Cultural Intimacy and Othering through Narrative Culture: Folktales about the Finnish Roma

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Folktales about the Finnish Roma R omantic nationalism and the historic-geographic method set the frames for interpreting peasants and their narratives in the vast oral culture of Europe. Folklore-collecting institutions, such as the Finnish Literature Society in the late nineteenth century, conceived of the so-called common people, that is, those who performed physical labor for a living, either in agriculture, the logging industry, or skilled craftsmanship, as a single, homogeneous group, "the folk" (in contrast to the upper stratum of society). They were treated as one entity, as the people who made up the majority of the population and were believed to have certain things in common. These people were assumed to speak the vernacular language; they lived in rural areas and were poor and often illiterate, or maybe semi-literate (Anttonen; Bendix; Dundes). The population of the nineteenth and early twentieth century included various kinds of social boundaries, such as ethnic and linguistic minorities and the complex layers of the poor, who often did not share the characteristics that were implied in the idea of the folk.