When studying social practices that are regarded as traditional,
'tradition' is usually seen as an element of meaning. Whose meaning
is it? Is it a meaning generated by those who study tradition or
those who are being studied? In both cases, particular criteria for
traditionality are employed, whether these are explicated or not.
The individuals, groups of people and institutions that are studied
may continue to uphold their traditions or name their practices
traditions without having to state in analytical terms their
criteria for traditionality. This cannot, however, apply to people
who make the study of traditions their profession, especially those
engaged in the academic field of the 'science of tradition,' a
paraphrase given to folklore studies. Traditions call for
explanation, instead of being merely described or used as
explanations for apparent repetitions, reiterations, replications,
continuations or symbolic linking in social practice, values,
meaning, culture, and history. In order to explain the concept of
tradition and the category of the traditional, scholars must
situate its use in particular historically specific discourses --
ways of knowing, speaking, conceptualisation and representation --
in which social acts receive their meanings as traditional. This
book argues that since the concepts of tradition and modern are
fundamentally modern, what they aim to and are able to describe,
report and denote is epistemologically modern, as that which is
regarded as non-modern and traditional is appropriated into modern
social knowledge through modern concepts and discursive means.
Modernity cannot represent non-modernity without modern mediation,
which therefore makes the representations of non-modernity also
modern. Accordingly, the book deals with the modernness of
objectifying, representing and studying folklore and oral
traditions. The first section focuses on modern and tradition as
modern concepts, and the conception of folklore and its study as a
modern trajectory. The second section discusses the politics of
folklore with regard to nationalism, and the role of folk tradition
in the production of nation-state identity in Finland.
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