Oral History and Life Stories as a Research Area in Estonian History, Folkloristics and Ethnology

Jaago, Tiiu; Kõresaar, Ene; Rahi-Tamm, Aigi

doi:10.30666/elore.78557

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…(Peltonen & Salmi-Niklander 2007, 5-6;Hytönen 2013b, 89-91;Hinrikus & Kõresaar 2004.) Nordic-Baltic oral history research has a tradition of adapting methods from neighbouring research fields, for example life writing (Jaago, Kõresaar & Rahi-Tamm 2006;Heimo 2016, 40;Hinrikus & Kõresaar 2004). In Finland oral history research is often conducted by ethnologists and folkloristics with extensive knowledge of old folklore and memory collections in Finnish archives.…”

Section: Materials Methods and Research Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Cos I’m a Survivor’

Hytönen

Malinen

2018

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In post-war Finland thousands of children experienced poor upbringing, neglect and abuse, and had to deal with their experiences without social support from adults. In this article we study how difficult and bitter experiences related to childhood crises are remembered, reinterpreted and reframed in later life and in contemporary Finland. As research material we use both oral and written reminiscences of childhood in the post-war years collected in the period 2014-2016. We argue that in the recollections of difficult childhood coping and resilience emerge as major narrative themes. Although informants in their childhood were forced to suffer in silence, they remember themselves as being resilient and capable of surviving in adverse environments. In their late adulthood public collection of childhood memories has offered them a suitable medium to remember and reframe their experiences as meaningful, by exposing the 'culture of silence' which prevailed in the post-war Finland.

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Section: Materials Methods and Research Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Cos I’m a Survivor’

Hytönen

Malinen

2018

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“…Particularly in the Baltic countries, oral history projects appeared to investigate traumatic experience of the 20 th century connected to the Second World War and mass deportations (Jaago, Kõresaar, Rahi, 2006;Kõresaar, Jõesalu, 2016).…”

Section: T H E C Ol L a P Se Of C Om M U N I Sm A N D Or A L H I S Torymentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Old Traditions and New Approaches: Locating Oral History and Memory Studies in East Central Europe

Slabáková

2021

Slovenský Národopis / Slovak Ethnology

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The article explores how oral history and memory studies have been used in East Central Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It focuses particularly on the question of whether Eastern European scholars only reproduce what was invented in the West, or whether they advance their original concepts and ideas. Both disciplines have been involved in reassessing the history of communism and the communist version of history itself and both contributed to revealing memoires obscured by the communist regime, even if the role of oral history may be considered as pivotal in this process. Although oral history had been practiced in the region at least since the 1970s, it was introduced as a new discipline according to the Western criteria after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Memory studies and their most successful concept, the “lieux de mémoire”, were implemented into to the region later and the promoters of the concept were predominantly Western scholars. Drawing on the uses of the term “historical consciousness” in Czech and Polish research, the article argues that various strategies associated with the “return to Europe” can be found in the region when promoting native traditions and equalizing them with the Western ones.

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“…12 Cf. Heimo's detailed treatment of interdisciplinary web of influences in Finnish oral history (muistitietotutkimus) (Heimo 2010: 37-52) as well as Jaago & Kõresaar & Rahi-Tamm (2006) on diverse (inter)disciplinary trajectories of Estonian life story research. The point that both overviews make is that oral history and life story research are not linear processes and instead of trying to reduce them to coherent "origins", one should focus on significant "meeting points" of diverse academic traditions and interests.…”

Section: Ene Kõresaarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2014

FEJF

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The aim of this article is to outline the main concepts used in cultural research, which denote the use of the past, to look into the trajectories of their mutual relationships, and to discuss the causes and development potential of the multi-faceted landscape of concepts that has emerged. Serving as an introduction to this thematic volume, this article creates the necessary conceptual framework for reading the following case studies. Two pairs of concepts are observed, which provide information on the modern cultural research of selected pasts: history culture and memory, and tradition-heritage. It is concluded that all the observed concepts could in the current situation be dealt with not only as fields of research, but as perspectives relevant for all areas of cultural research. Whether and to what extent the research of history culture, memory, tradition and heritage are entangled, is dependent on problem settings and objects of research, to which the respective research directions were originally related, but also connected with disciplinary contexts and academic traditions in different countries. In addition to impulses arising from inside research directions, the reason for the greater engagement of these directions could be the rise of interdisciplinary fields, which are not anchored to any specific concepts. A situation in which cultural research concepts with solid trajectories become replaceable occurs also in the case of transdisciplinary 'turns'. The research perspectives behind different concepts are best engaged within a specific field of research, which in turn have made way to the emergence of new concepts that bridge the established ones. In the context of this thematic volume, it is meaningful to refer to the increased cross-disciplinary interest in how the representation of the past in a variety of public spheres takes place. In this respect, concepts have been taken into use that refer to the 'public' at different levels: from official, state-sanctioned institutions to less formal, often locally based settings, and to particular, individualised contexts.

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Oral History and Life Stories as a Research Area in Estonian History, Folkloristics and Ethnology

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

‘Cos I’m a Survivor’

‘Cos I’m a Survivor’

Between Old Traditions and New Approaches: Locating Oral History and Memory Studies in East Central Europe

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