Books published by Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura

Transnational Death brings together eleven cutting-edge articles from the emerging field of transnational death studies. The collection highlights European, Asian, North American, and Middle Eastern perspectives, and reflects on people's changing experiences with death in the context of migration over time. The collection begins with a thematic assessment of transnational death studies, and then examines case studies, divided into Family, Community, and Commemoration sections. Together, the chapters provide new insights on issues including identity and belonging, community reciprocity, transnational communication, and spaces of mourning and commemoration. The collection is edited by Dr. Samira Saramo (University of Turku), Dr. Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto (University of Jyväskylä), and Professor of Ethnology Hanna Snellman (University of Helsinki).

How do people tell of experiences, things and events that mean a lot to them and are unforgettable? This book examines personal experience stories and the way they are narrated in an attempt to gain an understanding of the people behind them and to reveal how these people handle their history, their lives and their cultural memory.

The fascination in Finnish folklore studies began with the realisation that the collections of the Finnish folklore archives have much to offer the modern-day researcher. This work contains a collection of works from the premises that the cultural models which shape mentalities give rise to manifest expression of culture, including folklore.

In Nordic countries, relationships between new immigrants, local ethnic groups and majorities are created in ongoing and sometimes heated discussions. This work emphasises two factors in the cultural and political exchanges among historical minorities, recent immigrants, and the majority groups dictating the conditions of these exchanges.

This volume considers the linguistic borders between a language and a dialect as well as the administrative, cultural, and mental borders that affect the linguistic ones. The articles approach mental borders between dialects, dialect continua, and areas of mixed dialect, language ideologies, language mixing, and contact-induced language change. Karelian receives particular attention, being examined from multiple perspectives with attention to variation, maintenance, and the dialect perceptions of its speakers. Together, the articles paint a picture of multidimensional, multilingual, variable, and ever-changing linguistic reality where diverse borders, boundaries, and barriers meet, intertwine, and cross each other. The combination of the articles also aims to cross disciplinary and methodological borders and present new perspectives on earlier studies. .

This collection of articles addresses the narrative construction of places, landscapes and their supernatural dimensions, the relationship between tradition communities and their environments, and the spatial conditions for encounters with the supernatural as they are manifested in European folklore and in early literary sources, such as the Old Norse sagas. Articles in the book discuss places cursed and sacred, churches, graveyards, haunted houses, cemeteries, grave mounds, hill forts, and other tradition dominants in the micro-geography of the Nordic, Baltic and Baltic-Finnic peoples. It emerges that places accumulate meanings as they are layered by stories and memories about personal experiences. In addition to the local dimension of place-lore, the book scrutinizes the history of folklore studies, its geopolitical dimensions and its connection with nation building. It also sheds light on the social base of folklore and examines vernacular views of legendry and the supernatural.

This is the first English-language monograph on the poem Kalevipoeg (1857-1861), composed by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803-1882). The poem is over 19,000 lines long, and is known today as the Estonian national epic. The epic was not a success story from the beginning, however. It took at least one generation before the text was received by the emerging Estonian intellectual class. In the meantime, immediately after the release of the bilingual Estonian-German edition, the text was received abroad more intensively than at home. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it is the most prolific text within Estonian literature, leaving its traces everywhere in Estonian literature and everyday life. The book includes a summary of the contents of the twenty tales of the epic and a comprehensive bibliography.

What are the most popular names of the Ambo people in Namibia? Why do so many Ambos have Finnish first names? What do the African names of these people mean? Why is the namesake so important in Ambo culture? How did the nation's long struggle for independence affect personal naming, and what are the latest name-giving trends in Namibia?This study analyses the changes in the personal naming system of the Ambo people in Namibia over the past 120 years, starting with 1883, when the first Ambos received biblical and European names on baptism. The central factors in this process were the German and South African colonisation and European missionary work on the one hand, and the rise of African nationalism on the other. Eventually, this clash between African and European naming practices led to a new, dynamic naming system which includes elements of both African and European origin."Within the field of onomastics, i.e. the scientific study of names, this study is a remarkable and extremely important one. ... I suspect that it will become a major and standard reference work in the future, not only regarding Ambo anthroponymy, but anthroponymy in general, particularly where cultures interact."Professor S. J. Neethling, University of the Western Cape, South Africa

In present-day Africa chiefs interact fluently with modern states, international organizations, and business corporations, and traditional chieftaincy is perceived essentially as a secular institution. Consequently, social scientists have started paying serious attention to the role of traditional authorities in contemporary political landscapes. Yet it was only a few decades ago that classic ethnographers were characterizing chiefs as priests, magicians, diviners, rainmakers, and the like. What happened to the divinity of African chiefs and kings?Drawing on his research on the Asante people of Ghana, West Africa, Timo Kallinen explores how the colonial and postcolonial states have attempted to secularize the sacred institutions of chiefship and kingship, a process which is by no means complete. Furthermore, it has frequently proved a problematic undertaking with regards to a number of burning issues in contemporary Ghanaian society, such as Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity, nationalism, international development aid, civil society participation, coup d'états, and witchcraft.

In any society, communicative activities are organized into models of conduct that differentiate specific social practices from each other and enable people to communicate with each other in ways distinctive to those practices. The articles in this volume investigate a series of locale-specific models of communicative conduct, or registers of communication, through which persons organize their participation in varied social practices, including practices of politics, religion, schooling, migration, trade, media, verbal art, and ceremonial ritual. Drawing on research traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, the authors of these articles bring together insights from a variety of scholarly disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, folklore, literary studies, and philology. They describe register models associated with a great many forms of interpersonal behavior, and, through their own multi-year and multi-disciplinary collaborative efforts, bring register phenomena into focus as features of social life in the lived experience of people in societies around the world.

The Soviet Union was not renowned for its fashionable clothing. However, after the World War II the Soviet Government opened several parallel organizations of fashion design with fashion houses and ateliers all over the country. The post-war decades witnessed hot debates on destalinization, economic and social reforms and the increasing importance of the public opinion. The cold war and the peaceful competition between the two systems left their marks on clothes fashion. Fashion offers a good insight into Soviet economic planning. Despite increasing opulence, Soviet consumers were not satisfied. Soviet experts on fashion propagated small series of fashionable clothing and the opening of boutiques which never seriously challenged industrial mass production. Using a great variety of unique historical sources the book analyzes the changing economic, social and cultural conditions of Soviet fashion which faced many problems but had real achievements to show too.

Finland celebrated its 85th year of independence in 2002. It is one of the thirteen countries of the world that have preserved their democracy uninterrupted since the First World War.Despite its modest origins and difficult wartime experiences, this dynamic country is now a world leader in many spheres. In 2001 it was named the world's most technologically advanced and also the least corrupt country.Other studies have shown it to have one of the three most competitive economies, the best environmental sustainability, and the second most equal society.Such rapid development has increased the need for information about Finland and what can be learned from its unique experience. This book offers an introduction to the country today, focusing on the most recent research into its politics, policies, and society, viewed in a comparative context.Dynamic Finland has been written for a general audience by two eminent scholars.