Fifteen years ago, Alan Dundes concluded his last keynote to the American Folklore Society’s annual meeting with a shout-out to folklorists in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Sadhana Naithani’s latest book is yet another encomium to the humble folklorists of the Baltic, “quietly working, never showing off their achievements.” She declares from the book’s outset that her visits to the region left her feeling “that ‘the present’ of folkloristics was unfolding in the Baltics” (x).
This is high praise, coming from one of the world’s leading folklorists. Naithani is professor of folklore in the Centre of German Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has guest-taught at numerous universities on three continents. Her books and articles about the history of folkloristics in India, Germany, and the colonial British Empire are well known; she currently serves as president of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research. Naithani first traveled to the Baltic in 2008 to teach a folkloristics course at the University of Tartu; in 2016 and 2017 she returned to collect material for the book reviewed here.
Folklore methodology, collecting and interpreting stories, is the author’s path of entry into a folkloristic history of the three countries, each speaking a unique language and yet also sharing comparable motifs with the other two. Naithani delves into available English or German-language works to find stories about the region’s past folklorists and institutions; she converses with twenty-five scholars to glimpse the disciplinary history as remembered today (these are not Q&A; “interviews” but rather “conversations” among acquaintances); and she reads life stories collected from people in rural regions, in an “attempt to understand the folklorists and the folk.” “If one were to write this history of folkloristics only on the basis of folklore scholarship, one would get a record of… what the folklore scholars did/collected and published,” she writes. Her multidisciplinary approach, in contrast, “lets us see the disciplinary history of folkloristics not like an insulated tunnel through history, but as fragments in the larger cultural history of people and place” (10-1).
The Baltic case-study in turn offers new perspectives to the discipline’s international history. Plenty of research has been devoted to folkloristics in colonial or nationalist contexts, or its relations to gender relations and other power structures. Although Marxist ideas have often informed such interpretations, relatively little is known about how Marxism as the state ideology has affected folkloristics; “the relationship between folklore and socialist powers has not been sufficiently grasped” (6). Thus the book’s focus is on the period of Soviet Socialist hegemony in the Baltic. It is a “dramatic history” full of “shocking stories” about how lives of folklorists and folk were “impacted in extreme ways” (4).
Six concise chapters tell the dramatic story of resistance and resurgence. The stage is set with “A Flashback” to the institutional birth of Baltic folkloristics from the mid-1800s through the 1930s. “The Drama Begins” with the Soviet military occupation during World War II and the ensuing mass violence and deportation of hundreds of thousands to exile in Siberia. Three chapters are devoted to three sites of resistance during the Soviet occupation from 1944 to 1990: the university, the archives, and the countryside.
At universities, professors under heavy ideological surveillance taught, and students gained “parallel knowledge.” An Estonian professor, for example, first read a newspaper editorial declaring the official Soviet postulate that “culture exists only during Russian culture,” indicating that the state saw Estonian cultural identity as a threat to its existence; he went on to discuss unique features of pre-Soviet Estonian folklore (37). And so, folklore professors followed instructions they received from the hegemonic center, while also keeping alive a distinct cultural identity (41).
At folklore archives, folklorists collected folklore under the watchful eye of the Communist Party. Because government ideology denied that religion persisted under Soviet power, folklorists were not allowed to collect, study, or publish folk beliefs and religious folklore. Latvians nevertheless found ways of publishing “mythological” folksongs among other texts under officially approved classifications such as “work songs” (46). Lithuanian folklorists deliberately organized ethnographic expeditions to regions where Soviet terror and deportations had decimated the population, engaging memories of suffering and resistance (52-3). Stepping outside of officially permitted work could carry heavy consequences. After Latvians organized an unsanctioned midsummer celebration, they were transferred out of the Folklore Archives to a different job: erasing names of forbidden people from written records (46-7). That story about a work transfer, remembered with characteristic black humor as “exile,” recalls how easily the Soviets disfigured careers and lives, even after violent mass repression ceased. And yet today, Naithani writes,
“I was struck with the political astuteness and scholarly humility of the Baltic folklorists. Their current achievements are not born out of the USSR times, and much disruption of their institutions and intellectual continuity was caused by the USSR, yet they are able to place matters in a balanced perspective and talk about the single good aspect of the Soviet period for folklore research, namely, the [fieldwork] expeditions, which allowed for the continuity of collections, at least” (57).
The third resistance chapter shifts attention from professional scholars to the folk they studied, through reading Estonian and Latvian life stories documented in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Oral history has been among the broadest Baltic research directions in recent years, and analysis of such texts is connected to rethinking the whole of folkloristics (85). Naithani is struck by the collective sense of urgency on the part of scholars aiming to document historical narratives that were stifled by the Soviets, and of people who told their stories in a “torrent of memories” (9-10). She follows the lives of three Estonian women—a grandmother and a mother who survived the Stalinist Gulag, and the mother’s daughter, born 1947, raised to be a loyal Soviet citizen but due to her Estonian ethnicity branded “enemy of the people” at a children’s camp in Russia (65-9). Their stories and others’ resonate with the book’s earlier chapters. Returning to her question posed in the introduction, Naithani observes that while in the non-Communist world Marxism has sometimes enriched folkloristics, it was an ideology of repression in the Baltic: “it is not surprising that no one here wants to visit even the theory of Marxism” (88).
The concluding chapter, “Resurgence,” begins with the Singing Revolution of 1987-91, when Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania regained their independence through nonviolent mobilization. Dismantling the Iron Curtain, Balts soon renewed and expanded institutional and intellectual contacts with folklorists in Europe and worldwide. “The most influential theoretical paradigms were coming from the United States of America,” Naithani observes, noting in particular that a turn to “contemporary aspects and forms of folklore was the important feature” (93). I’ll add here a memorate about two panels of Baltic scholars at the 1994 AFS conference, presenting research on contemporary legends and current national singing traditions. Baltic colleagues were eager to meet scholars of near-mythical stature—Jan Brunvand, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Alan Dundes, (the list goes on), and Linda Dégh, whose identification of the life story as a folklore genre and (together with Dorson) paradigm-shifting turn to fieldwork in urban contexts they had read about. Already in 1994, however, the exchange of ideas was not a self-colonizing acquisition of American theoretical jargon, but rather, a two-way street. At the conclusion of one panel, Wolfgang Mieder thanked the presenters for bringing some sorely needed international discourse to the AFS conference.
In conclusion, Naithani celebrates three examples of resurgence in Baltic folkloristics: the new international graduate program at the University of Tartu; the Latvian Folklore Archives’ innovative online project of crowd-sourced transcription; and analytical research about Soviet folkloristics, which brings to the fore “aspects of folklore and folkloristics yet unknown to the international scholarship” (103). A more complete story of the resurgence remains to be written. This book of 115 pages cannot, of course, cover every detail of Baltic folkloristics past and present, and that is not the author’s intent. It documents one global folklorist’s encounter with disciplinary history in three incredibly rich traditions of folklore and folkloristics. I have also long admired Baltic folklore scholars from afar, and that is why I celebrate the publication of this book.
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[Review length: 1361 words • Review posted on November 14, 2019]