Konflikt, kogemus ja nostalgia perepärimuses Eesti ja Soome näitel

Abstract

The need to know one's ancestry has been justified by mythical, legal, as well as scientific explanations. But why do we discuss it and write about it in the modern society?We must search for the reasons for our interest in family heritage in the common elements of the earlier tradition and new forms of culture. Therefore, there is no need to study merely oral narratives, or separate them strictly from heritage in written form.The current article centres on the purpose of family heritage at the end of the 20th century, based on the structure of family narratives in two written sources. The manuscripts were taken from the Estonian collection entitled Eesti Elulood (EE), [Estonian Life Stories] available in the Estonian Archives of Cultural History in the Estonian Museum of Literature, and from the Finnish collection Suvun suuri kertomus (SSK) [The Great Family History] available in the Finnish Literature Society Folklore Archives in Helsinki. Nearly 1,500 of the total of 20,000 pages of the first collection (Life stories of the Estonians submitted for the 1996 collection contest «The Fate of Me and My Close Ones in the Course of History») and approximately 1,300 pages of the total of 40,000 of the other (the outcome of the 1997 Finnish national contest for collecting family heritage) were covered for the present article. As to the Estonian manuscripts the selection was based on the contents of heritage (the collection focuses on life stories, and therefore does not contain accounts about ancestry and the life of ancestors); as to the Finnish material I tended to give priority to narratives about peasant ancestries, as it seemed to comply best with the selected Estonian material.The narrators were mainly from village communities, although nowadays they may be settled in towns. The majority of them were born during the period between the two world wars. Written narratives reflect an opposition between the stability and harmony and the crisis after WW2. The reason for it is objective due to the life of the generation under discussion and ongoing historical events. In the 1920s-1930s, today's narrators-respondents were young children. This period is often characterised as a period of stability and security, followed by a very critical change in society. In Estonia, people's lives were interrupted by war and political reforms, which ran to the extremes with the arrests and deportations in 1941 and 1949. In Finland, life was affected by the war, emigration from Karelia due to the re-establisment of Russian borders; the most significant change was associated with cultural crisis, where the former natural tendencies were set in the opposition with technocracy. Living at the breakpoint has favoured stark contrast between perception and its performance before and after (i.e. now) in narratives based on conflict. Apart from perceiving the difference between the periods, we should remember that narratives based on conflict are already extant in the tradition. In peasant heritage they are associated with the topic of marriage, the relationship between a husband and his wife, a daughter-in-law and mother-in-law. Stories of conflict do not result in the fact that some people found themselves amid risky situations more often than others, the reason lies in the narrative traditions hitherto (or, to be more exact, in the structural methods extant in the narrative tradition).The opposition between the past and the present day is not always presented in the form of a conflict. In this case the narrator does not focus strictly on one axis (the conflict), but regards the events in a wider perspective, which eventually results in the notion 'experience'. 'Stories of experience' may also comprise 'stories of conflict'.The subject of nostalgia is rarely mentioned in the material discussed, mainly because the narratives are directed to future and addressed to the wider public, whereas nostalgia is directed to the past and addressed to the narrator himself.Narrative heritage intrigues folklorists mainly due to the established cultural stereotypes, as it does not introduce mere historical facts, but reflects also people's attitudes, tendencies of tradition, cultural differences and different narrative structures (what to tell and how).