The Anderson Lecture

Walter Anderson (1885-1962) was the first professor at the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore.
An account of his life is available on Wikipedia.

The next lecture by W. Anderson will take place on October 6 at 4:00 p.m. Ülikooli 16 in in room 115. The lecture will be given by Kaarina Koski, Docent of the University of Turku.

Belief narratives in social media

Belief narratives are flexible and can adapt to new genres, forms, and environments. While societal changes have left some old motifs behind, new ones have emerged, and ghosts, especially, have survived such changes and entered urban milieus and electronic devices. The lecture will focus on belief tradition in Finnish social media, and especially narratives about ghosts and haunting. These narratives flourish in diverse forms and platforms. Descriptions of personal experiences are likely to be posted anonymously in discussion forums, where they are followed by dispute and speculation. In turn, widely known legends, are often performed as illustrated videos in YouTube and TikTok. Belief tradition also involves enacting the stories, and reports of legend trips and ghost hunts are presented both in verbal and videotaped form. I will explore the narrative strategies used by the performers and discuss the sources, contents and meanings of the narratives. The new digital forms and wider audiences impact the genres and narrator positions, but some narrative strategies are still similar to those observed in traditional face-to-face performances. The meanings of ghostlore reflect contemporary interests and concerns. While in older tradition, moral points used to be a central feature of belief narratives, ontological inquiries and emotional issues are more salient today.

2019 Timothy Tangherlini 'Kaiser und Data: Folkloristics in an Algorithmic Age' https://uttv.ee/naita?id=28779

2020 Terry Gunnell 'Grimm Ripples: The Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen and the Collection and Creation of National Folk Narratives in Northern Europe' https://uttv.ee/naita?id=30712

2021 Guntis Šmidchens 'Variants in American and Estonian Folkloristics' https://uttv.ee/naita?id=32300

2022 Lotte Tarkka 'If the One I know Came – The Poem, Laws of Folklore and Imagination' https://uttv.ee/naita?id=34058

2023 Bengt af Klintberg 'The Baby on the Track: A Newspaper Legend with Roots in the 19th Century' https://uttv.ee/naita?id=34879

2024 Hans-Jörg Uther 'Worldviews about Disabled Persons in Folktales' https://uttv.ee/naita?id=36143

2025 Prof. Dorothy Noyes (The Ohio State University). "Containment Failures: Supernatural Visitations, Folk Performance, and Europeans on the Edge in Mérimée's Ethnographic Fictions". https://uttv.ee/naita?id=37773