“Collaborative Representations. Interpreting the Creation of a Sámi Ethnography and a Seto Epic”

CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS are constructed through interaction
of cultural researchers and culture bearers. A study
of collaborative processes that resulted in published representations
of Sami and Seto traditional culture requires an exploration
of the emerged voices and representational agencies, editorial
activities and reception histories. The focus of this book
revolves around two manifestly representative texts from the
early twentieth century: Johan Turi’s story of Sami experience
Muitalus sdmiid birra and the Seto epic Peko performed by Anne
Vabarna. The current analysis of the complex performative interaction
between the culture bearer, his or her repertoire, and
the culture researcher benefits from an interdisciplinary anthropological
and folkloristic approach, informed by hybridity and
the blurring of disciplinary boundaries in historicizing inquiries
into cultural documentation and textual practices.
KRISTIN KUUTMA is an Assodate Professor teaching folkloristics
and ethnology at the University of Tartu. She has published articles
on the implementation of cultural heritage in representation and in
recontextualized communicative practices. Her recent work in
disciplinary history indudes the co-editing of Studies in Estonian
Folkloristics and Ethnology: A Reader and Reflexive History
(Tartu University Press, 2005).

FF Communications 289