In Finland, the epic Kalevala (1835, 1849) and Kalevala-meter poetry, or oral folk poetry more generally, are often seen as nationally significant symbols of Finnishness. The Kalevala is a modern literary product constructed by Elias Lönnrot out of Finnic folk poetry especially from Russian Karelia, Finland, and Ingria. Lönnrot, who was himself among the most significant collectors of oral poetry, created the Kalevala as a synthetic, organized compendium of (reconstructed) pre-modern “Finnish” culture. Beginning from the publication of the first edition in 1835, the Kalevala has been extremely significant in the creation of Finnish national and ethnic identity. In this article, we discuss the engenderment of Finnishness and Finnish culture in terms of language ideologies by looking closely at the Kalevala's languages, language-specific reception of the epic, Lönnrot's language ideologies, and politics of language standardization in the contexts of the Grand Duchy of Finland and Russia. We argue that in these processes, Finnish was strongly symbolized and given a mythological charter: it was the language encapsulating ancestral heritage, and it was the language that theFinns were obliged to develop, learn, and teach. For the needs of the nation, the language had to be refined and homogenized, made into a standard language. In this process, the Karelian language and culture were implicitly absorbed into Finnish cultural heritage but not recognized and valued as coeval cultural realities: in both Finnish and Russian discourses, Karelia represented the past of the present-day Finnishness, but not the present day of Karelianness.

This article examines the inventorying of Finnish intangible cultural heritage with regard to UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. I analyse the participatory Wiki-inventory for Living Heritage, concentrating on entries that discuss food and foodways to study how food, materiality, and the national intertwine with practices of producing intangible cultural heritage. The article’s theoretical background draws from the fields of banal nationalism and critical heritage studies. Food is eminently important in narratives of Finnishness: by using the concepts of naturalness and pastness, I show how Finnish food becomes interpreted as ‘authentic’ Finnish heritage. The concepts illuminate the complex processes in which the materiality of food, the Finnish terroir and landscape, narratives of the past, and the consumer who prepares, eats, and digests the heritagised food are tied to each other. These processes reinforce the banality of Finnishness, although the practices of inventorying paradoxically strive for the ideal of cultural diversity that UNESCO promotes.

Kalevalaic runosinging is a Baltic-Finnic tradition of metered oral poetry. In Finland, runo singing and the national epic Kalevala based on this tradition are often seen − especially in public speech − as nationally significant symbols of Finnishness. In this article, I examine how the idea of the Finnishness of traditional runo songs has been constructed in the changing paradigms of studying and performing folk music and oral poetry in Finland across the last hundred years, and how the concept of cultural appropriation relates to this. I will concentrate on early Finnish folk music studies as well as on the contemporary Finnish folk music scene; I tie these fields together by following the circulation of an Ingrian runosong theme called Oi daiafter it became part of archived folklore collections in Finland in 1906.

The main goals of this chapter are to analyze: (1) how the claim of whiteness is reproduced in 21st-century Finland in the processes of producing intangible cultural heritage; and (2) how Finnishness is visualized and embodied in these practices. I scrutinize the newly established wiki-based open access publication National Inventory of Living Heritage (NILH, 2017–), which is a part of the Finnish implementation for the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. In this chapter, I examine the photographs published in the NILH by using a methodological approach of visual discourse analysis. I conduct an analysis of 153 photographs that are divided into categories of (1) manhood, womanhood and family, (2) nature and naturalness and (3) visual othernesses of Finnishness. Building on interdisciplinary studies on heritage, banal nationalism and gender, I argue that the NILH photographs participate in reproducing the normative (e.g. heterosexual, white, family-centered and middle-class) images of Finnishness. Finnishness is embodied in the photographs in active, working, mature bodies that perform either heroic and masculine or collective and caring feminine tasks. Finns are also represented as having an intrinsic connection to “nature.” People are often portrayed in forested landscapes, and the pictures underline naturalized connections between the landscape, ethnicity and sexuality.

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