Reviewed by: Mythic Images and Shamanism: A Perspective on Kalevala Poetry Thomas A. DuBois Mythic Images and Shamanism: A Perspective on Kalevala Poetry. By Anna-Leena Siikala. (FF Communications 280. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2002. Pp. 423, forward, citations, bibliography, 43 line drawings and photographs, person index, general index.) From its initial volume in 1911, the series Folklore Fellows Communications (FFC) has been recognized for both its complex and detailed monographs on folkloristic topics and its often ground-breaking theoretical and methodological contributions. With her Mythic Images and Shamanism, Professor Anna-Leena Siikala of the University of Helsinki takes up this forum to revisit the issue of shamanic elements in Finnish folklore. The study is informative about the Finnish tradition and valuable as a methodological foray into the vexing question of how to reconstruct a past—indeed, an ancient—cultural phenomenon on the basis of an oral tradition collected relatively recently. Siikala's study is a translation and partial expansion of her earlier work Suomalainen samanismi, from 1992. In it, she applies perspectives drawn from her own extensive research on North Eurasian shamanism, looking for and finding striking parallels in the folklore of Finns and Karelians. Following the lead of earlier Finnish scholars, Siikala bases her analysis on three closely associated sources of evidence: epic songs collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Karelia, Ingria, and adjacent areas of Finland; incantations collected over roughly the same period (but with a wider distribution); and court, historical, and ethnographic records of tietäjät, folk healers, ranging from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. On the basis of these materials, Siikala reconstructs a healer/magic practitioner tradition possessed of specific healing techniques (e.g., baths, ointments, sauna), along with magic procedures and a cosmos reflected in the exhortations and narrative portions of the incantations and epic songs. Comparative material from other parts of Europe, particularly medieval Scandinavia, helps Siikala explore and explain this intriguing religious tradition. In presenting this unified image of a "tietäjä institution," Siikala is also clear to point out the differing cultural sources from which it drew, reviewing the historical-geographic findings of earlier Finnish scholars with great precision and insight. Some elements of the tradition may derive from the ancient Finno-Ugric past, whereas others may reflect the influences of the Catholic Middle Ages or other more recent intercultural contacts. The final section of Siikala's work presents a diachronic overview of the tradition that accounts for its historical transformation from an Iron-Age paganism into a [End Page 242] form of Christian folk healing. What is most important for Siikala is not the various sources of such elements, but the way in which all of them became assimilated into a preexisting worldview, an "ethnic religion" that rendered the foreign familiar and useful in maintaining an age-old relation with the cosmos. Siikala accounts for the tremendous continuity her study implies—a religious continuum that stretches over millennia—through reference to the French history of mentalities school, in which cultural phenomena are examined over long duration with an eye to the ways in which cultures meet with and assimilate new influences. Indeed, such a model of cultural dynamics works very well for a region with a high degree of population stability and continuity and limited pathways of cultural influence, such as one finds in Finland and Estonia. In fact, the model may work better here than for France or other parts of Central Europe. And, naturally, such a framework would be far more difficult to apply to an ethnographic situation like that of the United States or other immigrant, diasporic, or displaced communities. Such seems a major point of realization for the field of folkloristics today: the fact that cultures may act in different ways in different areas because of essentially different historical, economic, social, and political factors. Siikala offers less a model for how to go about the work of reconstructing past religions or mythologies than a valuable case study of one cultural area in which the reconstruction can proceed with relative ease. And such is a fascinating rejoinder to the universalizing tendencies of past folkloristics and theories familiar from earlier issues of FFC. Thomas A...