Russian settlers used Samoyeds as their servants and day
workers, paying rather in spirits than in money which caused the severe
problem of alcoholism he was obliged to observe everywhere. His
identification with his field was so strong he was even considered a
son of a Samoyed family.
Although Donner used field technology
(questionnaires, phonography, etc.) obtained from the British
school, Castrén was his main mentor whose working hypotheses and
methods were tested throughout Donner’s fieldwork. He fully agrees with
Castrén’s opinion about the lifestyle differences between Samoyed
populations living in the villages at the Ob and those populations
which remained in their chums (cabins covered with reindeer skin) at
the tributaries. The fact eyewitnessed by the present author in his
fieldwork of the 1990s is that the former had become Russified but the
latter had preserved their old lifestyle and even the most esoteric
elements of their ethnic religions. Since both Castrén and Donner were
observing Siberian lifestyle in Czarist Russia, Christian influence
from the side of the Russian Orthodox Church and their missionary
stations was greater than during my own fieldwork which took place in
post-Soviet atmosphere. I was informed that the secret shamanic
knowledge had survived Soviet exile as a persecuted lifestyle,
also due to the lack of religious competition and control practiced by
the Church and its priests.
Donner was particularly happy after having found the
isolated Samoyeds at the river Ket who still had shamans as their
leaders. He writes:
The most beautiful memories of my journey are related to those
wonderful nights when I could take part in the pagan worship services
in the dim taiga. I very well recall one such occasion. There were some
men sitting at a peninsula of the river. The evening was quiet, the
fire almost finished, and the shades of the bodies of the ancient
Siberian leaf pine trees were seen against the bright skies. The
ground was covered by snow and all of nature seemed to sleep the dream
of wilderness. Men had for a long time told old tales about their
heroes long passed away, and the sage had talked to the spirits of the
skies and the earth. I had forgotten everything I had left behind as a
civilized man. I did not think about Christian and other dogmas. With
childish admiration I had fallen into what I saw and heard. I felt as
being a child again and I imagined in the same way as in my
childhood that all things had a soul and air and water and were
populated by mystical, visible and invisible spirits leading the world
and human fates in an unexplainable manner.
Donner’s encounter with the Kamas is told in next chapter. Among the
last representatives – eight in number – he was able to meet an elderly
woman who in her youth had met M.A.Castrén. She sang him the
following song, a kind of simple lament, on the death of her people:
Where I used to walk about,
There the black mountains disappeared.
A golden grass used to grow where I wandered,
In my own land.
The black mountains became invisible.
I used to be strong,
Nothing is now left.
I used to have many children,
I remained alone.
Where I used to go fishing,
There even my lakes disappeared,
So that I cannot see them anymore.
The roof logs of my cabin have already rotted off,
And all the bark on the wood has tangled together.
Donner tells in his book (1915) that he was able to
record this song with his phonograph. Then he let the Kamass listen to
the song from his apparatus: “I clearly recall how all who understood
the words became very serious. Finally everybody, both men and women,
started wiping their eyes. The atmosphere became even more tragic when
a small boy explained thta the one who sang was his grandmother who
died a long time ago”. (Donner 1915, 253.)
Kai Donner belongs to those scholars whose destiny
became World War I. He survived the war but became engaged with other
duties. After his death a posthumous volume “Among the Siberian
Samoyeds” was published. I would like to quote the last paragraph of
the book because it portrays the ambivalent feelings of the scholar
who, though a stranger, has shared all aspects of the life of his
subjects in the field:
This was for the second time that I returned from the wilderness to the
civilized life. Of course, I felt much happier to be with my nearest
ones in my own country, the war probably having also got to do with it.
But, in spite of everything, I again had the same feeling that the
previous time: my joy got mixed with a deep feeling of missing. I had
lived on the big steppes and endless deserts and now came to the market
places of civilization. I was longing for everything I had left behind.
There I forgot about my problems and worries. The fresh life and the
amazing staying with those children of Nature I had already learned to
like, were always on my mind.
Whosoever has seen only the civilized sied of life cannot understand
the other world. But he who has seen life in its most natural forms,
will never forget what he has seen. After he has left the great
wilderness, memories grow into a splendid revelation in his mind, into
something he can never get rid of. He has become a person living some
kind of a dual life. He has left behind some part of his personality.
This is what has happened to me as well. (Donner 1915, 262.)
I have quoted Kai Donner extensively because, in my opinion, he
succeeded in expressing something very essential about the experiences
of a Northern scholar who has spent enough time in the tundra or taiga
with “his people” to have learnt not only to describe but also to
understand their lifestyle and outlook. What is typical of this kind of
relationship between the scholar and the subject? Kai Donner writes:
“You will never learn to understand the finest nuances of the life and
offer your enthusiasm and love to those you study, if you do not search
them out on your own part” (Donner 1915, 212).
What is typical of this kind of reciprocal
“interaction” method in field work? Donner writes: “If you want to
search for something basic human, both good and bad, which is often
latent in them, it is necessary for you to accept their way of life.
Nothing could be more interesting and challenging thatn an in-depth
penetration into this ever-changing research field with endless
nuances”. (Donner 1915, 212.)
“Rather deeply than broadly” – this is how my
Canadian colleague, Emeritus Professor of folklore, Herbert Halpert
(1958) expressed the same ideas as Kai Donner above. It is also one of
the main principles I have learnt to follow in my own fieldwork
(Pentikäinen 1978, 13-28, 49-76.) You may mentally pose very broad
phenomenological questions unless you and your people in the field have
enough time and patience to learn about each other so that you are able
not only to describe but also to consider the problem, and not only as
a research one but also from the point of view of the people you intend
to study.
Conclusion: The three Pioneers of
Northern Ethnography
Fieldwork carried out by M.A. Castrén and A. Reguly among the Uralic
peoples in northwestern Siberia in the 1840s started a new paradigm,
“Northern ethnography”.
This fieldwork -based research activity started half a century before
Franz Boas, founder of American anthropology (1858-1942) had made his
first expedition to Baffin Island in 1883-84. It was Boas’ great
success to train two generations of American anthropologists. It was
typical of their historicist approach that each scholar did fieldwork
in his/her laboratory producing an indepth study on his/her people or
tribe on the basis of a critical historical analysis of the material
collected by the anthropologist, sometimes from one informant only. The
Culture and Personality School thus became famous for its hypothesis
that this gifted person with his biography and repertoire was supposed
to represent each culture and personality typical of it.
As told above, the Torres Bay project from 1898 led British
anthropology to the field in the spirit taught in 1911 to Kai Donner.
During his stay in Cambridge Donner was, among others, introduced to B.
Malinowski who had joined the staff of the London School of Economics
in 1910 before he went to Australia, New Guinea in 1914 and the
Trobriand Islands in 1915-16 and 1917-18. Malinowski became famous for
his fieldwork there and with his books which brought functionalism into
anthropology. Another contemporary scholar A.R. Radcliffe-Brown started
his fieldwork career from Western Australia in 1910-12, continuing on
in Tonga in 1916 and in Cape Town 1920-25; his classical work “The
Andaman Islanders” was published in 1922.
It was Donner’s great contribution as one of the first disciples of
fieldwork -oriented British anthropology to do research among Siberian
Samoyeds in 1911-1914 integrating his special training in the
traditions of British anthropology into his background as a Finnish
scholar along the lines of Fenno-Ugristics initiated by
Castrén.
Besides Castrén and Reguly, a third contemporary person has been taken
into careful consideration while researching the pioneers of the
paradigm in this article: Lars Levi Laestadius (1800-1861), a Sami
theologian and multi-scholar. His Fragmenter is a very important
contribution to Sami mythology, worth remembering, indeed, in search of
the founders of the paradigm of Northern Ethnography in this
colloquium. Two symposia concerning the lesser known roles of Lars Levi
Laestadius – Laestadius as linguist, botanist and ethnographer –
arranged in the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in April
1999, and another to celebrate his 200th anniversary on the 10th of
January in the facilities of the Royal Academy of Science and Letters
in Sweden led to a publication which reveals his unique roles as a
Northern scholar who combined his Sami background knowledge into his
career as an ecologist, linguist and ethnographer.
M.A. Castrén may be considered as a founding father of the Northern
ethnography paradigm. Compared to Elias Lönnrot, he was closer to the
research of our time and less motivated by the narrow national-romantic
tendencies of his era. He was a man of sound down-to-earth orientation
on the one hand, and wide perspectives, on the other. When Lönnrot as
the collector of the runes and as the author of the Kalevala was the
mythographer of the Finns, Castrén’s fieldwork made him both the
founder of Fenno-Ugristics and finally their mythographer.
Castrén’s definition of ethnography is to be read in his last
lectures in 1851-52 on “the ethnology of the Altaic Peoples” (meaning
the Finno-Ugrians):
[Ethnography] is a new name for an old thing. It means the scientific
study of the religion, society, customs, way of life, habitations of
different peoples, in a word: everything that belongs to their inner
and outer life. Ethnography could be regarded as a a part of cultural
history, but not all nations possess a history in the textual sense;
instead their history consists of ethnography (Castrén 1857, 8).
The religious dimension was central in his field studies as it is
in ethnography in general. Concerning shamanism Castrén stated,
in a way that is good to keep in mind also by our generation:
All the religion proper of the Altaic peoples has been called
shamanism. Unfortunately far more attention has been paid to the naming
and outer features of the phenomenon, not on the inner disposition, the
essential nature of it. [...] I would not consider shamanism as a form
of religion on its own, but rather as a moment of the folk-religious
divine doctrine (Castrén 1853, 1).
Unfortunately the lectures were not finished due to Castrén’s illness
and untimely death. They, however, have shown some important lines upon
which to proceed in the ethnographical research of contemporary
Siberian shamans and shamanhood, detailed in the literature below.
Literature
Castrén, Mathias Aleksander
1953Nordiska resor och forskningar II. Föreläsningar I finsk mytologi.
Helsingfors.
Nordiska resor och forskningar III. Ethnologiska föreläsningar.
1857
Helsingfors.
Estlander, Bernhard
1929.Mathias Aleksanteri Castrén. Hänen matkansa ja tutkimuksensa.
Helsinki.
Fellman, Jacob
1906 Anteckningar under min
vistelse i Lappmarken I–IV. Helsingfors.
Joki, A.J.
1950.M.A.Castrén turkkilaisen kansanrunouden kerääjänä. Kalevalaseuran
Vuosikirja. Porvoo.
Kuhn, Thomas S.
1970.The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Chicago.
1977.The Essential Tension. Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition
and Change. Chicago.
Laestadius, Lars Levi
1996.Fragmenter i lappska mythologin. (NIF:s publikationer 37).
Efterord av Reimund Kvideland.och Juha Pentikäinen. bo.
Louheranta, Olavi
1993 Kai Donnerin tutkijakuva vuoteen 1814 asti. M.A.
thesis in comparative religion, The University of Helsinki.
Pentikäinen, Juha
1986.Kalevala Mythology. Translated and ed. by Ritva Poom. (Folklore
Studies in Translation). Bloomington and Indianapolis.
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