Estonian Higher
Education Accreditation Centre
Evaluation of Research in Literary Science (6.7) and Folkloristics (6.4)
in Estonia
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2. Faculty of Philosophy, University of Tartu
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Chair of Estonian and Comparative Folklore (Head:
Prof. Ülo Valk) Investigators:
Risto Järv, MA, Jürgen Beyer, PhD, Paul Hagu, PhD, Tiit Jaago, PhD, Merili
Metsvahi, MA, Arvo Krikmann, PhD.
Main directions of the research activities are the following: Lyrical runo song (poetics and meanings); Epical songs; Folk religion and demonology; Legend and belief; Folktales (tales of magic); Minor forms of folklore (proverbs, phrases, riddles); Local tradition of Setumaa; Oral history and biographies; Contemporary urban folklore; Family traditions; Folklore theory (genre and genre system, text and textualization); Historiography of Estonian folklore; Folk religion of India.
Target-financed project: Process of Estonian everyday culture in historical and contemporary perspective (1998-2002).
The Chair of Estonian and Comparative
Folklore was fully re-established in 1993. In 1995 Ülo Valk was nominated as
extraordinary professor, and in 1998 he was elected as ordinary professor. The
Chair is a part of the Department of
Estonian Literature and Folklore. This status of being an independent chair but
in cooperation with the Chair of Estonian literature is quite obvious and good.
The professors in practice are alternatively chairpersons of the Department.
The chair has one full professor, 2 assistant professors, one-and-a-half researchers, 2 persons with half-and-half administrative loads. There are at the moment 2 professors from the outside: one from Germany and the other is Professor Arvo Krikmann, Member of the Estonian Academy, who has by a special agreement ½ load at Tartu University and ½ load at the Estonian Literature Museum, conducting there research on short genres of Estonian folk literature. Guest lecturers often visit the chair, and the staff members often give guest lectures elsewhere, mainly abroad. Gender and age criteria are statisfactory. The chair has a small library of its own, for fieldwork and archives they work together with the Estonian Folklore Archive at the Estonian Literature Museum in Tartu. At the beginning of re-establishing the chair, the Nordic Institute of Folklore (then in Turku) gave a good number of folklore books to the chair. Nowadays through international contacts some of the most modern books can be found in the chair’s library.
Technical facilities are fair, but could be developed. The same could be said about the rooms of the chair. They need one own seminar room and another room for the library.
As for financing, they get various grants and funds. Since 1998 they participate in the target project “Processes of Estonian Everyday Culture in Historical and Contemporary Perspective”. It makes circa 25 % of the finances of the project. From 1998 on there are target-financed resources for doctoral students too. For 2003-2007 they plan a project “Discourse of Everyday Life and the Dialogue of Cultures”, which is multidisciplinary indeed, together with researchers of ethnography, cultural anthropology and other branches of the social sciences.
Both teaching and research cover the most important chapters of Estonian folklore: folk religion, folk song texts, contemporary folklore and family traditions, regional folklore (with special emphasis on Setu folklore) etc. They pay due attention to theoretical questions. They have organized seminars on history and on methods of folklore researches, and on genre theory as well. Estonian folkloristics was often (and not without reason!) regarded as being purely empirical. The chair tries to change the situation, by a careful selection of invited lecturers and by translating important works into Estonian. E.g. the book of theoretical papers by Professor Alan Dundes (University of California) was published recently. (One could add that no such book was published e.g. in Finland, Scandinavia, Russia, Hungary etc.) The participation of the staff members in international conferences, as well as Professor Valk’s regular teaching activity abroad, give a good access to the most up-to-date results in comparative folklore research. However, the Tartu chair of folklore is not following any short-wave novelties in folklore studies, they combine the “classical Estonian” approach with a careful selection of modern methods.
It is very important for the international community of folklorists and ethnographers that from now on the Chair will edit (together with the Estonian Literature Museum) the most prestigious international bibliography Internationale Volkskundliche Bibliographie (which since 1917 is the best known and most used handbook of the research in folklore and ethnography). It is an important task and it needs more financial and personal support. This publication is number one in any respect in Europe, and can be done only through excellent international contacts, which the Tartu chair of folklore has already established. The publication in one way today belongs to UNESCO, but it is older than the UNESCO itself, or even than the League of Nations, which once was supporting it between the two wars. The Estonian editing institutions should be proud that the international community trust in them.
The list of publications contains more than 50 scientific papers, 13 monographs (10 in Estonia and 3 in abroad), and other publications too. Professor Valk’s dissertation on Estonian devil lore was published in English in the world’s most famous publication series in folklore: Folklore Fellows Communication in Finland. The Chair has its own publication series: Studies in Folklore and Popular Religion (hitherto 3 volumes).
7 MA and 1 PhD dissertations were defended during the period of the report. In addition to that in current projects there are 8 PhD and 17 MA students involved.
The Estonian fairy-tales research project (Grant no. 3894 for 1999-2001) aim to make (after a careful systematisation) a scientific and well measured anthology of Estonian fairy tales. There was no similar attempt in the Estonian folklore research before. The Legend as the Genre (Grant no. 4450, for 2000-2003) is about the interpretation of various sub-genres of the legends. There was a book already published on the topic (in German): Folklore als Tatsachenbericht. The project will cover other subgenres too.
The cooperation with other insitutes is exemplary. The Estonian Folklore Archive, the Estonian Literature Museum were always inseparable from the chair of folklore in Tartu. The chair is just keeping alive this tradition. They have added a more close contact with ethnographers, both in the Estonian Folk Museum and at the Chair of Ethnography at Tartu University (Faculty of Social Sciences). The cooperation runs from fieldwork to publication, organizing conferences, etc. (In most of such reports similar sentences can be read, but in this case it is an everyday routine indeed, extending to all possible ways of cooperation.)
A new form of cooperation is with the Culture College in Viljandi, where previous PhD students of the Tartu Chair of Folklore are working. The work there involves both research and teaching.
International cooperation is frequent and many-sided. Lund, Turku/Abo, Helsinki, Joensuu, St. Petersburg, Riga, Dublin, Oslo were mentioned in connection with 7 international research projects. The other contacts (visiting scholars, students, joint publications etc.) are wider, and include the USA, Germany, Hungary, etc. too. The Chair is in fact one of the most frequented international meeting places of folklorists from all over the world. They deserve the name “chair of … comparative folklore” very well.
The strength of the chair is its solid, continuous and multidisciplinary work in a friendly atmosphere. They go by steps and steps, and accumulate previous results. There is no hurry for so-called modernity, because they are modern and internationally oriented indeed.
As for weaknesses (aside from financial, technical shortcuts and the lack of necessary amount of rooms) we can mention the limited number of foreign students. A permanent position of teaching comparative folklore (in a special way) would be a good acquisition. Language skills of some of the older and very young staff members and students could be improved too.
Excellent, ranking among the 5-6 best chairs of folklore all around the world. (We could mention that there are more than 100 university chairs of folklore – sometimes together with etnography – around the world.) It is rapidly developing, and for that it needs further support.
Excellent (by about 11 grades), only with some lack in applying funds. As for the strategy of research and perspectives we saw only the immediate proposals.
Recommendations
1. To extend the special teaching of comparative folklore, by inviting visiting professors regularly. It will increase the number of foreign students too. It requires the enlarging of the library of the chair, and to work in more rooms.
2. Continuation of international and nation wide research (by grants). Perhaps the new opportunuity of editing the Internationale Volkskundliche Bibliographie will give wider perspectives for that. From that publication one learns best, what is going on in current folklore research.
3. To consider the writing of a new university handbook of Estonian folklore, and then a book of introduction to folklore methods. It would be useful not just in the next years, but for a long run, both for students and scholars.
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Tallinn, November 30, 2002
The Evaluators’ Team:
Professor Vilmos Voigt
Professor Pekka Pesonen
Professor Pekka Tammi
Professor Ulrika Wolf-Knuts