Related by Contradiction: Folklore and Archive
Related by Contradiction: Folklore and Archive

Summary/Abstract: The year was 2005. The occasion was the Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR) and I was in Tartu for the first time. As part of the Congress bonuses, a trip to the Estonian Folklore Archives (EFA) was offered to the participants. A relatively small group gathered for the event. I was also in that group, which was shown the Archives and specimens of censorship from the Soviet period in the basement. I did not realise at the moment what a deep impression these specimens made on my mind and that they would keep brewing in my head until I had a chance to come to Tartu to research the history of folkloristics from 1945 to the present. This chance came eleven years later, in 2016, but at that moment in 2005 when I visited the EFA for the first time, I was coming from London where I had been sitting in the archives of the Folklore Society, London (FLS) at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), and of the India Office and Records Library (IORL). I had been studying documents related to the collections and collectors of folklore in the British colonial Empire, particularly India.

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