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Z dějin finské folkloristiky: Zrod historicko-geografické metody

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Závodská B.

Studia Ethnologica Pragensia

2017

issue 1

109-117

The present article surveys the origins of academic folkloristics in Finland, mainly the birth of the so-called Finnish school of folkloristics and its methodological tool — the historic-geographic method. The first use of the Finnish method can be traced to the work of Julius Krohn, but it was his son Kaarle who adapted the method to the study of folk prosaic narrative. Kaarle Krohn’s aim was to find prototypical original form of any given folktale using a comparative approach with an emphasis on geographical and historical distributions of its known variants. The importance of geographical diffusion and an assumption of monogenesis link the Finnish school to diffusionist movement in ethnology. However, this school has also been called „Darwinism applied to folklore“, i.e. approach close to anthropological evolutionism, and the article investigates to which effect is this assumption justified. Evolutionism claims that the evolution is always progressive, from the simple to the most complex, from the identical to the diverse, following the same set of rules. The Finnish school assumes that by discovering these rules, we can go backwards to the starting point (form) of a particular tale. Many critics of the Finnish school argue that the historic-geographic method in itself is not innovative and that it had been used long before the Finns. However, this kind of criticism concentrates mostly on the comparative aspect of the method. The contribution of the Finnish method lies elsewhere. It was able to apply the elements of both evolutionism and diffusionism on the study of folk narrative while using a positivist method of textual criticism.

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1 Studia Ethnologica Pragensia

1 Závodská B.

1 2017

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Z dějin finské folkloristiky: Zrod historicko-geografické metody