Folkloristics and Cultural Geography - Estonian Roots: Centre of Excellence

Folklore accumulates and constantly reinterprets knowledge, values, attitudes, experiences from different times and of different origin. The research group is focused on the study of areal and diachronic variation of folkloric phenomena in different genres, and transmission processes of folklore, based on large corpora. One main focus of the research group is the Finnic poetic-musical tradition runosong that is considered to have emerged before the final divergence of Finnic peoples and developed along with language and population, preserving traces of culture contacts and elements of ancient layers of culture and language along with newer ones. Due to the complex poetic system the texts have resisted quick changes, while conserving archaic language forms, poetic figures, and content elements. Also the contribution of musical sources to the study of ethnic history is significant due to the great conservativeness of the ritual stratum of musical folklore, since the transmission of style requires especially long and close ethnic contacts. 

The other part of the work group focuses on the study of narrative folklore. Typological analysis of folktales combined with computational text analysis lets us discover the impact of various cultural contacts and societal changes on the genre's development. The place-lore collections and methodology of collecting place-lore is unique in combining folkloristic narrative research with geographical and archeological methods. Displaying textual data in their spatial context, offers a relevant base for comparative analysis of diverse geographical or cultural areas. Vernacular religious and folk medical knowledge has accumulated interactions, developments and innovations brought along by cultural contacts. The aim of methodical research on popular narrating about the ways of disease spread and healing rituals, but also the development of related religious concepts, is to get a more holistic picture of the development of such knowledge in Estonia and of its role in general mental coping over time. 

The research group has profound expertise on the Estonian folklore collections and its formation history. This ensures that the research adequately takes into account the biases in the research material as a result of selectivity and preferences in the long process of data collection. 

The Head of Folkloristics and Cultural Geography Group is Mari Sarv.

Further links:

The Collegium for Transdisciplinary Studies in Archaeology, Genetics and Linguistics, University of Tartu

Estonian Roots page

Estonian Roots Facebook page