Folk culture was a key concept and source of inspiration for the national romantic movement. This was decidedly the case in the Nordic countries, where folklore texts documented by folklore collectors, stored in large archives, and published in academic publications became intrinsically connected with the promotion of national identity. Additionally, in this article, I propose that folklore collectors' actual travels and physical presence may have significantly contributed to this process. Taking as a starting point Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1962) contention that our bodily experience of movement provides us with a way of accessing the world, I argue that bodies in motion can have an integral role in the creation and performance of identities. Based on travelogues kept by nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century folklore collectors in Swedish-speaking Finland, I also reflect on the physicality of the fieldwork situation and the importance of bodily techniques.
Question your tea spoons!" It is a clear enough incitement, and a deceptively simple task-yet, I do not think I had ever come across it before reading Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (Perec 1997). A friend lent me a copy to keep me entertained on a lengthy journey (from Dublin to Finland by train and ferry). The book struck a chord with me that has kept resonating ever since. Perhaps its profound effect on me was partly due to the context of travelling alone and having time to read slowly and repeatedly, interspersed with (discrete) observations of fellow passengers.Georges Perec (1936-82), was a writer and an artist of words. Prolific in the extreme, he covered an impressive amount of genres and literary styles during his lifetime cut short by cancer. His natural skill for word games and mathematical problems made him a member par excellence of the French Oulipo group experimenting with form and seeking new literary structures (mostly through various constraint-and rule-based methods). To make a living, Perec worked for many years as an archivist-librarian in a science laboratory-a job one cannot help think he must have enjoyed on some level with his passion for taxonomy, categories, and list-making. Nevertheless, Perec's own works are notoriously difficult to label: sociological fiction, Oulipian exercises, oblique autobiography, hyperrealist descriptions and literary puzzles are some of the attempts at classification (see Andrews 1996: 775).Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1997, revised edition 1999) is a selection of Georges Perec's non-fictional works in English translation by John Sturrock. The volume contains some of Perec's most interesting writing from the point of view of ethnography, ethnology, and folkloristics, which is the aspect of Perec's rich and
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