Archival politics and the loss of identity

As the majority of reconstructions of Latvian mythology are based on folklore materials, they are to some extent influenced and restricted by practices of folklore collection, the latter being determined by the agendas of collectors.

Folklore as culture of the Other and myth as the religion of the Other are juxtaposed to our, modern, world, serving as metaphors for that which is solid,

14 For example: “Polytheism is tolerant and friendly; he to whom all he looks at is either heaven or hell, God or devil, will both extravagantly love and heartily hate. But here again let me repeat, that to the heathen Germans the good outweighed the bad, and courage faintheartedness: at death they laughed” (Grimm 1883 [1844]: lii). Interestingly, due to Ger-man national socialist propaganda institutions’ appeal of GerGer-man mythology and war gods, the research and particular interpretations of German mythology has been an issue of scholarly suspicions also at the second half of the twentieth century (see Lincoln 1999).

fixed, unchanging, and thus providing psychological shelter from the ephemeral world. At the same time, against the background of overwhelmingly progressing (or, at least, changing) modernity, studies of folkloristics had shaped their object of study as something belonging to vanishing, pre-modern, pre-literate societies which seemingly lack all aspects of internal social organisation (see Anttonen 2005). With the advancement of the modern world, these societies are disappearing, echoing into the institutionalised nostalgic paradigm of loss: “Loss of culture, loss of tradition, loss of identity, loss of traditional values, loss of morality, and loss of exceptionally valued folklore genres” (Anttonen 2005:48). Such, for example, was the agenda behind establishment of the Archives of Latvian Folklore, calling for the collection of treasures very soon to be lost (p. 79–82). Folklore, collected at the moment of now, is disappearing; from the contemporary scholarly standpoint the only way to capture the pre-modern worldview is to reconstruct it from remains.

Regarding ethnography in the broader sense, James Clifford argues that its disappearing object is, in significant degree, a rhetoric construction legitimating this representational practice (Clifford 1986b: 112). Recovery of lost knowledge as a method of research of mythology was established by the Grimm brothers and their theory of survival. As stated Jacob Grimm on the Christianisation of heathens:

The heathen gods even, though represented as feeble in comparison with the true God, were not always pictured as powerless in themselves; they were perverted into hostile malignant powers, into demons, sorcerers and giants, who had to be put down, but were nevertheless credited with a certain mischievous activity and influence. Here and there a heathen tradition or a superstitious custom lived on by merely changing the names, and applying to Christ, Mary and the saints what had formerly been related and believed of idols

(Grimm: 1882 [1835]: 5).

So, the research on the mythology of the European people became the archaeology of these remains, which had survived under the mask and translation of Christian appearances. In addition, the very coinage of the term

‘folklore’ by William Thoms in 1846 was already fallowed by the definition of

“a slowly but surely disappearing knowledge” (Ben-Amos 1984: 104). It must therefore be collected, archived, edited, and stored. Thus, archival institutions, publication ventures, and editorial practices play an important role in discipli-nary history (p. 59–63), providing the material for analysis and reconstruction of the mythology. This way, the social practice is transformed into a textual representation, acquiring its own meaning within the general cultural policy:

The archive paradigm in folklore studies, which is stronger in some countries than in others, implies a political standpoint according to which cultural identity is best protected and argued for by depositing representations of both vibrant and receding practices in the archive and then selecting material for public

presentations, for example in the form of museum displays or books targeted at the consuming and reading public. Folklore speaks – for example the language of nationalism – through collections

(Anttonen 2005: 52).

In a way, scholarly pursuit of truth beyond the folklore materials is already caught in the illusion of authenticity created by the archival politics of selecting items valuable to be collected and represented; in this way the scholarly study of mythology manifests in the third level of representation – where the first level is a living tradition, amorphous vernacular reality, and the second is selected, categorised according to genres, stored folklore materials. Involving the power relationships, creating a collection is not a merely innocent activity:

“It is an activity pertaining to the politics of culture and history and contributing to the discourses on difference and the political construction of continuities and discontinuities” (ibid.). Latvian folklore in archival materials is also haunted by collectors’ agendas on the one hand and the aesthetics of perfect taxonomy on the other hand (cf. Vilks 1944). For a long time until the invention of audio and video technologies and their application to folklore collection, the main form of representation of vernacular entities was text. These are fragments (as are video and audio materials) of a larger whole, which have been decontextualised and transformed into literary imitations of their original orality (cf. Briggs and Bauman 2003). Such textual representations are politically charged for two reasons: firstly, according to archival practice they bear territorial identi-fications complementary to the construction of national and regional cultures and consequently the incorporation of particular areas and populations into particular political and ideological entities. This practice, in its turn, was to a large extent formed by the Finnish school of folkloristics, the scholarly environment in which the first folklore archive was founded, and which had also informed initiatives behind the Latvian analogue (p. 79–82). Secondly, since the formation of the subject called “national literature” and its circulation within the corresponding educational systems, entextualised folklore texts are later contextualised within the linear narrative of literature studies as “first, oral literature” (cf. Meistere 2000, Leerssen 2006); that, in its turn, serves for identity construction, testifying the age of a nation’s culture, an important characteristic with which to claim the cultural and political autonomy of particular ethnic group among other nations. Folklore is becoming a territorially bounded representation of the folk, and mythology – of the most ancient (and thus must valuable in political debates) layer reconstructed from this represen-tation. Even more than in scholarly discourse, folklore-derived mythology has been exploited for the construction of anti-modern identities in lay discourse from epic pagan-metal hymns to quasi-theological systems of neo-pagan religions in multiple countries, including Latvia (see p. 70–74). In both scholarly and lay projects, it is essential to note the discontinuity of living tradition: “That which was perceived as vanishing came to be valorized,

politically established as cultural heritage in a national arena and/or regarded as an embodiment of preferred moral properties” (Anttonen 2005: 58). So, the discourse of loss contributed to the establishment of archival institutions, which later served and still serve as the material basis of the scholarship concerning tradition, thus establishing a temporally conditioned timeless object.

2. From deconstruction to reflexivity