MA Kati Mikkola
At present researcher at the Graduate School of Cultural Interpretations: Nationality, Locality, Textuality.
In my doctoral study Popular Perspectives on the Challenges of Nation-Building in Modernizing Finland my aim is to examine processes of modernisation, secularisation and nation-building in Finland in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. The focus of my research is the level of the "ordinary people" where these processes and changes took place in everyday practice. These complex processes were not merely a "top-down" modernisation and nation-building from above by the elite and intellectuals, but a dialectic between the higher social orders and the ordinary rank and file. In my study I try to examine how the values and norms of traditional agrarian society were reconciled with the goals of popular reformers working within the spirit of nation-building and "progress". I will pay particular attention to the resistance toward new ideas and practices, and the nature of, and underlying reasons for, the tensions which emerged during the modernisation process in Finland.
The empirical source materials for my doctoral study consist of 1) responses to the questionnaire Miten kansa vastaanotti uudet elämänmuodot? (How the folk received new lifeways?) This questionnaire was published in the Kansantieto periodical in 1939. The responses of the questionnaire consist of free-form written narratives from 84 respondents living in different parts of Finland. 2) Autobiographical texts, letters and photographs sent to the Archives written by folklore collectors who answered the questionnaire Miten kansa vastaanotti uudet elämänmuodot? These texts shed some light on how these folklore collectors perceived, felt, and reacted to the new lifeways and opponents of modernisation. The material is drawn from the archives of the Finnish Literature Society and the Lexical Archive of Finnish Dialects.