Lauri Honko’s Geisterglaube in Ingermanland (1962) in a new reading
Unlike a classic of literature a scholarly classic is not autonomous. It has a place in the scholarly development, it makes a difference: the world is not the same any more. Closer analysis often reveals a struggle between the old and the new and only time will tell which path leads to the future.
Timing, and the reception, is important. It can kill a work, or offer it a fertile soil to grow. Geisterglaube in Ingermanland was given this favourable start, and Lauri Honko (1932–2002) a solid base for a unique career. This was the book that Finnish folklorists had been looking forward to, when the discipline after the war was searching a new start, asking how to catch up with the international scholarly development. Instead of valued national heritage folklore was now approached as a universal mental resource which we all share.
Honko guided the reader to see narratives of meetings with house spirits as tools in social life. Both people and spirits had their roles to play. The theoretical frame was offered by psychology and sociology. The most important contribution of the work today, though, is the scholarly practice, dialogue with the informants which Honko had never met. Here starts the path that leads to the 21st century. The Ingrian people appear not as “tradition bearers” or backward “folk” but thinking, reflecting people like us.
Another important clue is the supernatural experience, the focal point of the study. Forty years of further research has shown that the crucial word here is not supernatural but experience. It is fruitful to see folklore as expression of shared experience. This happens often in the history of science: a scholar intuitively puts his/her finger on something, but it takes several others to get a firm grip that holds, theoretically.
It has been said that after a Turn some books ought to be read again. Geisterglaube in Ingermanland is one of those books. It is only now when we clearly can see, which of the scholarly paths that started here have been widened to lively trafficed highways, which ones have vanished in the bush.
