Aleksei Petersoni roll vepslaste ja udmurtide rahvuslikus taassünnis (1980.–1990. aastad)

Estonian ethnographers have always taken a keen interest in Finno-Ugric peoples, their linguistic kin. The golden age of Finno-Ugric studies in Estonian ethnography began in the 1960s and lasted until the early 1990s. The State Ethnographic Museum of the Estonian SSR in Tartu (the current Estonian National Museum) emerged as the center of Finno-Ugric research with its long-term director Aleksei Peterson at the helm of the enterprise. Estonian ethnographers visited almost all Finno-Ugric peoples, with the major focus given to the Veps in the 1960s and 1970s, and to the Udmurts, in the 1980s. The museum acquired an awe-inspiring number of ethnographic objects, descriptions, photographs, drawings and films. Did all this benefit the peoples visited? What was the relationship of Estonian ethnographers with the subjects of their research? Did their plight affect Estonian scholars? The Estonian ethnographers had a high regard for the ethnic particularities, languages and traditional folk cultures of the kindred peoples and resisted their disappearance. Their views contradicted the Soviet nationalities policy which until the mid-1980s, emphasized the convergence and assimilation of nations. The interaction between the Estonian ethnographers and the Veps and Udmurts during the long series of expeditions helped to stimulate the suppressed and weak ethnic self-esteem of the latter. The mid-1980s marked the beginning of the era of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. As a result, national issues could be discussed openly, and it was at that time that the national revival of the Veps and Udmurts began. Estonian ethnologists embraced the process and actively contributed to it. This is especially true of Peterson, who was quite well known in Vepsia and Udmurtia and had a certain authority there. In his speeches at various events and in the press, Peterson encouraged the use of Veps and Udmurt in public life, including the schools. He emphasized the need to place a greater emphasis on traditional folk culture, which he considered to be critical to the national identity of small nations. His ideas influenced the creation of the open-air museum of the Udmurts. He supported the territorial autonomy of the Veps. He could speak as a messenger of perestroika whose word had weight. Thus Veps and Udmurt activists and nationally-minded ordinary people received inspiration and moral support from Peterson (and other Estonian ethnographers) for the preservation of their mother tongue, national identity and cultural heritage.

Soome-ugri välitööd ja muuseumikogud: sissevaateid uurimislukku

Introduction

Sürja traditsioon Põhja-Venemaa ja Siberi käsitöönduses ja rahvakunstis

The article deals with the term “Zyryanskoe” in the traditional designations of the material objects and art technologies among the people who live in the boundary territories with Komi-Zyryan’s. The article considers the ethnographic material that was gathered under the research project “The nomadic ornament: ethnic identity in the ornamental tradition of Izhma and Nenets reindeer herders”. The article is based on the published and contemporary field data. The author supposes that widely spread “Zyryan designations” among the Northern Russian, Nenets and Ob-Ugric people is the result of the high level of development and uniqueness of some traditional technologies of Komi-Zyryan. Also, this article presents recent field data on the ornamental tradition in the technique of decorating fur products among those modern Izhma Komi and Nenets, who live together in reindeer-herding settlements of the Nenets and Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrugs. The article discusses the ideas of Komi and Nenets masters about what represents the ethnic and cultural specifics in the artistic decoration of fur products. Also, this article focuses on the question of the reasons for loss of ethnic identity in the modern arts and crafts of the Komi. Special attention is paid to how Komi ethnicity is visualized in modern folk art. Finally the possibility of a correct translation of the ethnocultural heritage in the works of modern masters of Komi Republic is discussed.

Metafoorid, millega me töötame: kogumismetoodika kajastused Eesti Rahva Muuseumi soome-ugri ekspeditsioonipäevikutes aastatel 1975–1989

Our aim is to examine how the principles of museum collecting are reflected in ethnographic fieldwork diaries. In recent decades, scholars and representatives of indigenous peoples have sharply criticized earlier modes of ethnographic collection and representation. The earlier acquisition policy was based on the understanding that ethnographers had a kind of prerogative to collect objects and that people had to relinquish their possessions in the name of science. By now such collecting practices have changed, but the analysis of the ethnographers’ earlier techniques enables us to gain a clearer sense of the historical context of museum collection. In this article, we study various metaphors related to museum collecting that we found in Soviet-era Finno-Ugric expedition diaries kept in the manuscript archive of the Estonian National Museum (ENM). We examine how the museum’s ethnographers used specific metaphorical expressions and descriptive models. An exploration of diaries through metaphors offers a way to discuss the formation of ethnographic knowledge. Such an approach can be more subjective, but the metaphorical models that reappear in the field diaries do show that certain beliefs and the fundamental nature of their expression were more prevalent among the museum’s staff. We analyze the diaries of Finno-Ugric fieldwork kept from 1975 to 1989, the most intensive period of the museum’s collecting work among the Finno-Ugric peoples. The objects collected during these years make up almost two thirds of the current Finno-Ugric collection of the ENM. The Finno-Ugric expedition diaries of the mature Soviet era reveal some metaphorical expressions and descriptions pertaining to museum collecting that are used repeatedly. We found that the metaphors of trade, war and loot characterized the era’s collection practices in the most expressive way. These metaphors reflect, in the humorous and grotesque key, the ENM’s staff’s perceptions of time-specific museological principles. In their 1980 monograph “Metaphors We Live By”, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson substantiated the universal potential of metaphor in human thought. While for Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor is a tool that enables us to talk about reality, what is more important is that metaphors serve as a meeting place of fundamental questions concerning people’s everyday experience and life. The analysis of the ENM fieldwork diaries partially confirms Lakoff and Johnson’s view. Although ethnographers use metaphors of trade, war and loot in their fieldwork diaries, they need not always be related to existential reflections, but are often just an entertaining play on words. At the same time, the playful use of metaphors does not in itself preclude the fact that they also reflect the discourses of the deep structure of ethnographic consciousness.

Muuseumid ja nende mõju praktilises muuseumitöös

Introduction

Muuseumid ja pärand: inimesekeskse pärandihalduse poole

Museums are memory institutions. They serve to collect, study, preserve and mediate to the public culturally valuable objects related to human beings and their living environment. They bolster the formation of social, communal and family identities; they function as public memory institutions, supporting education and scientific research and, of course, museums provide entertainment and recreation. In this article, we look at museums from the perspective of heritage studies, and for our analysis, we use the following three dimensions: heritage objects, levels of society and processes of heritage management. Our objective is to present a conceptual framework which would highlight more clearly the connections between heritage and museums and which would lay a foundation for interlinking some theoretical concepts from heritage studies and museology and help to improve practical heritage management. Museums and heritage are closely, if not inextricably, linked. A museum’s connection with heritage has always been one of the important features that defines it. At the same time, the relationships between various heritage institutions and their links with broader heritage paradigms have not been sufficiently researched. Since the second half of the 20th century, the number of objects and phenomena considered to be heritage has dramatically increased. Museums endeavor to keep pace with these changes, and thus more new museums are being established and the range of collection items is expanding. For a long time, discussions of museums encompassed only national-level museums. This is due to the fact that national museums are the oldest of such institutions to have emerged, and on the other hand, it is museums at the national level that have attained the most influential position in the heritage landscape. At the same time museologists have paid rather scant attention to museum institutions at other levels. Private museums and personal collections have not received sufficient museological consideration even though they form a significant amount of social heritage and are the most natural to people, and often the most important for them too. Likewise, community and local government memory institutions have only recently become of interest to museology, which is also the case even in the context of world heritage. All activities connected to heritage may be summed up with the term ’heritage management’. Heritage management incorporates principles and practices connected to the identification, preservation, documentation, interpretation and presentation of objects of historical, natural, scientific or other interest. The processes of heritage management can be grouped according to their focus: object-based, value-based and people-centered. These approaches do not follow a specific chronological order and are not necessarily exclusive of one another. Although they come in a certain chronological sequence, all the approaches are currently used depending on the context and purpose of the inquiry. These approaches reflect an increasingly more comprehensive and integrated treatment of heritage management. People-centered heritage management is a dynamic social process which necessarily includes diverse perspectives on the value of the heritage. Museums have made much better progress in producing multi-perspective views than heritage conservation has by comparison. One of the reasons is that the museum field is not as rigidly defined by law or regulated by bureaucracy as heritage conservation is. Heritage management consists of a continuous re-creation of the heritage, and here again, museums are the places where such re-creations characteristically occur. It is in museums that we continually place objects in new contexts and examine how that impacts people. Each exhibition is a new interpretation of the object, offering a treatment of it from a novel perspective. In fact the exact same process takes place with regard to all other heritage objects and phenomena, but perhaps within less controllable and observable contexts. A key issue for heritage management is the introduction of sustainable and more inclusive management methods. Museological theory and museum practice offer several examples here. People must be involved in the management of heritage at each stage, starting from the definition of what it precisely is and ending with its interpretation. It is important to develop and implement relevant practices. The idea of a participatory museum has made significant gains in this direction. People-centered heritage management entails, above all, the creation of future-oriented values and meanings. In a sense, the perspective must shift from the past to the future. Heritage is not a thing of the past, but of the future. It is a social and cultural resource that forms the basis for our plans for the future. We believe that this is the primary function of the heritage. Heritage management is the reinterpretation of contemporary social and cultural realities by using interpretations of the past selected for this purpose. Its objective is to change the present into a desirable future. Here it is important to take into account different types of heritage as well as different levels of society. Heritage stories must be like a symphony that incorporates all the participants from all of the different levels of society.

Kuidas mõtestavad ekspositsiooni koostajad auditooriumide kaasamist? Kujuteldavad auditooriumid ja kaasamisviisid Tartu Ülikooli loodusmuuseumi uue püsiekspositsiooni loomisel

The article aims to enhance the understanding of audience engagement and ways of its shaping in relation to permanent expositions by using the example of Tartu University Natural History Museum. We focus on the role of exhibition curators as content creators in the shaping of audience engagement. The study is informed by constructivist grounded theory and draws upon eleven semi-structured interviews with the curators of the new permanent exhibition of Tartu University Natural History Museum. In order to understand better the curators’ perspectives our analysis relies on the concept of imagined audiences and seeks to answer questions about what kind of engagement modes can be identified from the curators’ comments and what processes the latter were influenced by. The theme of museum audiences and engagement modes should already be familiar to the reader from previous Yearbooks of the Estonian National Museum (Runnel ja Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt 2012; Runnel, Lepik, Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt 2014; Lotina 2014; Rattus 2016). Earlier discussions, however, placed more emphasis to the existence of audiences and engagement modes, and were less concerned with how curatorial considerations can impact the formation of audience engagement and how this formative process may be directed. Furthermore, the earlier in-depth identification of engagement modes and examination of the interrelationships between their various aspects was underpinned by a holistic view on museum activities (Lotina 2016), while the present treatment focuses on the specific context of museum expositions. The concept of imagined audiences (Litt 2012) draws on the study of social media, but for this article we have applied its principles to a museum exposition, which is a far more static communicative environment. The study answered the questions about the kind of audiences the curators who put together the permanent exhibition of Tartu University Museum of Natural History were envisioning and what factors influenced the construction of audiences as well as what engagement modes were designed for the exposition. Individuals and institutions were distinguished among the audiences, both of which were in turn comprised of more detailed groups. Building on Gidden’s theory of structuration (1984) and Litt’s notion of an imagined audience (Litt 2012) the factors influencing the curators were grouped as either structural or agential. The following modes of engagement with the permanent display emerged: teaching, attracting interest, co-operation and provisions for stakeholders. Teaching was closely interlinked with the main objective of renewing the permanent display: the intent is to create a learning environment for non-formal environmental education, and in this respect it resembled the informing mode of audience engagement identified by Lotina (2016). Attracting interest was a mode of engagement which bore similarities to the marketing engagement mode previously described by Lotina (2016). Co-operation where visitors contribute towards the fulfillment of the museum’s objectives offered limited possibilities within the context of the permanent exhibition, but it holds considerable potential in the planning of future developments of the exposition. Providing for stakeholders was reflected in the museum’s consideration of the stakeholders’ needs, and it allows the museum to develop various services. All in all, both museums and their permanent displays offer valuable material for analysing the way in which audiences and their engagement modes are shaped. A better understanding of these processes will help us expand the possibilities of engaging actual audiences. Identifying messages, audiences and activities is a natural part of the planning of any permanent exhibition; however, the content creators’ visions of the upcoming exhibition also merit a detailed examination, and thereby particular factors that favour or constrain curatorial creativity will become clearer.

Kunstiga kiusamise vastu. Kiusuennetustunni eesmärk ja ülesehitus Kadrioru kunstimuuseumi ja Tartu Kunstimuuseumi näitel

With the shift of focus on the part of museums towards a fuller consideration of the audience’s needs, a number of museums around the world have begun to contribute more actively and consciously to people’s welfare, including their physical and mental health and the inclusion of more vulnerable and marginalised social groups. Several museums in Estonia have joined in these efforts over the past few years. A specific example of such a museum innovation is the work that has been done with bullying prevention. To date, studies have shown that one in five children attending a school in Estonia is a victim of bullying and that bullying can cause anxiety and depression, or in other words, it can significantly affect one’s mental health. Although there are several organisations in Estonia dealing with this problem, more active co-operation with museums started only in 2018 when Kadriorg Art Museum and Tartu Art Museum, independently of one another, contacted the Foundation for the Bullying-Free School with the request to develop anti-bullying educational programmes for schools of general education. As a result of the co-operation, two versions of the museum lesson, ’Using art to combat bullying’, were prepared for both museums. The article addresses the questions of why the above art museums decided to undertake their bullying prevention initiative and how this concern and art mediation are combined in the structure of educational programmes and to some extent, in that of the exhibitions. There are several reasons for undertaking anti-bullying initiatives in art museums from the perspective of both schools and museums as well as the Foundation for the Bullying-Free School. As school children have become an important target group, museums have sought to adapt their programmes, as effectively as possible, to the needs of schools. Considering that schools likewise have become more proactive and systematic in their approach to bullying, museums have seen this as an opportunity to offer alternative anti-bullying lessons outside the classroom routine. The development of such a lesson has provided an opportunity to simultaneously offer schools a museum lesson which would combine two critical themes—bullying prevention and art mediation—as well as train instructors in how to intervene expertly in bullying situations and apply current theoretical approaches. An added bonus for the foundation is that the museum lesson enables them to introduce the Bullying-free School programme to the schools that have not yet joined it and offer further knowledge consolidation activities to the schools that have already enrolled in the programme. However, it is still a young initiative that needs further development in order to find more sustainable collaboration formats which would have a more long-term influence on school children than a single museum visit. It is likewise important that the museums should seek to tie bullying prevention more strongly to their broader strategic orientations, or otherwise they run the risk of it remaining an ephemeral experiment that is not grounded by continuous development or follow-up activities. Through discussions, cooperative role plays and a craft activity, the museum lesson, ’Using art to combat bullying’, combines mediation of art works and introduction to anti-bullying principles. Discussion of topics related to bullying through works of art enables children to analyse art works in the light of their own experience and to approach familiar situations from a novel angle provided by the artist’s perspective. The co-operative role plays help to test out in practice the conclusions of the discussions. To consolidate the recently gained knowledge children are tasked with drawing pictures and compiling a contract based on the pictures. Although it has not yet been possible to study in detail the impact of the lesson on the participants, an analysis of the existing data suggests that it is possible to impart simultaneously knowledge regarding the essence of art as well as social skills and attitudes. Art and bullying prevention act in partnership, so to speak, where they support each other without either of them becoming marginalised. One possible way of making the lesson more effective, however, would be the tightening of the interaction between the museum staff and teachers outside the lesson time so as to negotiate mutual expectations and exchange information regarding both the needs of a particular class and the specific adjustment of the lesson as well as follow-up activities. When examining the way in which the lesson was anchored to different exhibition environments, it became clear that the lesson could be combined with a variety of art expositions, including permanent displays and temporary exhibitions as well as displays of both historical and contemporary art. Regardless of the exhibition context, however, interaction between the curators and museum educators in the planning of spatial solutions and sound design could be further strengthened in order to deliver a more effective lesson. For curators and museum educators, the ongoing museum innovation holds the potential for initiating co-operation with many other target groups. However, given the limited resources, it is increasingly more important to choose priorities very carefully in order to align, as effectively as possible, the developments in the field with the local needs.