Welcome to the homepage of the international colloquium Silenced Sources, Heritage, and the Oral-Literary Continuum – Rewriting the Margins of the National in Helsinki, Finland, 28–30 June 2023.
The colloquium will offer a multidisciplinary platform for discussions on the making of national cultures and canonized regimes of folklore, literature, and cultural heritage in Northern Europe during the long 19th century.
The conceptual and ethnographic invention of folklore and oral poetry laid the basis for the national and transnational creation of elite cultures and literatures. The practices of dismissal, integration and transformation of folklore were strategic in the mediation between oral and literary forms of artistic expression. Rather than simple transformation of the oral into the literary, the processes of textualization and heritagization consist of phases of decontextualization and recontextualization that set the elements of cultural practices into novel symbolic and political articulations.
The colloquium welcomes researchers on e.g., folklore, literature, cultural heritage, and history to discuss the complexities of the oral-literary interface, textualization practices, heritagization and canonization of folklore forms and literatures, and the creation and legitimation of national cultures.
Dates and venue
The colloquium will be held in Helsinki as an in-person event on June 28–30, 2023. The programme will be made public in April 2023.
Main image: Lamenter Maura from the village of Jyvöälahti, Viena Karelia. I.K. Inha 1894. The Finnish Heritage Agency