Kansanmusiikin keruu ja kansallinen katse

Abstract

Folk Music Collecting and the National Gaze: The Documentation Work of Erkki Ala-Könni During the Second Republic of Finland, 1941–1974
 Outi Valo’s doctoral dissertation explores the ideologies and guiding principles for the collection of traditional folk music in Finland from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1970s. It focuses on the work of folk music scholar and collector Erkki Ala-Könni (1911–1996), who was a leading authority on Finnish folk music research. It takes its analytical stance from the concept of methodological nationalism, adopting a national gaze to scrutinise how the concept of Finnish folk music was constructed. The analysis concentrates on how nation-building and a national gaze guided data collection practices and what characteristics of methodological nationalism were involved in the collection of archive materials in Finland.