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Women Cry with Words: Symbolization of Affect in the Karelian Lament

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Elizabeth Tolbert
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Extract

The Karelian lament, or itkuvirsi, is an extraordinary expressive form found in eastern Finland and Soviet Karelia that uses music, language, gesture, and the icons of crying to communicate affect and power. It has its roots in the ancestor worship of the ancient Karelian folk religion, and contains vestiges of classical Eurasian shamanism in its ecstatic, trancelike manner of performance. The lament is performed only by women, usually within the ritual context of funerals or weddings; however, it is also performed at non-ritual occasions with strong overtones of affect, such as when old friends meet after a long absence or as a complaint about the hardships of life. The lament is now only barely remembered by a handful of Karelian women, most of them refugees from World War II now living in Finland. The ritual contexts have completely died out in Finland, although the funeral context still partially survives in Soviet Karelia. The primary source material for this paper is drawn from my fieldwork with Karelian refugees in 1984-85, who had learned laments prior to World War II in traditional village settings.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 22 , 1990 , pp. 80 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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Footnotes

1

This paper is based on fieldwork and extensive archival work conducted in Finland in 1984-85 under the auspices of a Fullbright grant for Research and Study Abroad, and further supported by an American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women and research grants from the Graduate School of the University of California, Los Angeles. Portions of this paper were presented at the 30th Conference of the International Council for Traditional Music in Schladming, Austria, July 1989 and at the Conference on Lament at the University of Texas, Austin, April 1989. Thanks to the reviewers for their helpful comments, to Kathryn Vaughn for her Music Mapper graphs and for many fruitful discussions, to Sue De Vale for her continuing dialogue, and to the Karelian lamenters who so graciously shared their knowledge with me. See Vaughn's computer aided analysis of these same materials (companion paper in this volume) for independent confirmation and new insights into the issues presented here.

References

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