The Peasant Poor and Images of Poverty: Finnish Proverbs as Discursive Representations of Cultural Knowledge

Abstract

This article examines the core idea of poverty proverbs as hints of cultural knowledge in old Finnish rural countryside. Until World War II, most of the Finns lived in a high-risk society with only few institutions to guarantee their safety and well-being. The continuous threat of absolute poverty was evi- dent for the majority of the Finns. The basis of this research is 204 proverbs that contain the words poor, poverty, pity or unfortunate. The proverbs analyzed and classified here were collected in the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society between the years 1885 and 1950. The ideational level of the proverbs in the context of social history is crucial in revealing the schematic structure that people use to communicate about rural poverty. Throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the majority of the population in Finland remained agrarian and poor. By World War II, more than half of the Finns still lived in rural areas and most of them earned their living primarily from agriculture and forestry. Urbanization proceeded rapidly from the 1960s onwards. This paper focuses on the idea of the cultural knowledge and shared understanding that ordinary people, 'folk', had of the concepts and ideas concerning the rural-based poverty in Finland at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The basis of this article is a corpus of 204 Finnish proverbs that contain the words poor, poverty, pity or unfortunate; of these, 54 have been selected as examples of a certain theme of cultural knowledge. 1 Some of the proverbs were explained by the informants. Therefore, I also carefully scrutinized every explanation provided by the in- formants for any given proverb text, if such was available. The article does not explore what is distinctive about Finnish proverbs but rather, how semiliterate poor peasants, the majority of the Finns in the relatively recent past, described their universe of experience from the point of view of living standards. The