Magic, Body and Social Order: The Construction of Gender Through Women's Private Rituals in Traditional Finland

Folklore, Oct, 2001 by Jonathan Roper

Magic, Body and Social Order: The Construction of Gender Through Women's Private Rituals in Traditional Finland. By Laura Stark-Arola. Studia Fennica Folkloristica, no. 5. Helsinki: SKS, 1998. 331 pp. B/W illus. 160 Finnmarks. ISBN 951-746-051-1

The most recent volume of Studia Fennica Folkloristica continues to maintain the high standards of the series. Magic, Body and Social Order is written by Laura Stark-Arola, an American now living in Finland, who, as befits her self-description as "a non-European with Anglo-American perspectives on culture, folklore and gender," brings a fresh pair of eyes to see the Finnish material. In this case, the material consists of the "large numbers of women's magical ritual texts" recorded between 1816 and 1966, mainly in Karelia and Eastern Finland. These are little known to the Finns themselves: "many (non-folklorist) Finns I spoke with ... had no idea that women in Finland had ever practised magic, despite the fact that magic rituals were still being performed in this country as recently as sixty years ago." Stark-Arola's attempt to provide a context for this material manages to stay close to the data and does not spin off into certain of the trends of contemporary "Anglo-American" discussions of witchcraft that some of the language used at the start of the book might suggest. This is the making of the book. "Anglo-American" discussions of witchcraft seem to spend more energy on side-themes such as witchcraft accusations, rather than on the activities of magical practitioners, such as charms and other aspects of "magic rituals" (to use Stark-Arola's term). The long-term effect of such writings can lead one into supposing that no one ever practised (or attempted to practise) magic in earlier times. Indeed, at one very interesting point in her discussion of the materials used in the study, the author clearly refutes this by showing that descriptions of rituals contained in the transcripts of seventeenth-century witch trials chime in with the magical practices that folklorists recorded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This book is full of data from the Finnish archives: ritual runo verse and belief narratives related to such activities as magical protection against forest animals or the evil eye, or to anti-social magic such as harmful magic directed towards a neighbour's cattle or the sorcery used against a bride by the husband's female kin. It also contains details of extraordinary former practices, such as "shrinking the vagina" rituals, while an epilogue illustrates how the "seriousness" of women's magic was mocked by men's humour touching on the subject.

The amount of work and background reading (in a foreign language) behind the study is quite extraordinary: it was first necessary to sift through a vast amount of archival material ("tens of thousand of texts"), then to select and provide a typology for the final 1,800-strong corpus, and to provide the social and cultural context of the texts for the non-Finn, before embarking on her task of crystallising from this material the "themes" and "core motifs" "not readily observable from the text itself." But despite all such investment of time and energy, we, as contemporary researchers, cannot have the same knowledge or experience of magic rituals as did those who participated in them in the past. This is something Stark-Arola readily concedes. Indeed, in other ways too, her attempt at recovering those aspects of folk belief implicated in women's private rituals is one of the most nuanced discussions of folk belief I have come across. She is aware that the sources are incomplete and "filtered." Her study is situated geographically (the source material is largely from Savo and North Karelia), she does not romanticise women or "the folk," she recognises the various conflicts of interest existing between different women, she acknowledges that different people may know of and hold to different elements within folk belief, and she is clear on who "the folk" are (even to the extent of listing the groups it consisted of: landowning farmers, tenant farmers, hillcotters, itinerant agricultural labourers, the poor who were unable to work, village shopkeepers and village "professionals," such as smiths, carpenters, etc.) My only criticism of this unusually rigorous approach is that it is somewhat ambiguously located in time. At one point, the author remarks that her analysis covers the century-and-a-half span of the recorded texts (1816-1966), but at other points, she speaks of these texts as valuable in the research of "archaic worldviews" and of a timeless "traditional Finland," leaving it ambiguous as to when the "core motifs" and "symbolic structures" she identifies were in play. But taken overall, this work seems to be far in advance of most Anglo-American writers in the field of folk-level magic.

Jonathan Roper, NATCECT, University of Sheffield

[Correction. In the reviews of Studia Fennica Folkloristica nos. 2 and 3 in the 1999 issue of Folklore, the Finnish word runo was misprinted as rung.]