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

Abstract

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.