The linguistic turn transformed all research on society and culture during the late twentieth century. At the core of the revision was the mode of conveying information: language is not a neutral medium. The content of knowledge is not independent of the form in which it is presented nor is it possible for a researcher to master all the aspects of a text. Even if the extent to which the scholar is at the mercy of some discourse has been the subject of a heated controversy one thing is for certain. Once it is accepted that the comprehension of reality is conditioned by the language used to express one’s beliefs, it is hard to regard attempts to reach an ‘objective reality’ as viable
As regards the discipline of history the necessity of asking, at every stage of the research process, ‘whose reality?’ and ‘whose discourse?’ is what the linguistic turn calls for. To be sure, this advice is self-evident to historians in one respect and they have also displayed outstanding skills in reconstructing the concepts of reality and the discourses in which these understandings have been expressed. The problem is that this scrupulousness has only been thought of in terms of the past people studied while one’s own concept of reality and the discourse for expressing it have been taken for granted. This stance comes close to regarding the scholar’s own tenets as objective and neutral as well as judging the patterns of thought of the people studied against them.
The revision problematized the historians’ particular way of understanding the ’objective approach’ that had been considered self-evident as late as in the early 1960s when I was taught the basics of historical research at the university. This pattern of thought called for guarantees against present influences and was concretised by two maxims that turned out to be counter-productive in the light of the linguistic turn. The first rule of conduct a historian was expected to follow had been put forward by one of the ’founding fathers’ of academic history-making, Leopld von Ranke. It required ’extinguishing one’s self’. The second maxim was a more general one and called for ’deliberately abandoning the present’, as the rule was put by e.g. the Cambridge historian G.R. Elton,
In short, that the historian presents the people studied unintentionally in his or her own terms is a permanent risk. This is why one must not forget at any stage of the research process that the people studied had a different comprehension of reality and a different discourse for expressing their beliefs than he or she. However, the message of the linguistic turn is not limited to this basic point but reaches far beyond it and to demonstrate this is my aim.
The present essay traces the early signs in Finland of the revision to which the linguistic turn contributed. The approach is autobiographical and the discussion starts from 1972 when my first my first book on the theory of history, Historian tutkimusprosessi was published. It is a treatise in which the view on language is quite traditional; when writing the book I had no idea whatsoever of the linguistic turn. The original idea was to end the present article with the two books on historical research I published in 1993 and in which the influence of the new pattern of thought is unmistakable. (5 riviä poistettu)
When starting this article, the ways and contexts in which the changeover in my thinking took place was a riddle for me. What I had was a vague assumption that still seems to be close to the correct depiction: there was no specific moment when the linguistic turn would have given a new direction for my thinking. On the other hand, when the article’s deadline approached it had become clear that making thoroughly sense of the revision’s entrance to Finland calls for more comprehensive presentation of the historians’ world than I had anticipated. This is why the text does not proceed, in the autobiographical sense, beyond about 1982-1983. Still, it was quite interesting to learn that the perspectives beyond the core of the linguistic turn were about to be revealed already then.
1. Disciplining one’s present-mindedness
Initially, the historians responded to ’the postmodernist threat’ rather than to linguistic turn as such. The reason was that many theorists claimed that, resulting from the nature of language, historiography bore no necessary relation to the past. According to some of them, rather than providing true representations historians actually invented past matters. In the view of perhaps most scholarly historians the question was, in the words of the English historian Richard J. Evans, of a ‘vehement attack … on the notion of scientific history, based on the rigorous investigation of primary sources’. This reaction reflects the origins of the challenge posed by the linguistic turn: it came mostly from outside the discipline and from writers ’who (had) no experience of historical research themselves’. Consequently, it is only gradually that historians began to reassess their traditional basic tenets.
As regards history, it is the American historiographer Hayden White who has most often been mentioned as the first postmodernist theorist. His Metahistory. Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe was published in 1973. A similar pattern of thought is commonly connected also to two philosophers, F.R. Ankersmit and Keith Jenkins, respectively from the Netherlands and Great Britain. In a broader context postmodernism has been linked with several French scholars, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, for instance.
With reference to postmodernism, it is correct to state that historians have no grounds to deny that reconstructing past people’s ideas and actions is strictly, epistemologically speaking impossible. Nevertheless, the linguistic turn this doesn’t frustrate the idea of history-making since giving the people studied a fair hearing is possible. This ethical demand entails a distinct objective for the historian: he or she must carefully aim at reconstructing the subjective world of the past people studied. In this perspective the founding idea of history-making remains a viable one: there is something to be gained, from some point of view, by way of making sense of past affairs. Accomplishing the ensuing effort is, however, a much harder task than the historians have assumed.
The historian’s challenge is.to tackle his or her inescapable present-mindedness, not trying to achieve an objective approach. Disciplining one’s thinking in general and being in control of the study’s premises in particular, is the precondition for presenting the thoughts and actions the people studied ‘in their own terms’, as the profession has traditionally put its fundamental goal. What the historian must not forget is that it is he or she who defines the parameters of the study and for that reason the question to be answered is ‘why, and on what I am actually doing research?’ This entails three interactive operations: turning the topic selected into a clear-cut subject, delineating the subject’s significance and specifying the audience.
Historian tutkimusprosessi from 1972 is a treatise that discusses ways of uncovering the historian’ initial choices and controlling their influence in the research process. The emphasis is on his or her political engagement. The scholar who fails to ‘assess the state of the society and his or her position therein’ does not only ‘deceive him- or herself but betrays the society, too’. The London historian Mary Fullbrook hits the nail on the head when she characterises this tendency of self-deception with the expression ‘partisan pretence of neutrality’. So, the need to discipline one’s present-mindedness dominated my thinking well before I had any idea of the linguistic turn.
Using the past in political debates is a theme that has run all through my thinking about history. In this respect the last year at high school 1958 -1959 was crucial. It coincided with the beginning of a crisis in the relations between Finland and Soviet Union that lasted until 1962. The then Finnish debate was overwhelmingly dominated by what had taken place during the previous decades and this characteristic decided my choice when enrolling for the university in 1959. The major would be political history at the faculty of social sciences, not any of the conventional histories. In a similar way the social neutrality of historical research has always been an empty and treacherous idea for me.
With the view on my theoretical work, it was demarcating the audience, one of the three parameters in defining the study to be undertaken, that turned out to be the most fruitful one. Tutkimusprosessi stressed among other things that any historian was confronted with the need to specify his or her target group. The reason was a simple one: answers to the scholar’s questions were not relevant to everyone in the society. Basically, he or she could not avoid deciding ’what is important for the present-day people’.
2. The historian’s duty in the present
My own view on the kind of historical research that the 1970s required in my native country is reflected in the two subject matters that have been constantly relevant for me from then on.. One is about securing the social order in Finland and has its origins in the 1971 request of colleagues at Stockholm University. I was asked to instigate research into the political consequences of the Great Depression of the 1930s in my country. The ensuing ’Pulaprojekti’ was also a sign of the times: it was one of the very first team-efforts in Finnish historical research and financed by the Academy of Finland
In Sweden, Norway and Denmark the Depression marked the outset of the welfare state while nothing of the sort took place in Finland. In addition to demonstrating this, ’Pulaprojekti’ brought a new element to the presentations of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Those years were not only the heyday of the anti-communist Lapua-movement but also, among other things, the time of the gravest period of unemployment in Finnish history so far. A significant result of the project was also that contrary to the simple communist view, the extreme right-wing movement was not determined by economic circumstances.
About simultaneously with the launching of ’Pulaprojekti’ colleagues at my university department took me along with their research programme on the Finnish working class movement. It was a reformist venture and reflected a larger phenomenon: marxist ideas gained for the first time even some foothold in the country’s academic life. In 1976 we produced the first comprehensive presentation on the history of the socialist movement in Finland. The scant interest in the development of the political left was a Finnish speciality and served for me as an incentive to characterise Finnish historiography from the angle of the audience in a series of radio-lectures in October 1979.
I started from the idea of history as the mode in which a culture accounts for its past, a loan from the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, and pointed out that only a quite restricted segment of the population had been provided with the information needed for such an assessment of the past. History had been produced for the intellectual needs of a relatively well-to-do middle class and peasantry while the majority, working people both in towns and in the countryside had been bypassed as an audience. A few days after this radio-lecture I started to rectify this situation by means of an adult education project.
3. The history movement
Having been virtually expelled from the University world I was appointed the fulltime historian of the wealthy trade union of the paper and pulp industry (hereafter, Paperiliitto). The way I designed my commission put into effect the ideas about designing a research project developed in the previous years while working on the history of The Workers’ Educational Association in Finland (WEA). The study should commence as a dialogue between the historian and his or her audience since the research would then enable ’the people in present to throw off the shackles of the past’ and in this way, to quote the British historian E.H. Carr, ’increase (their) mastery over the society of the present’.
In the newspaper of Paperiliitto I declared in November 1979 that it was neither scholarly questions nor those of the union leadership that should be answered: a professional historian had been employed to investigate what was significant for the members. The method to be employed was the study circle, the traditional form of self-education for the Nordic working-class movement. The new element was that the groups did not study ready-made materials but produced the substance of the work themselves by making their own histories.
This line of action was a logical extension of my experiences in listening to the activists while working on the history of adult education; I didn’t have any models to apply. To learn in a few weeks’ time that there were a great number of research circles in Sweden was therefore a big boost. My belief in the workability of the own plans was also strengthened by the nature of these circles: they had mushroomed on their own as a part of the local responses to closing places of work during the then recession. Thanks to the intensive Nordic cooperation it was easy to get acquainted with the Swedish counterparts and, for example, to organise a four-day-seminar to discuss the kind of activity I was planning with colleagues in the WEA of the neighbouring country in the summer of 1980.
The contacts with Swedish colleagues resulted in a crucial change in my thinking. They convinced me that the necessary motivation could only be secured by giving the groups full freedom to choose their own subjects. As a result, rather than their becoming de facto research assistants of mine, the circles should determine their work themselves. What they created were histories in their own right, independent of my job. My role was limited to being coach and supervisor. Furthermore, the Swedish advice caused me to specify a novel concept of history that I had to persuade the workers to accept.
It took roughly one year’s campaigning at the various branches of the union all around Finland to convince the workers that the substance of history was not predetermined. What had taken place in their factory and their neighbourhood was history on a par with narratives of past ruling groups. Here, two Swedish books, kind of manuals for research circles were helpful: the architect Gunnar Sillén’s Let’s strive to the light from 1977 and the novelist Sven Lindqvist’s from 1978. The title of the latter, ’Dig Where You Stand’ won international acclamation as did its message: in any job, the specialist was the person who actually performed the work.
The Paperiliitto project lasted seven years and during that time I trained more than 200 members of the union to do research in what, as I had acknowledged, in their view was their own history. Quite soon, in 1980 – 1981 I learned that there were in practically all developed industrial countries a large number of projects where ‘ordinary people’ were producing various kinds of histories. Professionals were involved in some initiatives, like the best-known one, the British History Workshop movement, but by no means in all of them. In my contemporary vocabulary, the question was of ’history movement’ that was concomitant with the various alternative movements.
In retrospect the Paperiliitto-project led, firstly, to rethinking that resulted in 2012 in Making History.The Historian and the Uses of the Past, as I present this book in its preface. and secondly to an ongoing search for ways of rescuing democracy. In the short term, in the 1980s, the history movement turned out to be the harbinger of a comprehensive social and cultural upheaval.
4. New parameters of historical research
The history movement had its contemporaries in the academic world, orientations that became agents of disruption within the discipline. These ‘new histories’, as they were called at the time, elevated cleaners to a status on a par with kings, for instance. A sign of the times was also the widespread interest in themes that had not been deemed previously fit for scholarly interest, for example, histories of sexuality, the environment or animal rights, Furthermore, approaches considered hitherto problematic, if not downright heretical, mushroomed: oral history, history of mentalities, gender history, micro-history, and so on.
In other words, the flourishing ‘new histories’ were not new but old ones that had been traditionally discriminated against. They made, interestingly, headway without strong opposition; by the end of the twentieth century they had been allowed to enter the mainstream of the discipline. The upgrading of these orientations, assigning them legitimate status was equal to questioning the profession’s received parameters. The traditional notions about actors, themes and approaches of historical research were discarded. In short, historians caused an upheaval within their own discipline themselves.
The disruption was, however, overshadowed by the simultaneous experience of ‘the postmodernist threat’. There were only scattered discussions, not systematic and comprehensive assessments of the perspectives opened by the ’new histories’. And as was mentioned above, the trouble connected to language and discourses was bypassed. Nor was there serious analysis of the significance embedded in the concurrence of the upheaval within the discipline and the linguistic turn. Yet, these concomitant late twentieth century phenomena brought about a paradigmatic change in historical research, a transformation of the parameters of the discipline of history.
At the beginning of the 1980s, however, the paradigmatic change was hardly foreseen by any historian; yet some of them had an inkling that new trends were about to come out. This situation is characterised by the title of the 1981 methodological conference of Scandinavian historians in Tranum, Denmark: ’Invisible history’. The participants presented some of the orientations that were later on to be termed ’new histories’. My own paper discussed various challenges of the Paperiliitto history project. After a short while I realisewd that the way I designed my commission in Paperiliitto had made me an active Scandinavian proponent of the ‘new histories’ and in this capacity, without knowing it in those days, a committed agent of the paradigmatic change.
In the early 1980s I focused on the nature and significance of the history movement and in this respect People’s History and Socialist Theory was an important source. It gave a fairly comprehensive view of British history-making activites outside the universities or on their extra-mural fringes. Some groups such as ‘People’s Autobiography of Hackney’ were connected to the British WEA, Workers Educational Association. An essential characteristic of these activities was that they were fragmented into entirely separate orientations and this made one think about the justification for the abundance of disciplines within the academic study of society and culture.
The book was edited by Raphael Samuel, leading figure the of the British movement and his introductory article ’People’s history’ made an important point by demonstrating that the activities in the history movement were no novelty but the resurgence of an age-old phenomenon. This helped to put in perspective both the non-academic history-making and university history. The discipline was barely two centuries old and the professionals’ claim that their work represented the ’proper’ history turned out to be questionable. What ensued was a thirty-years (at least) project with the aim to develop a substantiated policy regarding the relation of these two fields of history-making. The immeadiate starting-point was the need to substitute the professional arrogance towards ’amateurish’ histories for a pertinent attitude.
My first suggestion was that ’popular’ (’kansanomainen’) should be used instead of Samuel’s ’people’s’ (’kansan’) because the latter had unnecessary connotations mainly as a result from the expression’s political uses. Still my own proposal was unfortunate too since the English ’popular’ (not so much the Finnish ’kansanomainen’) has been attached meanings that confuse the point of the term. Finding an alternative took time and it was only in 2013 that I found ’vernacular history’. This term has the additional advantage of showing the connection this kind of presentations of the past have to a related, but different kind of usages: vernacular histories refer rather to ’domestic’ and ’functional’ uses than to ’public’ ones. The third of the kind, scholarly histories, are particular since they are constituted by the rules of the discipline. Yet, they originate either in the social or the public sphere and are therefore independent neither of vernacular nor public uses of the past but inescapably connected to them.
Overemphasising the own particularity is typical of vernacular history-making, too. This is why I underlined within the history movement from the beginning that the emphasis academics put on formalities does not excuse non-professionals failing to take note of an essential aspect of history-making: getting rid of biased thinking and identifying one’s own prejudices. Anyone moving from passing everyday remarks on the past to the practice of deliberate creation of histories faces the very problems that have given rise to scholarly history. Historical enquiry calls for critical evaluation of the sources of information and impeccable reasoning when presenting the results of research.
5. History in people’s life
’Don’t problematise history, make it living instead!.’ This was Gunnar Sillén’s motto as the keynotre speaker in May 1982. The venue was a seminar in Stockholm where various people engaged with the research circles and professional historians had a lively discussion over history-making. The organiser was the Swedish library and archive of the working class movement.
Sillén’ motto served as an important reminder for me and so did the premise for his demand to order the findings so that the past takes a shape. The historian’s duty is not only to select topics that are relevant for his or her contemporaries but also to deal with them in a way that contributes to their thinking. The past should be presented ‘as situations one could re-experience’. In other words, the task was to make it possible for the audience to understand the thinking and share the feelings of the people studied. This is the way to connect past matters studied with the audience’s present concerns.
What the historian must not forget is that he or she is in fact conducting a dialogue with his or her audience. The findings must be thought about in terms of the patterns of thought that the people to be addressed have in the subject at hand. This requirement of examining the audience’s way of thinking is on a par with the demand to carefully reconstruct the ideas and actions of the people studied. Actually, the historian has two simultaneous dialogues, one with the people studied and the other with those he or she is addressing. And to examine carefully the connection between the worlds of these two parties in order to create a dialogue between them (a virtual one, of course) is the core of his or her work. This is, in my opinion, the deepest message of the linguistic turn.
While writing the present paper I was astonished by a paper I had presented in May 1983 and in which I came quite close to my view of the historian’s work as it is today. The paper developed one of Sillén’s points in his keynote speech from the previous year: scholarly historians had bypassed the permanent value people’s memories had as documents to the way of experiencing reality. Thought about in this way memories were important starting points for examining ‘the ways in which the society’s ideological-cultural institutions influence people’s actions’. Which led to ‘the most important function of the research circles’: they provide the participants with an opportunity to ‘become aware of the ways in which their ideas and actions are socially conditioned’.
In the May 1983 paper I also emphasised that one of the scholars’ big issues, the relation of science and art didn’t exist in the world of the research circles. With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to say that here too the very first years in Paperiliitto had prepared the ground for taking in new ideas about conveying history. ‘We have to interview X because he/she has worked here for five decades.’ This was the first reaction of the local activists at almost every local branch of Paperiliitto after they had embraced the idea that they can produce their own history. The response was a surprise for their academic supervisor, a specialist in the history of politics who had a poor idea of the role the oral traditions play in politics.
There was also another eye-opener, too. A scholar who was used to think about conveying history predominantly in terms of written texts was astonished by the research circles’ many ways of presenting their findings. They produced (before the time of web.2.0) plays, processions, video and music programmes, recitations as well as one long-playing record – in addition to writing books and articles. The by far most popular mode was to put on an exhibition of commented old photographs. They were visited by hundreds (in some cases even thousands) of people, even in relatively small locations. My guess is that the secret of this remarkable popularity lay in ‘situations one could re-experience’, emphasised by Sillén.
In a way I had myself unknowingly prepared the ground for the many ways of conveying findings about the past in my own first book on the history of Paperiliitto. The work, titled Taistojen taipaleelta had to be finished in a short time, by the Union congress in the spring of 1981. It was necessary to rely on various documentary texts and visual materials about the experiences, descriptions and analyses of the workers instead of producing own text. The ensuing limitations were, however, compensated by the opportunity, as I put it in the book’s preface, ‘to convey such information that the historian’s conventional mode presentation excludes’. As a result, it seemed to be possible to ‘bring down the “wall of language” between scholars and other people”.
The planning stage of the Paperiliitto-project had ended by the summer of 1981 and the first circles started their work in the same autumn. The necessity of looking upon history-making in a much broader context than before seemed more to the point day by day since my theoretical work had from now on real-time context in everyday Finnish life. With most of the practical tasks fulfilled there was also more time reflect on scholarly issues. In this respect the extension of the Nordic dimension Norway was fruitful.
Supervising the circles’ work helped to specify the parochialism of scholarly history-making. In addition to to claiming monopoly of producing ’proper’ histories academic historians had de facto determined the substance of history. Choosing the approach to a topic was as important an issue as was the selection of the topic and treating these decisions just as aspects of scholarly policies was political elitism. The question is here about power over history that should be thought of in democratic terms. This was the conclusion that emerged from the practical necessity of giving the research circles full freedom in selecting their topic.
In other words, the trained historians’ work and their social role had been put in a novel new perspective, given a new premise. An essential element in their duty is to do what learned the hard way to do In Paperliitto: to serve as people’s consultants in their attempts to sort out their social and cultural intentions and targets. From this starting-point I have been claiming since the middle of 2000s the need to develop a strategy for the construction of democracy anew.
6. History as a cultural institution
Freedom from university formalities, or more precisely, learning to differentiate between academic forms and their substance, was one of the great personal experiences from working with the research circles in Paperiliitto. However, realising the parochial tendencies characteristic of disciplinary study of the past was more important in the general perspective. The common way of reflecting on history with the vantage point on ‘proper’, scholarly history was hopelessly artificial.
History is a wide-reaching, multifaceted cultural institution, an integral part of both the public and private spheres in any society. Accounts of the past are created for various purposes not only by various people but also all kinds of institutions. And all these different kinds of presentations do influence each other in a never-ending social process of history-making. To be sure, reaching this definition took three decades’ time but the premises for rethinking the conventional university history had emerged by about 1983. There were two concomitant routes I followed
In research it was Oral History that served as the key catalyst. In the beginning I was deeply influenced by Norwegian historians (especially Edvard Bull and Dagfinn Slettan) and anthropologists. A bit later the key interlocutors were Outi Lehtipuro and Seppo Knuuttila, two Finnish folklore researchers. Furthermore, I had useful discussions also with many colleagues in the fields of sociology and social politics. Fairly soon it had become clear that the upheaval within my own discipline was connected to the virtual redundancy of disciplinary borders.
In my case, scholarly rethinking was intimately connected to political reorientation. Here dynamics was created by communication with the research circles. During all the seven years in Paperiliitto I had countless diverse conversations in a variety of contexts with union members in various parts of Finland; this was the most important means of acquiring the information needed for my own research. Investigating among other matters the relation between the workers’ conditions and the role the course of history was assigned in the socialist parties’ ideology led to the crucial identification: social-democrats and communists shared the ‘imperialism of the enlightened worker’.
This identification led me eventually, as I have explained in Making History, to lay the hitherto labour movement to rest in a paper delivered at the twenty-fifth History Workshop in Oxford in 1991. By that time it had already been evident for several years that the end of the old left was part the crumbling of the modern, nineteenth century social orders – as was among many others the paradigmatic change in the discipline of history, too. This was the upheaval of which the history movement had been the harbinger not so many years before.
More about the linguistic turn and history-making, see Jorma Kalela, Making History. The Historian and Uses of the Past, Palgrave Macmillan 2012, 13-18.
Jorma Kalela: Argumentaatio ja rekonstruktio tutkimusprosessissa, Turun yliopisto, Poliittinen historia, julkaisuja C:43 (1993), especially 2-3. See also the collection of 11 essays published in different scholarly fora between 1987 and 1993, Jorma Kalela: Aika, historia ja yleisö. Kirjoituksia historiantutkimuksen lähtökohdista, Turun yliopisto, Poliittinen historia, julkaisuja C:44 (1993)
The first quotation from Richard J. Evans: In Defence of History (Granta Books,1997), 3 and the second from Evans’s article ’Truth lost in vain views’, Times Higher Education September 12, 1997.
More comprehensively about disciplining present-mindedness see Kalela 2012, chapter 4: ’The politics of history’.
Jorma Kalela: Historian tutkimusprosessi. Metodinen opas oman ajan historiaa tutkimivlle. Gaudeamus, 1972,11. About the emphasis on participation, see e.g. Jorma Kalela: ‘Om “bgränsningar” i historikerns engagemang i politiken’. In I.Skovgaard-Petersen (ed.): Historikeren og samfundet, Studier i historisk metode 9. Universitetsforlaget; 1974.
See her Historical Theory, Routledge 2002, 196.
Kalela 1972, 24-25.
For a brief summary of what followed from the Swedish initiative, see Kalela 2012, 91-93. My 1972 book Pulapolitiikkaa. Valtion talous- ja sosiaalipolitiika Suomessa lamavuosina 1929-1933 (Työväen taloudellinen tutkimuslaitos.Tutkimuksia 13. Helsinki 1987; avalable at first as stencil.) served as the research plan for Pulaprojekti..
Lauri Haataja, Seppo Hentilä, Jorma Kalela ja Jussi Turtola (eds.): Suomen työväenliikkeen historia. Työväen Sivistysliitto ja Kansan Voima 1976.
Atte Larma (ed.): Millaiseksi Suomen historia on kirjoitettu? Yleisradion julkaisusarja 69 3/1980, 16-20.
See both my Pyhitetyt ennakkokäsitykset. Tutlkielma koulukuntaisuutensa kätkevästä historiantutkimuksen traditiosta, author’s edition 1979 and ’Ammattiuran yksi välttämätön etappi’ in Päviö Tommila (ed.) Miten meistä tuli historian tohtoreita, Suomen Historiallinen Seura 1998.
The first quotatation from my Työväen Sivistysliitto 1919 – 1979. Tutkimussuunnitelma (a book of 249 pages), 6-7. Helsingin yliopiston Poliittisen historian laitoksen julkaisuja 2/1978. The secon quotation from E.H. Carr: What is History?, Macmillan 1961, 49.
A comprehensive presentation of the planning stage of the Paperiliitto-project is to be found in Jorma Kalela: Näkökulmia tulevaisuuteen. Paperiliiton historia 1944-1986, Paperiliitto 1986, 8-21, 193-197. See also Kalela 2012, 53-57.
A more comprehensive presentation of the changes that ensued in the professional work, see Kalela 2012, Chpter 1 ’Second thoughts about history’.
B.Wåhlin and Björn Qviller eds. Osynlig historie. Studier i historisk metode 17. Universitetsforlaget 1983. The title of my paper was ’Några synpunkter på arbetarnas egen historieforskning’.
About my publications by 1986 (in addition to Finnish ones) in Swedish, English and German, see Kalela 1986, 193-195.
The book is a collection of papers from the December 1979 History Workshop Conference and was published in the beginning of 1981 by Routledge & Kegan Paul in History Workshop Series.
In Making History (58) I erroneously claim to have learned the age-old nature of everyday history-making only after Samuel’s 1994 Theatres of Memory: this feature was only a secondary aspect in the1981 article.
Here, see Concise English Oxford Dictionary (2004), entry ’vernacular’.
See my articles ’Muistitietotutkimus ja historialiike’ (Kotiseutu 1/1984), ’Muistitietohistoria ja kansanomainen historia’ (In S.Laaksovirta, M.Lähteenmäki ja M.Simola [eds.] Ei yksin leivästä. Järjestöhistoria työväenliikkeen kulttuurin kuvaajana. Työväen Arkiston julkaisuja 1/1984) ja ’Mitä on kansanomainen historia. Miksi sen pitäisi kehittyä ja mihin sitä tarvitaan. (Kotiseutu 4/1984).
Jorma Kalela: ’Barfotaforskning i Sverige och Fnland’, Meddelande från arbetarrösrelsens arkic och bibliotek 21 (1/1982). See also my contribution to the discussion about ’Regionale und lokale Arbeiterbewegung vorwiegend bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg as Forschungsgegenstand’ in Internationale Tagung der Historiker der Arbeiterbewegung. 17. Linzer Konferenz 1981. Europaverlag 1983, 581-582.
Gunnar Sillén: ’Problematisera inte historien – gör den levande istället’. Meddelande från arbetarrösrelsens arkic och bibliotek 21/3 (1982). For a three decades later reflection on this see Kalela 2012, 72 – 73.
More about this see Kalela 2012, 144-145.
The paper (in my home-archive) was presented at a Finnish-Swedish seminar that was organised by TUCs and WEAs in the both countries in Hanasaari, Helsinki.
Taistojen taipaleelta. Paperityöläiset ja heidän liittonsa 1906-1981,Paperiliitto 19881.
Nordic conferences on the history of working class movement were important venues. At the 1981 one I presented a paper on ‘Aktivistenes nostalgiske egenkultur eller agitasjon I form av kulturvirksomhet’. Tidsskrift for arbeiderbevegelsens historie 1/1982.
See e.g. my ‘History Making: The Historian as Consultant’, in Public History Review from 2013, ( HYPERLINK ”https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj” https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj ), ‘Historia ja demokratia, Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 2/2014 ja ‘Vieläkö Suomi on demokratia?’, Kanava 10/2014. In a way these articles have the same basic idea as my ’Mikä on tutkiva opintokerho?’, Aikamerkki 8/1981.