Tradition Through Modernity: Postmodernism and the Nation-State in Folklore Scholarship

This book deals with the relationship between tradition and modernity and the modernness of objectifying, representing and studying folklore and oral traditions. The first section focuses on modern and tradition as modern concepts, and the conception of folklore and its study as a modern trajectory. The second section discusses the politics of folklore with regard to nationalism, and the role of folk tradition in the production of nation-state identity in Finland. My discussion of these issues emerges from selected perspectives on postmodernism and postmodernist thinking. These were topical, and in some circles radical issues in the early 1990s, when I was taking graduate courses at the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States and writing my doctoral dissertation. I am aware that today, more than ten years after, postmodernism seems like out-dated rhetoric, but I can excuse myself by saying that I have an antiquarian interest in things postmodern. The first section of the book draws heavily on literature from the 1980s and early 1990s because that part was originally written for the dissertation. I have used it here – changing in places the present tense to the past and adding newer references – with the belief that it still functions as a theoretical and research historical orientation to the discussion on the politics of folk tradition in the second section. I also believe that many of the points made in conjunction with postmodernism continue to deserve consideration. This is especially so in the field of folklore studies, which was never saturated with the postmodernist critique of modernism. There are academic environments in which such ‘postmodernist’ issues as reflexivity and representation and their implications for both ethnographic and archival research still await discovery.