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FI-20014 Turun yliopisto, Finland. Puh. +358 2 333 51

Conference in Methodologies and Theories in History Faculty of Humanities

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Human Faces of Power

X Conference in Methodologies and Theories in History
University of Turku, 10th-12th of September 2009

 

Abstracts

 

Kimmo Ahonen M.A.,
Doctoral StudentSchool of History / Department of General History
University of Turku

Alien Faces of Power: I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)

This paper deals with I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), a B-budget film directed by Gene Fowler Jr. During the 1950s, public discussion on mass culture in the United States was marked by a sort of dialect of anxiety: a free, individualistic and democratic American way of life vs. bureaucratic collectivism made possible by the availability of sophisticated methods for controlling men’s minds. According to critics of mass culture, the individual was replaced by the "organization man": a dull "other-directed" suburban whose life was centered around mass consumption.

Simultaneously, the internal invasion of the human mind by aliens was a very common plot device in the 1950s American science fiction films. The dehumanization plot was usually located in a small town, in which aliens took over a man's body and mind, turning him into a soulless machine with no will of his own. The most celebrated example is Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), but there are also less-known science fiction films dealing with the internal invasion.

Monster followed the previously employed dehumanization plot. Nevertheless, it also developed the pattern in by focusing into gender roles between the heroine and her alien husband. Thus, the movie can be read as a metaphor about the anxieties of suburban domesticity. In Monster - unlike in the Body Snatchers - aliens are individuals with differing viewpoints, and also capable of expressing human emotions. How did the Fowler’s film define "otherness" of the aliens? What kind of ideological messages it implicitly or explicitly embody? I will argue that Monster reflected and, at the same time, expressed and explored the ambivalent feelings and anxieties of the Cold War Culture.

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Louis Clerc
Department of Contemporary History
University of Turku

The Finnish lobbying in Paris as a case study of foreign policy decision-making, 1900-1940

This presentation will examine the role of lobby groups and small states in the shaping of great powers' foreign policies. The relation between France and Finland during the first half of the 20th century, and especially two periods of crisis (1917-1918, 1939-1940), will serve as a specific case study. The goal of this presentation is to consider the possibilities offered and limitations imposed by the French system of foreign policy decision-making to the representatives of small states in influencing French foreign policy.

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Bolivia Erazo 
Cultural History
University of Turku

The origin of the dispute between El Comercio newspaper and Empresa Cines de Quito cinema company in 1929 Quito

At the beginning of November 1929 the cinema sphere in Quito underwent an unexpected shift. The commercial relationship between Jorge Cordovez, head of the Empresa Cines de Quito, runner of the cinema spectacle in Quito and the Mantilla brothers, owners of El Comercio newspaper (1906), one of the three main broadsheets of the capital, came to a bad end. The reason was claimed to be the arbitrary fluctuation from time to time of the cinema ticket prices which apparently infuriated the owners of the newspaper who, on behalf of the audience they said, complained in the press about it.

According to Jorge Cordovez, the newspaper reaction was a retaliation against him for not letting them charge him more for the cinema ads he published in that newspaper. The Mantilla brothers denied that it was a revenge against Cordovez for the advertisements price and claimed to be just backing the audience demands about different aspects of cinema. What raises suspicion is that prior to this incident there are no traces that year in this newspaper of the critiques to cinema made neither by the audience nor by the newspaper.

After two months of continuous critiques published about cinema, this apparently commercial problem ended up shaping the cinema spectacle in Quito by a number of regulations. Was there any particular reason why El Comercio newspaper criticized cinema spectacle in Quito at the time? It is difficult to say. However, since then on, there are evidences that the owners of the newspaper started to build a theater which turned out to be one of the biggest in South America and inaugurated in this modern theater the newest innovations on cinema such as the sound film which led to the disappearance of the former cinema firm they had just started to attack some years ago and the birth of a new one: that of the Mantilla brothers. In this paper I aim at analyzing mainly the origin of the dispute which dates back to September the 14th 1929.

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M.A. Elise Garritzen
Department of History
University of Helsinki

Footnote and power in historical research:  The case of Mission Historique Finlandaise à Rome

The paper discusses the role that the footnotes have had in the process of producing and legitimating historical knowledge of often politicized national histories. For the last centuries the footnotes have been inseparable part of historical scholarship. For a historian they are the proof for their arguments. For a reader they are an easily recognisable indication that the knowledge is produced by a professional, and hence it is authoritative and true. This assumption, however, is problematic. Only rarely the reader can or will control the use of the references or compare the author’s arguments with the sources mentioned in the footnotes. The reader assumes that the historian follows the research ethics and uses his footnotes correctly. In this paper I argue, that this assumption has made the footnotes a powerful rhetorical tool for historians in the process of creating a scientific image for politicized interpretations of national history.

The paper examines how the research group lead by Henry Biaudet (1880-1915) used the footnotes in their studies on national history. They worked in the Vatican Secret Archives to search for documents to strengthen the fennoman interpretation of Finnish history. They acknowledged the footnotes as an essential part of the scientific research method, and the references to the sources as an undisputable prove to their arguments. Their use of the footnotes did not however always follow the accepted research conduct. According to them, the rules could be broken if it advanced the knowledge of national history. The "national cause" justified incorrect citations, and false and incomplete references. The misconduct was not – of course – exposed to the readers, who unaware of this, were convinced by the numerous notes in these studies.

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Ph. D. Heini Hakosalo
Research Fellow, Department of History
University of Oulu

BABY POWER: CHRISTMAS SEAL HOMES (1936-73) AND THE PRODUCTION OF EXPERT KNOWLEDGE

In 1933, an expert committee set up by the Finnish Anti-Tuberculosis League recommended the founding of a special nursing institution for newborn babies of tuberculous mothers. Although not wholly without foreign precedents, the suggestion must be regarded as original, even radical. Children were usually protected from infection by placing them either in foster care or in preventoriums that admitted children, not newborn babies. Finnish experts, too, had on previous occasions rejected isolation of newbowns as a medically desirable but impracticable course of action. Acting on the committee's suggestion, the Anti-Tuberculosis League opened its first Christmas Seal Home "for the newborn children of consumptive mothers" in Tampere in October 1936. The opening of the Tampere Home was followed by the founding of the Pälkäne division of the Tampere Home (in operation 1939–48 ), the Oulu Christmas Seal Home (1947–69) and the Kuopio Christmas Seal Home (1954–64). The Homes were gradually discontinued beginning from the mid-1960s, the last one to close its doors being the Tampere Home in 1973. During their roughly forty years of existence, the Homes nursed over 5000 babies and small children, thus making a difference in the lives of thousands of Finnish individuals and families.

The paper discusses the Christmas Seal Homes as an instance of expert power. The stated goal of the Homes was twofold: to protect tuberculosis-threatened infants from the immediate sources of infection at home (usually the mother) and to build up their resistance to disease in general. To preclude any contact with tuberculous family members, babies were admitted immediately after delivery, and they stayed at the institution for one to two years (during the prewar and war periods) or for 6 to 8 months (during the post-war period). The daily regime of the Homes was carefully planned by the leading pediatric experts of the country. The paper suggests that there was a third goal as well, although it was seldom discussed in public: production of expert knowledge. I shall ask what sort of knowledge the Christmas Sea Homes produced, how this knowledge was used in and outside the institutions, and in what sense can this knowledge be regarded as the product of the practices and mechanisms of power characteristic of these institutions.

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Petteri Halin

Remembering the past, celebrating the present – Refiguring and updating history on celluloid screen

No question, the year 1992 marked a great milestone in human history as the anniversary of the voyage that set changes in motion. The fifth hundred anniversary of the voyage of Columbus was marked nationally and internationally, and it sparked controversy over the legacy of Western civilization. To some people Columbus remained the Renaissance genius par excellence whereas some people wanted to rewrite the old phrase "in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" as "in fourteen hundred and ninety-three, Columbus stole all he could see".

The quincentennial served Spain as a post-Franco coming-out party and the world was invited to participate. Spain enjoyed the international spotlight in 1992 for a number of important reasons: the World Fair in Seville, the Summer Olympics in Barcelona and Madrid’s designation as the Cultural Capital of Europe. The Spanish quinto centenario celluloid contribution had an early start: the Carlos Saura spectacle El Dorado, aka A peso d’oro, premiered four years before the QC-year and it was widely circulated especially in the Latin American countries prior the anniversary.

The Saura movie is a loose remake of Werner Herzog’s Aquirre, Der Zorn Gottes (1972). In tone of Herzog’s visions of decadence and madness, pre-quincentennial production chronicled a failed expedition down the Orinoco River in 1560, undertaken by Spanish soldiers in quest of finding El Dorado, the city of gold. Although the movie is about early Spanish failure in Latin America, the movie served the QC-agenda: in deed, it was in tone with the official QC-manifesto that declared Spain’s ambition to re-connect to Latin America. Whereas the great European-based mega-spectacles served Spain to portray itself as a deeply European nation, El Dorado stressed that, although failures in the beginning, the Latin American countries have deep Hispanic roots.

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Pauli Heikkilä
PhD Student on the history of European integration

Rudolf Holsti the Anarchist. Evolution of international relations to promote mutual interests

Rudolf Holsti (1881 – 1945) spent the last phase of his life in California giving lecturers at the Stanford University. In March 1941, he wrote to Alexandra Kropotkin and asked her a copy of Mutual Aid, the most famous book of her father, Prince Pjotr Kropotkin (1842 – 1921). As an obvious attempt to persuade the princess, Holsti told how he had been an admirer of Kropotkin's anarchist ideas since his formative years. He stressed an outcome of his learnings: as Foreign minister in 1921 Holsti had heard that Kropotkin was starving in Moscow, and he had enforced the Finnish embassy to provide him food. Holsti asked now, whether the assistance had ever arrived.

My presentation will shed light on an obvious contradiction between anarchist idea and leading foreign affairs of a state. I will not consider the term anarchism literally as an aspiration to abolish state but concentrate on Kropotkin's interpretation of the idea, sometimes coined mutualism. Accordingly, the individuals an inborn ability of empathy towards each other. Thus, 'the survival of the fittest' means for Kropotkin the triumph of the most social and consequently to cherish these natural, collectivist feelings paradoxically result in increased individualism.

I'll search for anarchist (mutualist) ideas in Rudolf Holsti's diplomatic work. International relations have sometimes been called anarchist, without order. Holsti supported strongly the League of Nations, the new organization to stall nationalist rivalries. Apparently this does not correspond with anarchist ideas but on the other hand, the League of Nations was for Holsti the international forum where the nations would come aware of their mutual advantages and solve their disputes peacefully. Thus the presentation emphasizes the evolutionist aspects in Holsti's view on international relations and illustrates interaction of science (sociology) and politics in Holsti's work.

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Nicholas Hill
Master of Arts (Univ. of Wisconsin/Madison), Doctoral Student
Department of Political History
University of Helsinki

The Nation in Uniform: The selection process for Finnish officers 1918-1928

After Finland gained its independence, one of the tasks that faced the new state was the establishment of an armed forces to handle internal and external security challenges. A key aspect of this process was the appointment of officers to the units that were being formed. The Finnish Civil War, the Jäger movement, and the service of Finns in the Imperial Russian Army, along with other issues, lay in the background of the naming of officers. In fact, the conflict between those in the Jäger movement and those who had served in the Imperial Russian Army became a prominent theme in the early years of the Finnish Armed Forces. As in most general themes however, there are some interesting nuances in this interpretation.

This paper examines the formal and informal control mechanisms involved in the appointment of officers with a primary focus on the Ståhlberg presidency. There were a number of interest groups involved in the evaluation of the suitability of candidates, and they had different roles in the process. This paper will also examine a few special cases involving the discussion of the suitability of men who already were officers.

The differences in viewpoints between these groups and the justifications they provided for their decisions reveal different concepts of the nature of the nation, and the relationship of the nation to the state. Officers had to be loyal and possess the necessary skills, but who controlled the definition of loyalty? The process by which this definition was maintained possibly provides wider insights into how nation identities are regulated.

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Susanna Hoikkala
M.Soc.Sc., PhD student                
Department of Social Policy Studies
University of Helsinki    

Changing Disciplinary Practices in Children’s Residential Care -Isolation as an Example

In residential settings, children may be restrained by adults in many ways and for a variety of reasons. By these restrictive and disciplinary practices, I mean such techniques which 1) differ from the usual regulative practices of institutional everyday life (e.g. bed time), and 2) restrict children’s possibilities to act and participate in the usual way (e.g. isolation). Nowadays the purpose of these practices is described by welfare terms. In the past, however, they were described differently and used as punishments. Isolation is one of the most extreme examples of these practices.

This presentation is based on my ongoing PhD research. My aim is to present the empirical findings which illustrate 1) how isolation as a disciplinary practice has been used in one Finnish residential institution since the 1950s, and 2) how the normative and regulative bases of isolation have changed. I am focusing on the key changes taking place in the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s. Data includes 1) grass-roots level documents (e.g. daily reports, the journals of punishments and children’s case files) written by various workers as a part of the everyday institutional life, and 2) the policies regulating the usage and documentation of various disciplinary practices. I will discuss the findings by emphasising the intertwined themes of care and control as well as gender. The theoretical framework is based on the ideas of Michel Foucault.

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Brendan Humphreys
M. Soc. Sci. Doctoral Student
Aleksanteri Institute and
Department of Political History
University of Helsinki

The Second Fatal Shore, Gallipoli in Australian Experience

"Lest we Forget!" The impact of the Gallipoli landings of 1915 on Australian national consciousness can hardly be questioned. From officially-sanctioned heritage to popular culture, Gallipoli is commemorated as the defining moment in Australian history.

This paper deals with Gallipoli as an example of "political mythology" and sets it in the context of similar events, and asks why it has been so durable as a foundational narrative? The paper questions why a battle – fought far from home and under British rather than Australian military leadership – became the cornerstone of Australian national identity.

Finally, the paper examines how the stern, "Never Again!" message of Gallipoli has been played out in subsequent Australian political history.

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Ulla Ijäs
University of Turku
Department of Finnish History

Merchant Households and Gender Division of Labour at 18th and 19th century Vyborg

April 1833 the lower city court of Vyborg had a case about a debt. Two brothers named Isidor and Nicolai Siliverstoff, both merchants accused an other merchant named Pavel Sopetoff, that he had not paid his debt on time. Merchant Sopetoff had brought his mother-in-law to the court room, because he was taking care of her merchant house after her husband’s death. At the very beginning of the court session she declared that she did not know anything about the debt.

Five years later Nicolai Siliverstoff is again in the court room requiring a debt. This time debtor is merchant’s widow Akulia Schuschin, who is represented by her son bookkeeper Fredric Schuschin. Again the familiar sentence is written down at the protocol; she does not know anything about the debt. At this time the son interpolates that his mother does not know anything about the commerce.

As previous studies have shown, women’s position was often in the margins of the society. Women did not have legal right to perform, nor they had legal right to do business, unless they were not widows or had a special permission, often granted because of their poor status. The two widows mentioned above seem to represent one, still quite typical aspect of an early modern woman. Yet these two women were declared innocent and ignorant at the same time when there were several active and skilful women doing business and taking care of the merchants’ households.

These two examples are from the material I used in my master thesis. At my doctoral thesis I am going to find out how power and gender division of labour was organised in 18th century merchant networks. My aim is not only bring women visible, but show how power relations and division of labour was negotiated in every day life situations. My assumption is that micro strategies of merchant networks might have varied according what was most advantageous at the time. Studying 18th century Vyborg there is possible to find several different types of merchant households, because there were tradesmen from Sweden, Germany, Baltic countries and from Russia. 

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Mari Isoaho
Research Fellow, Ph. D.
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
University of Helsinki, Finland

The power relations of the lands of Rus’ in 1015−1078 in the Primary Chronicle

In the medieval world the public and the personal were closely connected, much more so than in today’s world. In the Middle Ages personal relations were the key strategies used in the public political arena. One can argue that personal relationships, kinship, and alliances formed the main tools which kept the medieval order in the society. Since the princely power of medieval Rus’ was divided between the sons of the ruling prince, the marriage contracts and family ties provided a major structure for supporting the sons who contested each other for the supremacy of the Kievan throne, which was the ultimate symbol of power.

This presentation examines the division of power after the death of Vladimir, the great prince of Kiev in 1015, during the reign of his son Yaroslav. The presentation also looks at the history of the power politics and the strategies of Yaroslav’s sons. The Primary Chronicle is the most important source in describing the development of the medieval power structure of the Rus’ lands. Therefore, this presentation also aims to study the Primary Chronicle as the major vehicle representing the formal narrative of the dynastic power of Kiev, providing in its annals the legitimacy of the Rus’ supreme power. As a final point, it seeks to study the writing process of the Chronicle, in order to explain its punctuations in its descriptions of the princely struggles.

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Bruce Johnson
Department of History
University of Turku

Sounds of Power

The influential work of Michel Foucault on power has foregrounded visuality in cultural theory. His celebrated analyses of the negotiation of power through such models as the panopticon have resonated strongly with the modelling of knowledge through visual tropes that has predominated in a scientific milieu. Scopocentricity has been intensified through its synergies with other aspects of Renaissance and post-Renaissance epistemologies, as for example the rise of print culture. Knowledge that is grounded in a range of sensory experience has become literally ‘visualised’, embodied in ‘perspectives’, ‘visions’, ‘points of view’, ‘theory’ (derived from the Greek word for spectacle’, and ‘the gaze’.

Yet our intersubjective negotiations are by no means confined to the scopic, and power in particular is articulated, mediated and exercised across the full sensorium. In the social and public sphere, the most active alternative to vision is hearing.  It has been forcefully argued, bu R. Murray Schafer and others, that sound is the most ancient way of defining territory. Whether conceived literally or as a metaphor for identity, territory is, of course, the major site of power relations and struggles. Prior to the nineteenth century, the radius of sonic power relations was defined by ‘earshot’ (a term which also encapsulates the notion of sound as weapon).

Since the development of the sound recording from the 1870s, increasingly sophisticated sound technologies have enlarged the radius of the sonic circulation of knowledge and power.  From the one-to-one model of the telephone, to the mass mediation of sonic information through radio and recorded sound, power has increasingly been mediated as an acoustic phenomenon; in the words of Goebbels, ‘What the press was to the nineteenth century, radio will be to the twentieth’. Drawing on examples from statecraft to sexuality, from politics to pornography, this paper will argue that sound is one of the significant 'faces' of power in the modern period.

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Kirsi Kanerva           

Outbursts of Insanity vs. Nobly Restrained Rage. Expressing Emotions in Thirteenth Century Iceland.

 My paper will concentrate on the aspects of power concerning the emotions and emotional life in thirteenth century Icelandic culture. Through the concepts introduced by William M. Reddy and applied, for instance, by Barbara H. Rosenwein – emotives, emotional regime, emotional community and emotional refuge – and adding to this formula the variable of social hierarchies I will discuss the ways of expression of emotions allowed or allotted to people from different levels of the hierarchy of the society. I will examine the nature of the thirteenth century Icelandic emotional community: how people expressed their emotions, what kind of differences were there between different social groups, and, whether there existed other ways of expressing emotions that people were assumed to restrain.

The sources of my study consist of íslendingasögur and samtiðarsögur, both of which were written in Iceland during the thirteenth century. Both genres have been regarded as histories of their own time, and have their roots in the oral tradition. Concrete describtions about the inner mental life of the people lack in saga literature. The emotions were usually displayed either in the dialog or through the actions of the saga character or by describing the somatic changes of the body of the saga protagonists. Still, the styles of expression of emotions in different social groups seem to differ from each other so that the bahaviour of the slaves and farmworkers diverged from that of a free farmer, a bóndi, for instance. In my paper I will first discuss the expression of emotions and the differences in it between different social groups. After this, I will turn to another power aspect of emotional life, namely restraint, and focus on possible emotional refuges that offered place for emotions otherwise not enhanced by the norms of the emotional regime of the Icelandic society.

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Anu Kantola
Department of Communication
University of Helsinki, Finland

Performing Power: Public Authority Styles in the Post-War Finland

The paper examines the public authority styles of corporate leaders in the post-war. The focus is on the revolutionary nature of corporate authorities. Have corporate authorities adopted a socially transformative role in the post war societies as for example the notions of the "new spirit" of capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2005) would suggest. A longitudinal qualitative analysis of main Finnish current affair and business magazines, Suomen Kuvalehti and Talouselämä, tracks down the changes in public authority in Finland from 1945 to 2000. It is suggested that there emerge three distinct public styles of corporate authority: i) patriotic paternalism (1945-1975), ii) rational managerialism (1955-1980) and iii) enthusiastic individualism (1980-2000). These styles are seen as emotional styles and regimes, which are in dynamic relation with each other. At the heart of each style are the positive feelings, a fantasy of "we", which give rise to it. Yet at the same time there is the darker side, negative and suppressed feelings, which often are addressed by the following regime. This dynamic has been central especially in Finland since 1970s as corporate authorities have developed clearly a style of authority which can be characterized as revolutionary. Moreover, it has had a wider societal role as also authority styles in other societal sectors have been clearly affected by it.

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Asta Kietäväinen
Finnish Forest Research Institute
Rovaniemi Research Unit

Striving towards independence - Agency and Identity in the Life Stories of Settlement Farmers

After the Second World War, more than 100 000 settlement farms were established in Finland. Settlement farmers were clearing land for cultivation, building houses and farming the land. In the initial stage of this settlement process, the state had control over farmers wood trade, land clearing and building. In addition to values and norms determined by the cultural context, the conditions of natural environment limited the space of human action. Farmers have acted and faced these constraints and societal changes individually.

My research data consists of settlement farmers’ interviews carried out in 2001 and autobiographical writings from the essay competition that collected the memories of the settlement actions ("Muistellaan asutustoimintaa") which was organized in 1982. I have interpreted the farmer identities and agency from these stories.

My main findings are that if the farmers perceive the general circumstances and societal structures as constant and unchangeable, their ability to react to external changes can be limited. They feel that what the future holds is not quite in their control. Instead, the farmers that define their life through active agency, encounter the future as target-oriented actors who have power in their own hands. In this paper, I discuss what do the possibilities to control ones life and to affect to the future means in the identity formation of settlement farmers.

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Hanne Koivisto
Cultural History
University of Turku

Studying the identity of left intellectuals - How to reach identity reflections with contradictory sources of changing power relations

The life and times of Finnish left intellectuals from the 1930’s until 1950’s provide a fruitful basis to explore the question of how group identity is affected by the collision between superior State power and an implicit but surprisingly strong ideological power of a small group with a loud voice. The epoch features turbulences from the Great Depression through the influence of Extreme Right and World War II to post-war construction with a short-lived left dominance. Left intellectuals experienced a dramatic change from a pre-war opposition group to a post-war rehabilitation giving them better chances for political participation and influence. They continuously reflected on their group identity and relation with their own time. This resulted in a large amount of texts of varying genres. These texts comprise the first essential sources for the present study. 

The approach is that of identity research in which identity is conceived as a life-long process. The formation of an individual’s identity is informed by a continuous negotiation involving one’s own reflections and the feedback from significant others. In the case of left intellectuals, the latter comprise political opponents as well as the powers of the State. In pre-war period, left intellectuals strongly opposed the official foreign policy. These actions finally led to formal accusations of treason, resulting in imprisonment during the World War II. The second relevant source material consists of the writings of political opponents and the archives of State Security. The latter served as a basis for well documented trials leading to imprisonment.

The paper analyses these considerably different and often contradictory source materials, seeking descriptions and definitions of being a left intellectual. Attention is paid to variations and nuances that characterize contemporary discussions by relating them with international issues and debates among the Left as well as the stances taken by the Government. The focus of the paper is on Raoul Palmgren, a Finnish literary and social critic, and later on professor of liberal arts. He is a prime example of a left intellectual by virtue of his continuous writing on the problem of being a left intellectual until his death in the 1990s.The red thread of the analysis is the striking difference between Palmgren’s self-image as an intellectual and the image of the enemy of the state held by the authorities.

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Jan Kunnas
PhD student, European University Institute
Florence, Italy

Tensions originating from different time perspectives

I hypothesize that much of the historical tensions between the elite and the subalterns stems from different time perspectives originating from differences in wealth. The elite can afford a long time perspective, the wealthier the longer. A peasant can afford as long time perspective as there is grain in storage, while a landless person an even shorter.

My first example of the tensions and different opinion between the elite and the subaltern is from my research on slash-and-burn cultivation. The elite considered it as a waste of valuable timber; while peasants favoured slash-and-burn cultivation as it did not call for major capital inputs and required less work than clearing land for permanent cultivation.

In Ostrobothnia, tar burning displaced slash-and-burn cultivation by the end of the 18th century. Many contemporary writers, however, thought that it would be wiser to concentrate on permanent field cultivation than to waste the forests for the burning of tar. Again we can trace conflicting views stemming from different time perspectives. The clearing of permanent would have required enough savings to survive the period between the clearance and the first yields.

An important question is: What would have happened if the subalterns would have listened to the advice given from the elite, and stopped both slash-and-burn cultivation and tar burning and concentrated on the clearance of permanent fields. What effects would it have had on the availability on food, tax revenues and income distribution?

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M. Soc. Sc. Ville Laamanen
Postgraduate student, researcher
Department of Contemporary History
University of Turku

The Power of Historical Knowledge Shaping Interpretations on National Socialism

This paper gives an example of how much an individual’s knowledge and expectations on history can influence conclusions drawn on even the most radical phenomena and upheavals in society. The case given discusses the ways how the power of historical knowledge, or lack of it, shaped interpretations on National Socialism during the inter-war period. This paper focuses on the cultural analysis of two Finnish writers, Veikko Antero Koskenniemi (1885–1962) and Olavi Paavolainen (1903–1964).

Both of these writers were influential opinion leaders in culture among their contemporaries, and both had visited and written about National Socialist Germany in the 1930’s. However, the writers themselves came from different cultural backgrounds: Koskenniemi was the central figure among the nationalist–conservative cultural front deriving from the Fennoman movement of the mid-19th century, whereas Paavolainen had established his reputation as a leader of Finland’s liberal young modernists in late 1920’s.

Koskenniemi, an outspoken advocate and expert on classicism, wanted to believe that the old virtues of classicism and Germanic culture continued to thrive under totalitarian rule, even when there was a wealth of contradicting evidence to indicate otherwise. Paavolainen, an enthusiast of the modern and liberal cultural movements of the inter-war period that envisioned a "new" man and society, pondered if National Socialism also could be a manifestation of a new, revolutionary and, above all, vital period in culture despite all of its obvious drawbacks.

My main argument is that National Socialism benefited from the power that historical and cultural knowledge had on contemporaries observing it. Thus it was able to effortlessly present itself in a light that was most applicable to each observer.

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PhD. Rauno Lahtinen
Cultural History
University of Turku

Urban Planning and the Power of the Media

Soon after the Second World War people started to move to the cities in search for jobs and better living conditions. The atmosphere was full of hope for the future. New technologies promised wealth and happiness for all.

The city planners firmly believed that Turku was to almost double its size and become a city of over 200 000 inhabitants in a matter of three decades. Quick and exhaustive alterations were needed to transform a city full of wooden buildings to a modern-day metropolis with high-rises, office blocks and motorways.

A significant part of the old historic buildings in the city of Turku were torn down during a twenty five -year period from 1956 to 1981. The cityscape changed considerably and irreversibly.

This paper focuses on the way the local newspapers wrote about this extensive modernization process. In the middle of the 1950s the destruction of the first notable historic buildings raised very little attention, but soon the atmosphere changed – at least in some cases. As a whole, the pulling down of old buildings was not considered very negative: on the contrary, newspapers usually welcomed the modern buildings, increased traffic, new roads and parking areas as signs of dynamic development and increasing wealth.

This paper asks how did the local media react to this quick and substantial change. Did the newspapers have any real power in the town planning process? Could the media have stopped or somehow changed the development? Or is it even possible to find out what exactly was the influence of the media?

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Dr.Soc.Sci Jaana Laine
Department of Social Science History
University of Helsinki

Shifting Power in the Forest Work

Forest work has after the WWII experienced revolutionary changes. This development has often been described through the mechanisation of the timber felling or professionalization of forest workers. However, even more drastic changes took place in the power relations between forest workers and their foremen.

This paper explains how and why this power relation changed. This change can be discovered at least from three aspects as follows.

1.    Professional power. Timber felling had to be done according the instructions given by foremen. From 1960s onwards the forest workers possibilities to control their own work improved. The main reason for this was the beginning of vocational training, which gave forest workers more competence in silvicultural issues. Later in 2000s the idea of team work shattered professional power relation even more.

2.    Economic power. Traditionally foreman paid the wages to forest workers every two week. In the end of 1960s forest companies began to pay wages to bank accounts, which removed foremen’s privilege to ‘give’ the money to forest workers.

3.    Social power. The majority of the forest workers lived every winter in the forest cabins under the foremen’s supervision. This way of life where foremen controlled even the free time vanished in the late 1960s. The forest companies began to transport forest workers between home and forest by car. The end of the forest cabin era reduced the foremen power over forest workers’ life.

Shifting power in forest work can be studied from many other aspects too. All in all, the forest workers gain power and became more equal with the foremen. This was i.e. due to reforms of the legislation, construction of the Finnish welfare state and its infrastructure, and forest workers’ unionization.

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Tiina Lintunen
Lic.Soc., Department of Contemporary history
University of Turku

THE WINNER TAKES IT ALLThe civil rights and liberties of the defeated after the Finnish civil war

Finland gained independence in December 1917. However, the young independent country was already experiencing severe internal friction which in January 1918 erupted into civil war. The nation was divided into the rebellious Reds and the Whites who supported the government. The bloody war lasted for three and a half months.

After the victory of the Whites, 75 575 people were taken to court and prosecuted for treason. In order to cope with these numbers, a special court system had to be established: 145 courts dealing with crimes against the state were set up. The court proceedings were massive and unprecedented. Even 89.7 per cent of the accused were found guilty and sentenced. Apart from incarceration, the Reds were punished by being deprived of their civil rights, of which the loss of recently gained suffrage was considered most significant.

After the Civil War the victors also tried other methods to restrict the civil liberties of the defeated faction. The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the immediate consequences of participation in the Civil War for former rebels. The paper focuses on their restricted opportunities to act as citizens after being convicted: How did the winners exercise power on the defeated in the name of preventing another coup d’etat? I shall also ponder what happened to the political activity of these people when they were punished for revolutionary action and lost their basic civil rights.

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Tiina Miettinen, phil.lic.
Researcher, Department of history and philosophy
University of Tampere

Subordination, Cooperation, Resistance: Power Relations in Medieval and Early Modern Households.

Position of the unmarried household members - Kinless Servant or daughter of the house? Unmarried women in 17th century sources

At first sight 17th century sources (court-records, general registers and church registers) shown us clear patriarchal peasant society with consist clear patriarchal households. Every farmer household has master, his wife and their young children and last servants and landless people. It is easy to find out which families are joint-families or with are nuclear families. But is the situation same in real world?

It is known that there were many people who were not in the general register in the 17th century. It is difficult to find out unmarried 30-40 years old peasant women in the main sources. Farmer daughters who didn´t married are sometimes written as servants, landless women or even vagrant. Unmarried women status in 17th century was tied in her father social status. If unmarried woman lost her father, she was unprotected and lost her dowry. This last reason brought on growing difficulties to find husband with good social status. Well known truth is that married women have more power to local community – and more visibility in the sources.

Interesting point is that some unmarried women lived with their parent household and gave birth to one or more illegitimate children in the 17th century. How that "modern single life" was possible? Illegitimacy associated closely to unmarried women lifecycle and so it is possible to identify unmarried farmer daughters in court-registers. Sources are complicated but by using the genealogical method I have able to tracked down the connections of unmarried women who gave birth an illegitimate children.

I have chosen three rural parishes from the western part of Finland: Hauho, Luopioinen and Tuulos. All three parish located area where western European nuclear families started to change multiple family household which were typical in east and south of Europe. Illegitimacy rates were high level in the end of 18th century. I have noticed that same situation was already in 17th century.

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Heta Mulari
Research Fellow
Cultural History
University of Turku

Practices of Sexual Power in Swedish Youth Film Hip hip hora! (2003)

During the early 2000s, several films dealing with different forms of sexual power, teenaged girls and girlhood were produced in Sweden. These films were part of a girl film cycle that emerged in Swedish film production in the early 1990s. In my paper, I will discuss the practices of sexual power in the film Hip hip hora! (The Ketchup Effect, 2003), written and directed by Teresa Fabik. The film describes 13-year-old Sofie and her first weeks at upper secondary school in Stockholm. Due to drinking too much at her first party, passing out and becoming harassed by a group of older boys, Sofie gets a reputation of a whore and slut in the school community. My main focus is on the reception of the film in Swedish press, tabloids and media pedagogical publications, and I aim to analyze the negotiations about "a girl in danger", or "a troubled girl". In Swedish youth film, the narrative of the troubled girl has mostly been linked to sexuality and sexual behaviour, especially sexual harassment. However, the troubled girl is not a monolithic category, but a narrative that is constantly altered and challenged depending on the context. In my presentation, I will argue that the cinematic narrative about troubled girls in the early 2000s Sweden was constructed in a specific cultural, social and political context, in which third wave feminist viewpoints about empowerment and girl power were intertwined with national educational aims. My aim is to show, how the cinematic narrative of the troubled girl is a result of several forms of power and counter-power, visible both in the film and its reception.

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Rami Mähkä
MA, research fellow
Cultural History
University of Turku

Imaginary History from Below: It Happened Here (1964)

The paper focuses on the film It Happened Here, an independent 1964 British drama by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo. The film, set in 1944, writes an imaginary history of Britain under occupation by Nazi Germany. The film’s depiction of events and themes relating to World War Two was met with an outraged reception although the film originally received a very limited release.

Analyzing the film text alongside the makers’ recollections and contemporary reviews, the paper approaches the film as an example of the popular and often multifaceted historiographical idea of ‘history from below’. The paper’s argument is that the film in question is ‘history from below’ for at least two reasons: as a work of fiction it is subordinate to the official histories of the war and as an independent production it was subordinate to the major, and hugely successful, cinematic depictions of World War Two. Finally, both historiography and film production contain clearly articulated as well as implicit hierarchies and power relations. The paper seeks to demonstrate that, despite the film’s imaginary historical story, the case of It Happened Here is an example of how ‘history from below’ illustrates the multidimensional nature of power.

As a part of the session Cinematic Practices of Power, organized by the research project Cinematic Cartographies of European History 1945-2000, the paper’s contribution to the session is to focus on the complexity of the combination of independent film and popular history in the context of British cinema. For the theme of the conference the paper attempts to map the problems concerning the multidimensional and often ambivalent power relations between official and (here imaginary) popular history.

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Mari K. Niemi
Researcher, Centre for Parliamentary Studies
Department of Contemporary History
University of Turku, Finland

Political Leadership in Finnish Media Publicity

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Jyrki OUTINEN, M.A.
Cultural History
University of Turku

THE POWER AND THE GLORY: THE FINNISH SOLDIERS IN THE RUSSO-TURKISH WAR, 1877-1878

This paper mostly cover the topic of power and the ethnic relations. True, there can be also other thematic power aspects. The topic is a neglected one. Most of the research has been in favor of an idea according to which the Finnísh soldiers did not negotiate any alternative empowerment contrary to the official institutions.

The topic is undoubtedly linked to the question of stability of power structures and processes in the soldiers' identity. The Finnish guardsmen ran into situations of negotiating these frameworks while at the same time contacting the hard realities on the one hand, and the foreign cultures, on the other. The informal and invisible power structures were both a source for stability and change. In the soldiers' everyday life and in their memorialization of their experiences they not only showed examples for this variety, but sometimes also analyzed them.

The war expedition was some kind of a persecution of the "other". Thus, at the same time, the war functioned as an indoctrination process. The cultural stereotyping of alien ethnicities included ambiguosities. The soldiers' memoirs were idealized representations of their wartime mind and action.

The power and the glory of the Finnish soldiers was an invented one and mainly constructed in the posterity. The Finnish soldiers may never have felt authentically proud, but, rather, they were unaware of what they actually had attained. Thus, came in the picture the heroic discourse, the Finnish Guardsmen fighting far away in the foreign wars that did not mean much to them, albeit a boyish adventure while still serving loyally the Emperor. Actually they did question the whole venture.

The Finnish nation created a sort of nostalgia which was not easily suited in the Republican identity politics, a nation hopelessly needing glory for its own military past after a sinister civil war. The Finnish nation, as well as the subsequent scholars, missed most of the points the soldiers wrote, and this might also be true in the case of "faces of power" of the Finnish soldiers.

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Pierre-François PEIRANO
Université d’Aix-Marseille, France

The Lewis and Clark Expedition and the construction of American political identity

Ordered by President Jefferson to discover a shorter commercial route to the Pacific Ocean, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which set out from Saint Louis in May 1804, was composed of about twenty privates, placed under the commandment of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. But this corps of discovery was also assigned implicit goals, namely the extension of American influence in the Northwest Territories, which were largely unknown at the time and coveted by other countries – like Great Britain, Spain or Russia. The future expansion of the United States was thus at stake and Lewis and Clark also acted as representatives of the State. The medals they carried with them and that they were supposed to give to the chiefs of the various Native tribes represented President Jefferson, accounting for the political role the Expedition was supposed to fulfil. Throughout the journey that led them to the Pacific Ocean and back to Saint Louis, the discipline and determination inherent to military corps characterised the Expedition and it is not fortuitous that the most recurrent phrase in the journals written by Lewis and Clark is "We proceeded on", a symbol of their abnegation in the middle of a hostile wilderness.

Nowadays, the Expedition is remembered for having effectively contributed to the extension of American influence in the Northwest Territories – which were officially incorporated into the United States in 1846 – and several monuments pay a tribute to the corps of discovery in those regions – particularly in Montana, Oregon and Washington. The Expedition has come to represent the political identity of those States and, on a national scale, the pioneering spirit of the American nation. And, as evidence of its lasting legacy, "Lewis and Clark Trails" have also been opened, enabling people to follow in its footsteps.

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Ville Pitkänen
Researcher, Centre for Parliamentary Studies
Department of Contemporary History
University of Turku

Political journalism and the internet

My paper focuses on the interplay between the traditional media and the internet. The main question my paper seeks to answer is, how has the internet affected the traditional gate keeping role of the media during the past 10 to 15 years. My paper argues that while the traditional media are still formulating the mainstream publicity, the internet is slowly challenging the top-down communication model, were citizens are passive bystanders in the communication process. This doesn’t necessarily mean that in the future citizens will have better access to the mainstream publicity, but it may mean that power position of the traditional media is changing. The fragmentation of audiences, the uncontrollable information flow and the more active role of audiences is altering the power relations in society and the gate keeping role of the media is weakening.  

The material of the paper consists of selected body of communication literature, newspaper articles and eleven interviews executed during spring 2008. The interviewees are journalists or television reporters that concentrate on politics. All the biggest media in Finland are represented. (Television: MTV3, The Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE, Nelonen. Newspapers and tabloids: Helsingin Sanomat, Turun Sanomat, Aamulehti, Iltalehti, Ilta-Sanomat. Periodical: Suomen Kuvalehti) The interviewees were asked to evaluate the effects of the internet to political journalism and journalistic profession.  

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Erkka Railo (Lic.Soc.Sc.)
Department of Contemporary History
University of Turku

Personal life stories as legitimation of power

In my presentation I analyze the interviews of female politicians published in the Finnish weekly woman magazine Anna between 1975–2005. More specifically, I aim to answer to the question, how do the texts legitimize the positions of political power reached by female politicians.

It is a common trait of these interviews that they tell about the personal experiences of the politicians. These experiences include, for example, difficulties in caring for children, challenges in trying to combine work and family lives etc. The descriptions of personal life can be explained with the fact that culturally women are seen to belong to the private sphere and men to the public sphere.

The texts, however, clearly aim to break the cultural barriers between the private and the public. The private experiences of female politicians are, for example, used to legitimize the political power of the female politicians. The interviews in Anna try to emphasize the qualifications of interviewed women by stressing that the experiences gained in private sphere give them particular advantage in the public sphere and in politics.

Therefore, one could describe the interviews of female politicians in Anna as an ongoing negotiation of the limits of the public and the private and the woman’s place in a society. In my presentation I analyze the different discoursive techniques used to both enforce and to break the limits of the public and the private sphere.

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Leena Rossi
Cultural History
University of Turku

Peer Reviewer’s Power in Publishing

In my paper I discuss the power peer reviewers or referees have and how they can use or miss-use it for publishing in academic journals. Referees belong to the gatekeepers of research and are nowadays an essential part of the scientific critique. Historians are also used to having their texts reviewed and/or acting as a referee for colleagues’ papers. The system is supposed to guarantee the high quality of research and to prevent fraud.

The guidelines for and practices of reviewing vary but usually two independent referees are asked to give their opinions of a certain text. Most often reviewing is "double blind" – neither the author nor the reviewer knows the other party. It is the editors who ultimately make the decision for publishing but the referees are expected to help them by recommending a certain text to be published a) as such or b) after certain corrections and alterations have been done, or c) not to be published at all in that particular journal. In addition, they should encourage and help authors to do better research.

There has been rather little investigation in any field of research about the effectiveness and consequences of the referee system, and often its benefits are only a matter of belief. Here I use some experiences of my own and those of my colleagues to enlighten the topic of discussion. From practical experiences all historians know that various comments can be given: some helpful and encouraging, others superficial and futile, and some even totally crushing and with fatal consequences. With her comments and recommendations the referee can, for instance, favour or disfavour certain topics, ideas and interpretations and thus steer the research into certain direction. She can praise low-quality papers, which support her school of though, or devaluate high-quality papers, which contain challenging ideas. By delaying her comments she can prevent a competitor from publishing a crucial article in time, etc. It is just these miss-uses of peer reviewer’s power that beg for open discussion. 

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Claudia Rother, MA
Department of Medieval History
University of Bamberg

Fables, Myths and the Power of Truth – or: What is "history" in the Middle Ages?

There has been a vivid debate about the theoretical preconditions and foundations of historical knowledge and the power of literary constructions. In particular postmodern approaches stirred up the discussion whether history is necessarily a pure literary product or whether there might be some kind of objective historical ´truth` the historian could grasp at. However, the search for the aim and nature of history is not particular for our times. Many medieval authors tried hard to define the concept of ´history` and we can still trace the thoughts and discussions in their writings. Although starting from a quite different perspective than modern historians usually do the concern about the power of history and its nature appears to be familiar. Who has the authority to define historical truth and what criteria should be applied? To study the medieval idea of historical writing and to investigate its parallels and contrasts to modern academical approaches is not only essential for understanding medieval sources, but it might also reveal some of our own notions.

In this paper, I shall examine William of Newburgh's approach to historical writing and his struggle with powerful ´myth`. The twelfth-century English author discussed the difference between history and fiction, in particular the Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Since these stories about the Celtic past of England and its mythical king Arthur are today regarded as fiction but were widely recognized as true history in the Middle Ages, Williams's fierce rejection and his classification of them as ´lies and fables` is remarkable. What perceptions lie underneath this distinction? And in particular, how did politics and the power constellations shape William's attitude towards the Arthurian stories? These are the questions I shall address in this paper.

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Päivi Salmesvuori
Department of Church History
University of Helsinki

Power and Authority in the Case of the Finnish Trance Preacher Helena Konttinen (1871–1916)

This paper is about the methodological concerns of my study, which concentrates on Finland’s perhaps most famous sleeping preacher (also called trance preacher) Helena Konttinen (1871–1916). My general aim is to investigate Konttinen from the perspectives of authority, power and gender. Gaining and Keeping the Authority is the working title of my work. I am especially interested in how Konttinen established her authority and power, and how people perceived her spectacular and performative trance-sermons. Konttinen directed her words often personally to individuals. She made many to change their lives.

In order to examine Helena Konttinen as exerciser of power one part of my study is to find out how other people perceived Helena, what kind of affect she had on people. This is what I call power in action. They found Konttinen convincing or unconvincing. In this paper I make some preliminary observations about the use of these diaries as the sources of historical research.

Konttinen dictated shortly before her death a kind of memoirs (Eräs meidän ajan profeetta = EMP), which is the main source of her life. A priest, K. Sarlin was her devout disciple and wrote in short hand what Helena preached or told him. Other sources consist of letters and diaries of people who were involved in Konttinen’s surroundings.

In this paper I will map the beginning of Konttinen’s career as trance preacher and investigate how she managed to move from the private to the public sphere.

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Akseli Salmi
Department of History
University of Turku

THEATRE AS A MEDIUM OF POWER IN PRUSSIA 1815-1848

Theatre was one of the great forms of media in the 19th century. In spirit of the restoration, when almost all public activity was forbidden, theatre was one of the only places where public gathering and transmitting information for greater masses was possible. That is why the importance of the theatre as the public media grew enormously.

The tradition of the 19th century theatre is twofold. First, it arises from the tradition of the court theatre. Theatre was a representative place for the monarch to show out the glance of the court. Furthermore theatre was a gift from the good prince to his subjects. Second tradition is the middle-class tradition of Bildung-theatre, whereas the theatre was seen as the self-educational institute for the people. In restoration Prussia the high expectations of middle-classes towards more liberal society were laid upon the theatre.

The main argument of this presentation is, that because the theatre was such a strong medium for power, it was consciously used by the ruling elites of the Prussian state to manoeuvre the public opinion. The ruling elites in the restoration Prussia were the court aristocrats and the king himself. The elites used the power in theatre especially by favouring certain repertoire and restricting the other. Also the performance situation itself, was highly controlled. My argument also challenges the traditional view of seeing the 19th century theatre only as the mouthpiece of the middle-classes.

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Mirja Satka
Academy Research Fellow
Universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä

 Modern Child Protection Social Case Work and Power

Modern Finnish social case work practice based on law (1936), local regulations and professional psycho-dynamic theory was started in the 1950s. By the end of 1960s this practice was severely criticized by the  political left and some other quarters. Did this critique mark a change  in the nature of the social relations of children and adults (cf. Lee  2001)? It has be claimed, this critique limited the authoritarian social control exercised by social workers in the 1970s. This paper explores whether this was the case, and argues for multifaceted approaches on power while investigating the history of modern child protection work in general. This paper develops an approach by applying some ideas of Dorothy E. Smith's institutional ethnography recognizing that they are enough alone for a detailed analysis of power. They benefit from a joint use of Foucauldian understanding of history and power. This presentation will explore questions such as: How did the conceptualization and writing process of the social workers express their use of power? And on a more general level: How does the regulatory power operate in this kind of care work?

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Andrey Shcherbenok
Columbia University

 The Absent Face of Power: Missing Stalin in Post-Stalinist Soviet Cinema

The death of Stalin in 1953 and the denunciation of Stalinism by the Communist Party leadership in 1956 led to momentous changes in the ways state power was conceived of in popular imagination of Soviet people. This change was most visible in Soviet cinema, which both reflected the ideological earthquake of de-Stalinisation and was one of the primary vehicles of its promotion. Starting in the early 1930s and up to 1953 power in Soviet Union had increasingly human face – that of Joseph Stalin, whose visual representations were ubiquitous. Documentary cinema made its important contribution, while Stalin also appeared in fiction films played by various professional actors. In the mid-1950s this situation was reversed – during Khruschev’s era Stalin was no longer mentioned, let alone shown, even in historical films set in the years of his rule; sequences and individual shots containing Stalin were systematically cut out of older films, while their soundtracks were re-mastered to erase the mentioning of Stalin’s name.

The consequences of this change for Soviet imagination of power cannot be overestimated and went far beyond public attitude to a particular historical figure. No other Soviet leader ever became a universal representative of ideological law comparable to Stalin, so Soviet power literally lost its distinctive human face. In this paper, I will analyze both the ideological effects of excising Stalin from the existing films and the new representation of state power in Soviet cinema after 1953 in which the palpable absence of the great leader was made up for on the symbolic and imaginary planes to effect ideological interpellation that would replace the former mechanism based on the libidinal attachment to the person.

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Laura Stark

The limits of patriarchy: women’s hidden networks of power in rural Finland 1860-1940

Familial patriarchy has defined as control of resources by the male head of household that are essential  to the maintenance of the family and form the material basis of his authority/power. Familial patriarchy in rural Finland was not without its weaknesses, however. In agricultural peasant societies in which the largely self-sufficient farm was the basic productive unit of society, women were by no means excluded from access to production. The fact that women’s labour was vital to the survival of the household and that they had access to the farm products themselves  led to interesting, often tension-filled configurations of power. Prior literature on the topic has tended to neglect the precise mechanisms by which patriarchal power was exerted within the household, not to mention strategies for power employed by those who did not enjoy the position of patriarch – women,  youth, and men of lower social status.

In this paper I focus specifically on the hidden power networks formed by two female activities ‘behind-the-scenes’: ‘home-thievery’ (kotivarkaus) and ‘news-carrying’ (kontinkantaminen). Home-thievery was the bartering of farm products – grain, butter, meat, cheese, milk and wool – by wives and daughters behind the farm master’s back in return for information, services, and store-bought goods. News-carrying was when women from the landless classes (masseuses, cuppers, day-labourers and even beggars) reported their observations or disseminated rumours in the village for a specific purpose. These women were usually  paid by farm mistresses  through home-thievery to travel to other farms to carry or spread news. The farm mistresses then used the information collected or disseminated by their "spies" to advance their own interests. These hidden networks of information circumvented and undermined male authority in many ways.

My sources include written recollections sent by rural inhabitants themselves to the Finnish Literature Society Folklore Archives (1900-1940), and newspapers published 1860-1900

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Saara Tuomaala
Ph.D., Research FellowAcademy of Finland
University of Helsinki

Care or Control? Leisure Time of Rural Young People in Finland, 1917-1940

This paper explores the structures, processes, and experiences of young people and their leisure time in the Finnish countryside in the early decades of the 20.th century. I focus on the ways in which the modernization of youth and free time of young people in Finland was formulated as embodied and subjective experiences in the local power relations and life spheres. In modernizing Finland, the rural young from different genders and social strata were creating their social spaces and places partly anew within their leisure time, and partly applying the practices according the traditions of agrarian cultures. Especially during weekend evenings both boys and girls gathered together or in separated groups in the village yards, roads, sports fields, the youth clubs and houses of other societies within religious, civic and political organizations. In those places and positions of leisure, there were created and also retained different societal, political and gendered borders, which sometimes were surpassed by young people themselves. In any case, in the divided society of the early 20th century, it was impossible for young persons to ignore those divisions of social control and care.

Considering the leisure of young people as a societal dialogue of modernization between the care and the control, it included new forms of social control as institutional practices of social care, for example as reformatory and educational activities among the youth movements. In their redemptive spaces of leisure time, there existed organized attempts and intentions to construct a new social order within modernizing youth thorough a special enlightening social care.

The paper is based on my post doc-research Rural youth, Citizenship and Gender in Finland, 1917–1940 (Academy of Finland). Through the oral history data and written materials of the era, I examine the dialogue between private and public life spheres of young persons, especially on the coastline of Northern Ostrobothnia.

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31.08.2009 11:12 Elina Heikkonen