valuable dances such as the Allemande, Minuet and Quadrilles; it has grown too popular, and is sometimes indecent. These ideas are not new or original, but reiterated similar continental discourse. There are no traces, however, of scepticism towards the foreign dance, and the article does not refer to the Waltz as particularly new. The writer states that mature women of a modest background, as well as 'mature ladies of the world', have told him how the Waltz touched them in their younger days. This suggests that the arrival date of the Waltz in Norway should be moved to at least ten or twenty years earlier.5

Fig. 12.2 This famous painting represents the moment Norway became an independent nation. A specifically elected national assembly met to write the country's Constitution which was completed on 17 May 1814, since then the National Day of Norway. Oscar Wergeland, *Riksforsamlingen på Eidsvoll 1814*, 1885. 285 x 400 cm. Parliament of Norway Building, Oslo. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Norwegian\_Constituent\_Assembly#/media/File:Eidsvoll\_ riksraad\_1814.jpeg

5 *'En prøve hvorledes noget om dands vel monne smage* [*5 Parts*]*'*, *Trondhjemske Tidender*, no. 3–7 (1796). I thank my colleague Professor Anne Fiskvik for giving me this source. 'Saa skal vi nu ikke mere valdse?' [n.a.], *Trondhjemske Tidender*, 47–49 (1797).

Historians mostly argue that nationalism surfaced in Norway with national romanticism towards the middle of the nineteenth century.6 At this point, the old couple dances of the peasants, such as *springar* and *halling*, started to be named national dances, but this does not seem to have triggered any critical attitude toward new 'foreign dances'. At least, it is hard to fnd comments about it in contemporary Norwegian sources.

Fig. 12.3 Old dances — *halling* and *polsk* — in the mountain mining town of Røros. Chapter frontispiece in Edward Daniel Clarke, *Travels in Various Countries of Europe*, *Asia and Africa*, vol. 10 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1824), part 3, p. 166. Library of Norwegian Centre for Traditional Music and Dance.

6 Mary Hilson, 'Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Pan-Scandinavianism and Nationalism', in *What Is a Nation*?: *Europe 1789–1914*, ed. by Timothy Baycroft and Mark Hewitson (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 192–209.

In fact, an English traveller, Edward Clarke, wrote one of the most important comments. I cite his remarks from 1799, regarding a ball in the Norwegian capital, Christiania, which is also one of the earliest sources for the Waltz as an established dance in Norway:

There are public balls on a Sunday evening, once in every fortnight. These are held in a large room belonging to the principal inn; and the ball is followed by a supper. Tickets are given to the diferent persons as they enter, to regulate their places in the dance; a diferent set of tickets being distributed for a similar purpose at supper. The dances are, the waltz, which has always the preference, and the common English country-dance: but even in the country-dance the waltz is introduced: indeed it is so great a favourite, that our English dance would probably not be tolerated, but in compliment to the English who may happen to be present. Some of our popular dances were performed by the band, but in so slow and solemn a manner, that the efect became truly ludicrous.7

A colonel's wife, born around 1801, reports from her young days in Christiania, the capital of Norway:

In general there were more original personalities at that time than is seen now, and often they were quite comic. One of them, whose name was Flor, I think, was teacher at the Latin school, a middle-aged man who was very enthusiastic about dancing, in spite of a quite unbecoming appearance. He was the alarm of all ladies, because he used to tap the beat with his big hand at the lady's back. At that time there was waltz in nearly all dances, partly a very slow one, as in English dance, partly 2/4 quick as in *Feier* and *Molinack*, not to forget about *Figaro* which did not have neither beginning nor end. Everybody danced at the same time, and everyone with their favourites, because it was the dance of inclination. It ended the ball and lasted long.8

7 Edward Daniel Clarke, *Travels in Various Countries of Europe*, *Asia and Africa*, vol. 10 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1824), part 3, p. 454, https://babel.hathitrust. org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433000631485&view=1up&seq=7

8 Oberstinde Rehbinder, *Carine Mathea Thrane Rehbinder and Nanna Thrane*, *Barndoms Og Ungdoms Erindringer* (Kristiania: Gyldendal, 1915), pp. 23–24. Translated from the Danish by Egil Bakka. It is worth noting that Ms. Rehbinder is using the term Waltz in accordance with the term's usage in the early nineteenth century, considering also dances in 2/4 to be versions of the Waltz. The dance names based in this understanding stayed on even after the name Polka spread over Europe from Prague via Paris in the late 1840s as shown in Egil Bakka, 'The Polka before and after the Polka', *Yearbook for Traditional Music*, 33 (2001), 37–47, https://doi. org/10.2307/1519629. The description of *Figaro der alle dansar* in Klara Semb, *Norske*

Additionally, the famous Danish ballet master and choreographer, August Bournonville (1805–1879) commented on the Waltz in 1829 with a slightly critical tone:

I would like to add a few words on the frequent use of the German waltz. Not to mention the violent movement in which it brings the blood and the untidiness it brings about in the clothing, I think, though, that, since the more civilised world distinguishes itself from the lower classes as well as in language, customs and clothes as in pleasures, it should also make its dance a bit less accessible for those whose being and manners cannot give the necessary grace. For I consider it to be impossible in a waltz to distinguish between more or less decency. I will probably fnd many opponents among the passionate waltzers, but I do not present my opinion as an oracle, I just think that a bit less waltzing at the balls would not hurt.9

These sources seem to confrm that the Waltz was already a very popular dance in the frst decades of the nineteenth century, at least in the upper classes of the capital cities of Norway and Denmark. 10 Bournonville's voice may have been heard in Norway in matters of dance even in those days, when he was only in his mid-twenties, and dancing masters in Norway might be of similar opinions. It is worthwhile noting that Bournonville seems afraid of criticising the waltzers too harshly, which is why one might propose that it does not refect any strong critical attitude in his circles in Copenhagen. Rather, it perhaps refects his international orientation, and stronger critical attitudes towards the Waltz elsewhere in Europe. In turn, the source itself is too early to suggest that his calling the Waltz German, whilst at the same time criticising it, has anything to

*Folkedansar. Turdansar* (Oslo: Noregs boklag, 1991), p. 215 makes the last sentence about Figaro understandable.

9 Aug Bournonville, *Nytaarsgave for danse-yndere* (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels forlag, 1829), p. 122. Translated from the Danish by Egil Bakka.

10 The Waltz, as the earliest representative of the round dances, seems to have been established in all the Nordic capitals around 1800. Cf. Henning Urup et al., ed., *Gammaldans i Norden*: *Rapport Fra Forskningsprosjektet*: *Komparativ Analyse av Ein Folkeleg Dansegenre i Utvalde Nordiske Lokalsamfunn* (Dragvoll, Norway: Nordisk forening for folkedansforskning 1988).

do with the slowly rising scepticism in Denmark towards Germany, 11 a scepticism which culminated in armed border conficts.12

Fig. 12.4 E. Lange, *August Bournonville*, before 1879. August Bournonville was a Danish Choreographer and Ballet master at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. Royal Library, Copenhagen. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:August\_ Bournonville\_by\_E.\_Lange.jpg#/media/File:August\_Bournonville\_ by\_E.\_Lange.jpg

11 See, for instance, Poul Kierkegaard and Kjeld Winding, *Nordens historie* (Copenhagen: H. Hagerup, 1965), p. 2, who claim that there had not been any conscious antagonism between the Danes and the Germans, even in the Southern provinces where there was a border between the two languages, before 1830. The conficts over the provinces of Schleswig and Holstein resulted in two wars (1847 and 1864).

12 Ibid., p. 205.

It seems that Norwegians received the Waltz and the round dances generally without much refection on their origin. There is no evidence to support the assumption that they may have been considered as threatening to Norwegian identity or to older, traditional dances in this period. It is striking to note that more than a hundred years passed before anyone singled out the round dances as threatening and banned them. During this period, the round dances spread to most of Norway, with few exceptions. At the beginning of the twentieth century, they dominated in urban as well as rural dance repertoires. There were, however, a few rural districts where they were hardly accepted and of little importance, and some districts where, while they were still on equal terms with older couple dances, they were mostly the dominant genre for young people. 13

## Early Twentieth-Century Building of Community Houses in Rural Norway

In the frst two to three decades of the twentieth century, there was an impressive boom in the building of community houses that could act as venues for dancing in Norway. Local groups and clubs belonging to diferent, more or less national, movements built the houses. This radically changed the situation for social dancing, particularly in the Norwegian countryside. Earlier, most dancing had taken place either out of doors in all kinds of weather, in narrow rooms of private homes, or in improvised locations, such as vacated houses, barns or, in some liberal communities, even the schoolhouses. In the twenty-frst century, it can be hard to understand fully what a treat it was for young people to dance in spacious community halls with excellent dance foors. The young people were sheltered from wind and rain and did not need to beg permission from their parents' generation in each case. Community houses open for dancing were exceptions in the Norwegian countryside before 1900.14

13 Egil Bakka, *Norske Dansetradisjonar* (Oslo: Samlaget, 1978).

14 Ibid., p. 175.

Fig. 12.5 Dance in Vålåskard, a dairy farm hamlet in the mountains between Meldal and Rindal, around 1920. Young people from Løkken and Rindal had set a weekend meeting and dance out of doors at an old meeting and dance place. Photo owned by Ingeborg Isdal Løkken, CC BY-NC.

Community houses were obviously very attractive for young people who wanted to dance, and many of them eagerly participated in the building, even if dancing was not at all given as any ofcial purpose for such houses. There were, however, ferce struggles on the question of dancing in some of the new houses, and they seem to have peaked in the decade around 1920. These struggles are the main topic for this article.

There were two dominant groups of community houses which were, at least in principle, available for dancing. These were the houses of the Liberal Youth Movement, called *Ungdomshus* [Youth Houses], and the houses of the Labour Movement, called *Folkets Hus* [The People's House]. The two movements behind these houses based themselves on strong ideologies, and had many similar characteristics, despite the fact that they were opposing agents in the formation of Norway as a new state. They were also opposing agents in concrete and practical terms in local communities. 15

15 There were also other types of small, rural assembly houses in which dance could take place (for example, those belonging to shooting clubs or temperance lodges), but these are neither numerous enough, nor do they sufciently represent coordinated strategies, to be examined in more detail here.

There was also an older type of community house that existed in considerable numbers, the *Bedehus* [House of Prayer]. Small, local, informal groups or congregations of devout, often stern Christians built these houses. Dance was unthinkable in the *Bedehus*, but, due to their explicit stance against dance, these houses nonetheless belong in the picture of the struggle about dance in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Fig. 12.6 Svae Bedehus and its congregation at Skiptvedt, 1902. Public Domain.

Fig. 12.7 Dølehalli Ungdomshus Morgedal with members, from *Den Frilynde Ungdomsrørsla. Norigs Ungdomslag i 25 År*, ed. by Sven Moren and Edvard Os (Oslo: Norigs Ungdomslag, 1921), p. 265. Public Domain.

Fig. 12.8 The workers in the mining community of Løkken in front of their Folkets Hus, preparing for the Labour Day procession which unions organized throughout the country. The house was built in 1914, and the picture was probably taken in 1919. Photo by Karl August Berg, Folkets Hus, Løkken (c.1919). Public Domain.

Before discussing the main topic, I must give this picture some more nuances. There were certainly a variety of assembly houses used for dancing in towns and cities, at least from the early nineteenth century. Most of them were probably venues for clubs of the upper classes. 16 Even in the early twentieth century, the upper strata of society had some houses built for their own dances. In regions with relatively sharp class divisions, the leading farmers built their own houses (i.e. Bøndernes Hus in Lørenskog, built 1921),17 in competition with the houses of the Labour Movement. Large industrial enterprises in small communities also built assembly halls (i.e. Sauda Klubb, built in the 1930s, and Festiviteten in Tyssedal, built 1913). They were mainly for ofcers who might not be at ease in the houses of the Labour Movement or in a house for everyone in the community. The enterprises may not explicitly have stated any distinction in who could use the house.

16 Trygve Wyller, *Det Stavangerske klubselskab og Stavanger by i 150 år* (Stavanger: Dreyers grafske, 1934), p. 242.

17 'Bøndernes Hus (Lørenskog)' [n.a.], *lokalhistoriewiki.no*, 20 July 2017, http://www. lokalhistoriewiki.no/index.php/B%C3%B8ndernes\_Hus\_(L%C3%B8renskog)

The confict over popular dancing took place in the Liberal Youth Movement, and not in the Labour Movement. Nonetheless, the Labour Movement and their houses are an important backdrop against which to understand this confict, and are thus necessary to provide a full picture of popular dancing in Norway during this period. If we depart from the dance repertoire, all levels of the community shared the round dances. Around 1900, the egalitarian rural communities dominating most parts of the country would additionally still have kept the couple dances, which were older than the round dances. The so-called regional dances, and the very thin layer of the bourgeoisie (the upper class of Norway), would still have a repertoire of contra dances. The lower classes in rural regions with a strong class division, the working classes in the towns, and much of the coastal population, would have used the round dances, practically speaking, as their only repertoire.18

18 These rather broad generalisations are based on the author's extensive feldwork in all regions of Norway in the period between 1966 and 1990, and on the resulting collections at the Sf-sentret, Trondheim. It is also based upon the impression that it took some decades before African-American dances such as Onestep, Twostep, Tango etc. gained any broad importance as social dances in Norway. See for instance Egil Bakka, *Norske Dansetradisjonar* (Oslo: Samlaget, 1978).

## The Labour Movement and the People's Houses

In the late 1890s, Labour unions and the Labour Party grew into a Norwegian Labour Movement19 through complex political and organisational processes. Numerous unions and local clubs experienced problems in fnding places for their meetings. To deal with this dilemma, the idea of building houses became obvious. In 1910, the National Labour Union20 established a fund for supporting the building of local assembly houses, 21 which could ofer many local unions a much-needed contribution for this purpose. There is no statistical information available to tell us how many of these houses were built, but a knowledgeable representative for the People House Union in the late 1970s guessed that around 500 such houses might have been built up to then. However, old houses that were later replaced by new houses were also counted in this number. Provisional houses, built by migrant workers during a period of construction work on road or railways who left afterwards, might also be in this number.22 A monograph on *Folkets Hus* by Harald Berntsen — a historian and political activist on the radical left — names some 250 such houses.23 This history, alongside other histories of the Labour Movement, speaks about the eforts of building these houses.24 These histories name the leaders of the work, discuss the fnancial arrangements involved, and describe how the houses strengthened the social life of the membership. The union activity and political meetings were, of course, a primary aim, but broad cultural activity is also mentioned. The dance parties, which seem to have been perhaps the most regular activity at the weekend, whether it was proceeded by some cultural or political activity or not, are hardly mentioned.25

19 Ida Blom, Sølvi Sogner, and Gro Hagemann, eds, *Med kjønnsperspektiv på norsk historie*: *Fra Vikingtid til 2000-Årsskiftet* (Oslo: Cappelen akademisk forl., 2005), p. 461

20 Arbeiderens Faglige Landsorganisasjon.

21 Harald Berntsen, *100 år med Folkets Hus* ([Oslo]: Folkets hus landsforbund,1987), p. 530

22 Bakka, *Norske dansetradisjonar*, p. 170

23 Berntsen, *100 år med Folkets Hus*.

24 For example, Bjarne Jullum, *Folkets Hus 1907–1932*: *Fagforeningenes Centralkomité*, *De Centraliserte Fagforeninger*, *De Samvirkende Fagforeninger 1883–1893–1932* (Oslo: [n.p.], 1932).

25 Ibid., p. xii.

Berntsen counts the stonecutters' community house Spjerøy Folkets Hus at Hvaler in the county of Østfold, as the oldest *Folkets Hus* in Norway. 26 Torsnes Folkets Hus, also built by stonecutters in Østfold, fnished in 1902, claims to be the second oldest. A short online article, written to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Torsnes Folkets Hus, gives some background information and a lively account of the social life during the early years of the house, unfortunately without precise dating.27

A company that brought in stonecutters from Sweden established the stonecutting industry in Østfold in the 1880s. The workers there established their Stonecutter Union in 1896, which, from the beginning, held its meetings in the parish house. One may suspect that there were quite strong tensions between the local farmers and the mostly immigrant stonecutters. In 1910, the community had 360 people connected to the stonecutting industry and 265 to agriculture. This was a typical situation when small communities in Norwegian countryside were being industrialised through mining or large construction work such as building roads, railways or factories. The large infux of immigrants from Sweden or other parts of Norway, often from a proletariat background or liberated from the norms of the stable rural society and inspired by socialism or communism, created a new labour class in rural Norway, and even more in towns and cities.

One of the members of the Thorsnes Stonecutter [Brass] Band has given an account about how the band and the stonecutter community in Torsnes celebrated the First of May in the early twentieth century:28

**First of May** At 5 o'clock in the morning we lined up at Høyda på Holm started playing and marching […] and at Kråkberget we blew the Internationale and other socialist marches. […] Then we continued along the dusty road to Folkets Hus. In the felds, the farmers were spreading manure, which was their way of celebrating the day. Outside Folkets Hus, the women served cofee and sandwiches, and sometimes someone might have a tot. Then everybody went home for a few hours before the First of May procession at two o'clock. The Stonecutter Music

26 Berntsen, *100 år med Folkets Hus*, p. 19.

27 Willy Olsen and Sverre Holt, 'Jubileumsberetning Folkets Hus Torsnes. Et Faglig, Politisk Og Kulturelt Sentrum Gjennom 100 År. 1902–2002', *Folkets Hus Torsnes*, 2002, http://www.folketshus-torsnes.no/index.php/historie

28 The Band was dissolved in 1938.

led the procession with the Stonecutter banner and a red standard, then came the children and then the grown ups' procession. We may have been 100–150 people who were winding through the small parish. The procession went to the Folkets Hus where there was a speech for the day, community singing and music by the Band […]. In the evening, we played again. There was a partyat the house until midnight and the Band provided the music, I think mainly the bass drum was excused. We played old time dances, *reinlender*, the Waltz and the Polka […].29

Fig. 12.11 Opening celebration of the Folkets Hus at Torsnes, 1902. Postcard, Torsnes Arbeiderlag. Public Domain.

Even if most available accounts keep the issue of class very low key, some attitudes and hints shine through in the text: heavy drinking and partying among the stonecutters, an emphasis on cultural activity in the *Folkets Hus*, and the comment about farmers spreading manure on the felds as a protest to the celebration of the First of May.

There are few, if any, signs of the Labour Movement having any position on dancing. Dancing was a given phenomenon which the Movement did not seem to have any opinion about, a treasured activity among the membership, which the leaders probably saw neither as politically interesting nor harmful, but which must have been useful to attract members.

29 Olsen and Holt, 'Jubileumsberetning Folkets Hus Torsnes', http://www.folketshustorsnes.no/index.php/historie. Translated from the Norwegian by Egil Bakka.

## Dancing — a Problem in *Ungdomshuset*, not in the *Folkets Hus*

The rules for Folkets Hus Høvik in 1909 seem typical for such houses, and the following paraphrase gives an impression of the tone and aims:

At parties and similar gatherings outerwear, hats, umbrellas and the like should be left at the designated place. Smoking should not take place during lectures, discussions, recitations or performances. Moreover, dancing persons may not use a pipe, cigar or cigarette. Two men are not allowed to dance together.

It is strictly forbidden to drink spirits in the house. Intoxicated persons are not admitted. Persons who repeatedly behave in disturbing or violent ways will be refused admission for up to half a year.30

There is reason to assume that the rules were intended to regulate or prevent typical behaviour. Some of them may have been an attempt to improve manners, such as leaving outerwear on when entering. It might not have created great problems that some people kept their outerwear on. Men are reported to have danced with hats indoors, considering 'bare-head' dancing snobbish.31 The rather lenient restrictions on smoking probably had a similar background, together with rules against spitting indoors.

The rules against more serious problems, such as drinking and unruly behaviour, are more sharply formulated, but they still tolerate# such behaviour at least twice. The prohibition against two men dancing together could be connected to this and meant to stop drunken men. Girls had perhaps refused them, and then they disturbed the dancing by being unruly on the foor. In the many isolated, next to all-male, working places, such as construction sites and fsheries and during military service, it was quite usual for men to dance together, for the purpose of practice and for the pleasure of moving to music. 32

30 Berntsen, *100 år med Folkets Hus*, p. 196.

31 Egil Bakka, 'Samandrag Frå Intervju Om Ålen', in *Gammaldans i Norden*: *Rapport Fra Forskningsprosjektet*: *Komparativ Analyse av Ein Folkeleg Dansegenre i Utvalde Nordiske Lokalsamfunn* (Dragvoll: Nordisk forening for folkedansforskning, 1988), pp. 180– 201 (esp. pp. 188, 195).

32 Bakka, *Norske dansetradisjonar*.

Rather than representing any homophobic ideas among labourers, the prohibitions could also be a concession to what good considered polite manners.

The radical Labour Movement used slogans such as 'Down with the Throne, the Altar and the Plutocracy'33 and mostly did not see a need to work for acceptance in religious circles. Their wishes for good manners probably had educational rather than moral roots. Their use of political and cultural activity as a means to promote the educational was central. They saw that the formation and progress of the labourers' culture needed to be based in a knowledge of, and being on level with, existing culture in Norwegian society.34 Probably leaders saw drinking in particular as a problem for such progress, not least because the Labour Movement had infuential members belonging to the temperance movement. 35 It is worth noting, however, that the public discourse of the Labour Movement does not blame dancing for increasing drinking, nor for creating problems for other cultural or political activity.

The folklorist Ørnulf Hodne discusses the particular problem of 'culture' in the Labour Movement. There was hardly any specifc 'Labour culture'36 employed during the 1920s and 1930s. What was available was either the bourgeois culture of the upper class or the folk culture from the countryside. Therefore, elements from those had to be appropriated and adapted to the ideas of the international Labour Movement, based on the concepts of solidarity, community spirit and joint action.37 There were somewhat spectacular attempts to appropriate folk dance in the capital city around 1920 through communist folk-dance groups for children. The communists belonged in the Labour Movement at that time.38 One may interpret this as having been successful; individual initiatives and actions came from folk dance instructors who belonged

33 Berntsen, *100 år med Folkets Hus*, p. 77.

34 Berntsen, *100 år med Folkets Hus*, p. 79.

35 Øyvind Bjørnson, *På Klassekampens Grunn*: (*1900–1920*), ed. by Arne Kokkvoll et al. (Oslo: Tiden, 1990), p. 177.

36 Hodne's use of the term 'culture' here, seems to point towards performative or social practices, such as music, dance, theatre, etc., and not towards an open anthropological understanding, encompassing all human practices. Ørnulf Hodne, *Fedreland Og Fritid*: *En Mellomkrigsstudie i Noregs Ungdomslag* (Oslo: Novus forl., 1995), p. 35.

37 Hodne, *Fedreland Og Fritid*.

38 Einar Øygard and Johan Austbø, *Folkedansen i 20 aar. 1903–1923* (Ski: Den norske folkeviseringen, 1923).

to the left wing of the Labour Movement. This may be the reason why they sprung up suddenly and disappeared, possibly due to the changing personal circumstances of the leaders. If this was the case, it did not need to have had any deep political roots. On the other hand, when the communists formed their own party in 1923, the split deeply afected the Labour Movement's work for children.39 The split had already marginalised the communist party during the late 1920s, and it seems that the individuals who had earlier supported the children's movement were on the communist side. This may explain the rapid decline and be an important reason why folk-dance activity did not continue as an important element in the Labour Movement.

Round dances constituted the dominant dance genre within the Labour Movement in the early twentieth century, but there is no evidence that anyone looked upon it as any kind of cultural asset. Books on the history of the Labour Movement mention theatre, choir singing, club newspapers, and similar activities as culture, but not the weekend dance parties in the *Folkets Hus*, which was a traditional activity up into the 1950s.40

#### *Ungdomshuset* and the Liberal Youth Movement

The Liberal Youth Movement grew from the local youth clubs which shared aims and values. Ivar Blekastad, an eighteen-year-old son of a farmer, initiated the club which has been counted as the frst in Sel in Gudbrandsdalen during the winter of 1868/69. He and most of the other pioneers in the movement derived their inspiration directly or indirectly from the teachers' seminars and the folk high school movement. Many young people from the countryside attended these schools and came back to become resources and innovators in their communities. Further new clubs came into being in the 1870s and 1880s, but during the 1890s the development exploded. The local clubs formed regional unions in the early 1890s, and these were the basis for the national organisation which was founded in 1896.41 The Liberal Youth Movement came

39 Hodne, *Fedreland Og Fritid*, p. 72.

40 E.g. Frode Rinnan and Olav Tveten, *Vi Skal Bygge et Folkets Hus*: *1937* (Oslo: [n.p.], 1937), and Jullum, *Folkets Hus 1907–1932.*

41 Kløvstad et al., *Ungdomshuset*, p. 15.

from the grassroots and had its strongholds among small farmers and countryside teachers. During its frst twenty years, the organisation had four chairmen, all of whom were farmers' sons.

The organisation promoted popular enlightenment and national and rural values. One of its main aims was to build a strong civic society, according to modernistic,42 liberal values. The clubs built community houses to attract young people to be enlightened through talks or lectures, discussions, recitations, unison singing, playing theatre, and playing games. They could use standard popular dance as an attraction, but, increasingly, they viewed dancing as problematic.43

Histories about *Noregs Ungdomslag* [Norwegian Youth Association] stress how Grundtvigianism was the ideological basis for both the Liberal Youth Movement and *Noregs Ungdomslag*, and how these ideas spread through the folk high schools.44 Grundtvigianism emphasises a joyous Christianity, a sense of the national, of popular culture, and of the spoken word as the optimal kind of communication.

The founder of the folk high school movement is considered to be N. S. F. Grundtvig (1783–1872) […] He was not interested in creating an educational system, and he was never able to set up a school according to his ideas […]. But his lectures on national education inspired others to found folk high schools. 45

Grundtvig argued that to be a true Christian, one must frst be a full human being. And a human being was someone embedded in a specifc cultural and historical tradition. […] For Grundtvigianism, therefore, the study and celebration of rural folk culture was an integral part of the search for salvation…46

44 Moren and Os, *Den Frilynde Ungdomsrørsla*, p. 2; Kløvstad et al., *Ungdomshuset*, p. 25.

42 The large popular movements of this time may seem to have had a mostly conservative aspect, building on established values. Historians are divided, however, on whether even the religious revival movements should be seen as mainly representing continuity, or, despite their intention, whether they actually represent change and modernism. Such movements contributed, for instance, to the enlightenment and emancipation in the countryside. Dag Thorkildsen, 'Vekkelse Og Modernisering i Norden på 1800-Tallet', *Historisk Tidsskrift*, 77 (1998), 160–80; Svein Aage Christofersen, *Moralsk Og Moderne*?: *Trekk av den Kristne Moraltradisjon i Norge fra 1814 til Idag* (Oslo: Ad notam Gyldendal, 1999), p. 274.

43 Sven Moren and Edvard Os, eds, *Den Frilynde Ungdomsrørsla. Norigs Ungdomslag i 25 år* (Oslo: Norigs Ungdomslag, 1921).

45 Cati Coe, 'The Education of the Folk: Peasant Schools and Folklore Scholarship', *The Journal of American Folklore*, 113 (2000), 20–43, https://doi.org/10.2307/541264

46 Andrew Buckser, 'Tradition, Power, and Allegory: Constructions of the Past in Two Danish Religious Movements', *Ethnology*, 34 (1995), 257–72, https://doi.

Fig. 12.12 Cover of Sven Moren and Edvard Os, eds, *Den Frilynde Ungdomsrørsla. Norigs Ungdomslag i 25 År* (Oslo: Norigs Ungdomslag, 1921). Public Domain.

In the context of this article, the main point of interest is that the Grundtvigian orientation promoted a kind of Christianity that accepted dancing. This enabled two priests to be chairs in *Noregs Ungdomslag*, and a good number of other priests to be prominent members. Halvdan Wexelsen Freihow was the frst priest who chaired *Noregs Ungdomslag* 1925–1936.47 In 1921, he wrote an article where he compares the ongoing struggle about dance to a lawsuit where the Liberal Youth Movement

org/10.2307/3773941

47 The second one was Knut Eik-Nes, who was chairman from 1936–1947 (but not functioning under the German occupation).

stands trial. Freihow metaphorically frames the lay preacher as a prosecutor, the stern laity as the jury, and Freihow himself takes on the defence:

I admit that young people of the Liberal Youth movement are dancing, I admit that drunken people sometimes attend meetings and reunions, but can this serve to prove that the work of the Liberal Youth movement prevents a true Christianity among the young people? If the youth clubs had as a task to teach young people to dance, then would that be the same as preventing true Christianity? If it is, there are many who prevent true Christianity among young people. If the work among young people had as an aim to teach them to drink, then the accuser could have found proof for his accusations.48

Freihow accuses the laity of seeing themselves as a kind of Supreme Court in questions of religion and culture, and popular opinion for seemingly accepting that. He ends submitting 'not guilty' as statement for the defence, stressing that: 'The Liberal Youth Movement does not see it as a task to condemn and suppress the joy of life in playful dancing. The movement sees it as a task to do everything it can to help young people play with dancing *without* killing their spiritual and intellectual engagement'.49

Freihow's polemic explicitly targets a newspaper article by a named lay preacher, and such articles were manifold in this period. An anonymous writer heavily criticises dance and liberal youth clubs in a small contribution to a local newspaper in 1916. It gives an impression of how the stern lay movement pleads its case of dance as dangerous and sinful. The writer claims:

Dance is perfect for fostering and nourishing sins against the 6th commandment50 in thoughts, mind and action. […] In the Bible 1 John 2:16 one can read: 'Everything in the world — the lust of fesh, the desires of the eyes, and haughty lifestyle — comes not from the Father but is of this world'. Our Saviour says, 'The world loves its own'.51 This fts dance

48 Halfdan Freihow, 'Ikkje skuldig!', in *Den Frilynde Ungdomsrørsla. Norigs Ungdomslag i 25 År*, ed. by Edvard Os and Sven Moren (Oslo: Norigs Ungdomslag, 1921), p. 71. Translated from the Norwegian by Egil Bakka.

49 Freihow, 'Ikkje skuldig!', p. 73.

50 Under the Augustinian division used by Roman Catholics and Lutherans, the sixth commandment refers to the commandment against adultery.

51 This statement is taken from John 15:19.

perfectly. It is the three-headed animal that constitutes the 'desires of the eyes, the lust of fesh, and haughty lifestyle'. Those who are not true converts seek to place the activity of dance into a spacious bag alongside other loved sins under the name of indiferent things.52

If a person, for instance on the street, approaches someone of the opposite sex in the same way as during a dance, any decent individual approached would feel it as defamatory, even as a crime for which the person rightfully would deserve punishment. But in the dance clubs it is counted as purity and decency.53

It seems clear here that the main problem with dance is the impurity and indecency of a public act of intimacy between man and woman. No distinction is made between kinds of dances, and even singing games were generally forbidden. 54

According to Freihow, the laity was very infuential in many parts of the Norwegian countryside. They also had support from some clergymen of the state church. This was probably an important part of the backdrop for the quite intensive debates in *Noregs Ungdomslag* about dancing, peaking in the years from 1916 into the 1920s. The religious laity published articles as part of the heavy discourse against both dance and the Liberal Youth Movement in newspapers throughout the country. Sometimes, *Norsk Ungdom*55 cited such articles to enable replies in the internal channels of the movement. The opinions about dance as sin hardly found support within the internal debate, but the movement found it important to argue against them.

In 1917, *Norsk Ungdom* was the arena for particularly intensive debates about the dancing in member clubs of *Noregs Ungdomslag*. An anonymous contributor wrote, 'If one has followed the work for young people in clubs where many members have an inclination to dance, one will acknowledge that dance is and remains the worst enemy a youth club can get. There is nothing that can overwhelm young people spiritually and culturally more than the dance'.56 The reason given for

52 'Indiferent things' here refers to adiaphora — matters not regarded as essential to faith, but nevertheless as permissible for Christians or allowed in church.

53 'Betydelig fremskrit' [n.a.], *Nordlands Avis*, 7/4 (1916), 2. Translated from the Norwegian by Egil Bakka.

54 Olaf Aagedal, *Bedehuset*: *Rørsla*, *bygda*, *folket* (Oslo: Samlaget, 1986), pp. 122, 236.

55 The newsletter of *Noregs Ungdomslag*.

56 'Dansen i Ungdomslaga' [n.a.], *Norsk Ungdom* (1921), p. 4. Translated from the Norwegian by Egil Bakka.

this claim was based on experience, 'If there is a discussion, only older members participate. The young people are sitting uninvolved, perhaps making noise, longing for the end so that they can get a dance, even if the questions debated are burning issues, that particularly bear on their situation'. The members who had joined the club in order to dance were not engaged with other activities or issues the organisation had as its main aim. Rather, they were impatiently waiting for the dancing that would end the meeting. In this way they, destroyed all engagement with other issues. Hence, the dance prohibition was intended for meetings and not for parties. The *folkeviseleik* [ballad games] were identifed as the most efcient means to eradicate round dances from the meetings. The *folkeviseleik* would still provide the pleasure of movement that young people needed after the meetings, but those individuals who attended for the sole purpose of dancing would no longer disturb the meetings, since they did not care about the *folkeviseleik*.

In a later issue, Hulda Garborg published an article arguing along similar lines. She refers to Martin Luther: 'If vice and sin can be found together with dance, it is not the fault of dance itself, but rather the fault of the evil minds of some of those who dance'. She vehemently attacks the 'new-fangled' dancing as 'vulgar, ugly and of bad taste […] being poisonous fowers from the most unsound city culture'. She continues: 'Therefore, I think that this kind of dance should be barred by everyone for aesthetic and moral reasons. Unfortunately, I also think that the good round dance needs to be kept away from the liberal youth clubs — for other reasons'.

These clubs had idealistic goals; they were founded to combat brutality, materialism and indiference, and to help young people fnd their way to a higher cultural life, better self-esteem and stronger national feeling. 'Everything that hampers this must be taken away from the clubs, however good it may be in itself. Long experience shows that the round dance hampers, it destroys fellow feeling and disperses motivation'. She argues that, for dancing to have educational value, it should engage the mind as well as the body. She suggests that the 'song dance' and the 'fgure dance' have such qualities; they are serious disciplines that keep dancers alert and have spiritual content. The round dances do not, even if they are pretty and innocent. Garborg probably thought that dances that could be performed without demanding a certain concentration on them were of less educational value.57

There were several other articles on dancing in the clubs in 1917. Even if no article argued directly against Hulda Garborg, there is every reason to believe that many members at a local level wanted to dance round dances without restriction. An example from the small community of Sauda is likely representative: a farmer gave the ground for the house, on the condition that the users did not allow round dancing. The house was ready for use in 1915, and a struggle arose soon after. Parts of the membership wanted to dance round dances; not only the song dances and fgure dances which rules allowed. At Easter in 1922, the dance faction broke into the house to dance, and there were threats of bringing in the police. The struggle ended when this faction left and built a house of their own some years later. In 1938, the youth club bought the site, and, from then on, allowed round dances at parties, but still not at meetings.58

Fig. 12.13 The — at the time — new Ungdomshus (Youth clubhouse) in Sauda, with a dining room in the basement, and a hall for meetings with a small stage and a gallery. *Den Frilynde Ungdomsrørsla*, *Norigs Ungdomslag i 25 År*, ed. by Sven Moren and Edvard Os (Oslo: Norigs Ungdomslag, 1921), p. 239. Public Domain.

*Noregs Ungdomslag* held its annual general meeting of 1917 at Voss in western Norway, and Hulda Garborg attended to teach song dance

57 Hulda Garborg, 'Dansen i Ungdomslagi', *Norsk Ungdom* (1917), pp. 178–79. Translated from the Norwegian by Egil Bakka.

58 Egil Bakka and Magne Eiesland, *Sauda Ungdomslag 1909–1964. Lagssoge* (Sauda: Sauda ungdomslag, 1964), p. 44.

and to be part of the discussion about the round dances. It seems that the board of the organisation had brought together a strong team to argue for a proposal from the Board: 'The meeting is of the opinion that the round dance ought to be prohibited at ordinary meetings'.59 The proposal was unanimously adopted.

The struggle over round dances was, however, not won locally, and articles on the issue appeared in the internal channels of *Noregs Ungdomslag*:

The aim for Norwegian folk dancers is to promote Norwegian folk dancing, not only for use in the youth clubs, but also as a common dance both at home and elsewhere. One of our worst enemies, which we have to fght, are the round dances. The question is, what have we done to tackle this, our worst enemy? There are diferent answers. Some will reply, 'We are only allowed to dance (round dances) at our club parties'. Others reply, 'The round dances are totally banned in our club'. This may be fne, but, in my mind, good bylaws and decisions in the clubs do not help much as long as each of us […] do the round dances as soon as the opportunity arises. We often see that people we count among the folk dancers are the most dedicated in keeping alive our worst enemy. Perhaps there would be many who would ask, 'You can't mean that liberal youth should establish a life-time promise against using round dance in our private lives?' No, this is not my intention; I do not think it should be necessary. People always said that the liberal youth are the most alert and intelligent youth. Because of this, I believed that this intelligent youth would see that, if they were to achieve something through their actions, it would just be their private lives, which would be infuential. Here, all the folk-dance groups should lead as good examples, so that people can see what a group looks like that is working seriously. Those who want to be pioneers and leaders in cultivating also need to show that they can protect what has already been sown, so that it can grow large and strong.60

59 Noregs Ungdomslag, *Norsk Ungdom*: *Noregs Ungdomslag 1916–19*29: *Bodstikka*: *Blad for Noregs Ungdomslag og Noregs Mållag*. Translated from the Norwegian by Egil Bakka. Bjørnar Blaavarp Heimdal, 'Nasjonal Samling Og Den Norske Folkemusikken: Norges Folkemusikken' (unpubished master's thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Faculty of Humanities, Department of History and Classical Studies, 2012).  Leikarvollen* (1923),

p. 270. Translated from the Norwegian by Egil Bakka.

It may be that Hulda Garborg's rather forceful attacks on the modern dances, and, in contrast, her acceptance of round dances, constitute a more urban perspective, while modern dances were not of great importance in the countryside around 1920. *Noregs Ungdomslag* also ruled against a proposition to ban the latter as well, which may seem strange.

The folk-dance subfeld made decisions to promote song dance and national dances. In some places, the diference between round dances and national dances would be small. The national dances could be just as dominant and attractive as the round dances, but those leaders who adopted a national folk-dance perspective and were based in large urban clubs may not have understood this at the time. The result was either a ban or lack of interest in the national dances such as *springar*, *gangar*, and *pols* at the local level, which led to annoyance among the fddlers who wanted to play the local music, but were forced to learn simple melodies for the national repertoire of fgure dances.

Another diference between developments at the national and local level was the term for folk dancing. From the very beginning, Garborg used the term *folkevisedans* [ballad dance] or *songdans* [song dance] for the chain dance used on the Faroe Isles, as well as for the Norwegian version she initiated.61 Her main follower, Klara Semb, used the terms *songdans* and *turdans* [song dance and fgure dance].62 It is interesting to note that, in spite of this, local leaders in the clubs used the term *folkeviseleik* [ballad game] or, simply, *leik* [games], in which they often included the national repertoire of fgure dances. Klara Semb published many of them and they were danced to music. The reason seems patent: there was a clear distinction in the countryside between *leik* [games] and *dans* [dance]. In this distinction, games were considered far more innocent than dance, and were far more acceptable in many contexts. *Leik* quite soon became an important term for the national repertoire of

61 *Norske Folkevisor*: *Med Ei Utgreiding Um Vise-Dansen Av Hulda Garborg*, *I*, ed. by Hulda Garborg, Nr 8 vols (Oslo: Norigs ungdomslag, 1903), p. 48 s., Hulda Garborg, *Songdansen i Nordlandi* (Kristiania: Aschehoug, 1903)., Hulda Garborg, *Dagbok 1903–1914*, ed. by Karen Grude Koht and Rolv Thesen (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1962)., Hulda Garborg, 'Færøisk Dans', *Dagbladet* (25 January 1902).

62 Klara Semb, *Norske Folkedansar II. Rettleiding Om Dansen* (Oslo: Noregs Ungdomslag, 1922).

song dance and *turdans*, leading to the term *leikarring* for a folk-dance group specialising particularly on song dance and fgure dance.

It is possible to understand the argument for *turdans* and song dance rather than round dances in the way they would function in a youth club. Freely improvised couple dances, such as the round dances, allow the dance partners to concentrate on themselves and each other. They do not need to pay attention to others, except for avoiding dancing into other couples. In turn, they could more easily hide firting or even sexual tensions, and could slip out of the house more easily than in more organised dances. The couple would only feel responsibility to one another, whereas, in a big crowd of dancing couples, each couple would be less available to each other's gaze than when couples formed circles and lines where they could see each other most of the time. The leaders of a club who considered dancing as a tool wanted to create a collective feeling of closeness and cooperation, rather than allowing happy couples to isolate themselves from everyone else in the group. In this way, attention on the group, and alertness to precise and complex patterns that were purported to hold educational value, were both understood as efcient means of maintaining this collective feeling of unity in the group. It could also help the disciplining of unruly and perhaps slightly drunk groups of young people who tried to challenge conventions of 'good' behaviour.63

The song dance had even stronger tools for creating a collective feeling of unity in the group, since the unison singing and dancing even aimed to create a shared emotional involvement in the stories told by the text. This shared expression of emotion probably appeared strange in a secular context, since it is reminiscent of religious singing. This is probably why people in the folk music movement scornfully called it 'den heilage dansen' ('the holy dance').

#### Conclusion

The round dances were about one hundred years old in Norway in the early twentieth century. Dance was generally strongly criticised

63 The Cotillion — a mixture of party games and round dances, often organised by ball directors — might have had similar efects, and be promoted by the dancing masters and adults for similar reasons.

in religious circles, and much more so by lay preachers than by the clergymen of the ofcial church. The Labour Movement used them extensively in social life, but did not recognise them at all as having any cultural value or being of relevance for the movement itself. The Liberal Youth Movement had a much more complex relationship to round dances. The movement did not see round dances as harmful or sinful in themselves, but did not recognise them as having any educational or national value. Since it was a genre that nearly all dancing Norwegians knew and enjoyed, occasions for dancing it in the new assembly houses were cherished and yearned for. The leading ideologists in the Liberal Youth Movement found the competition encouraged by round dances in the clubs to be very problematic, and banned it from meetings for forty years, whereas the Labour Movement let it live on without paying it any attention.

#### Bibliography

Aagedal, Olaf, *Bedehuset*: *Rørsla*, *Bygda*, *Folket* (Oslo: Samlaget, 1986).

## 13. Dance and 'Folk Devils'1

## *Mats Nilsson*

This chapter will discuss how new dances, especially when danced by young people, tend to be seen as a negative and even evil infuence by elder members of society. By framing the discussion with the use of the concepts of 'moral panic' and 'folk devils' by the British sociologist Stanley Cohen and those infuenced by his work, I want to place the Waltz and other couple dances as just one example of how social reactions create folk devils out of new dance forms in diferent historical contexts.

## The Waltz 'In and Out'

In June 2010 the Swedish Crown Princess Victoria married Prince Daniel, and at the wedding party they started the dancing with a Waltz. 2 In 200 years, the Waltz has gone from being an immoral popular dance to one accepted throughout the whole of society, and accepted by all as the prime wedding dance.

Fig. 13.1 Video: Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel of Sweden's Wedding Waltz (*bröllopsvals*), 19 June 2010, Sveriges Television AB. 'Victoria & Daniel of Sweden's Royal Wedding Waltz/Bröllopsvals', 4:15, posted online by 2x7, *Youtube*, 21 June 2010, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=xLk977Ktaus

1 This chapter is a revised and updated version of an article published in Swedish in Kerstin Gunnemark and Magnus Mörck, eds, *Vardagslivets fronter* (Göteborg: Arkipelag, 2006).

2 *Det kungliga bröllopet 19 juni 2010*, dir. By Lars Bjalkeskog (Nordisk Film, 2010).

Establishing the date that Waltz dancing became popular in Sweden is difcult, if not impossible; there are too few sources. However, in 1785 it was at least noted by an anonymous author under the pseudonym G. F. Koskull as a fashion among the gentry:

[As to] the Waltz, the earlier fashions we have got from abroad, but this fgure we have learned from our own farmers; nobody that has been in the countryside any time during spring or summer can have missed how the people, especially the youth, amuse themselves by laying down in the green grass, preferably on a small hill, always two and two, one above the other, holding each other with the arms and throwing their legs around each other, and in this formation they roll or waltz down the hill. This has previously been a game, but the gentry today has developed it as something serious; it has been introduced into the Contra dance, and is done to music. The formation is nearly the same and is executed in the same way, nota bene: in dance it is done upright. The lady and the man take each other with one hand around the waist, the other hands hold each other, press each other as hard as they can to each other, and turn around in a circle, always so that the man has a knee between the lady's thighs, which must keep them apart, otherwise the Waltz shall not work. Whether a lady is strong or weak, and whether she can stand a stronger or softer Waltz, is something a sensible man shall decide.3

One of the other traces of the Waltz is the name 'väggadans', which means something like 'dancing along the walls', following the inside walls of the house. It is mentioned in 1809 in southern Sweden, in a source that tells us that people danced around the room in a circle when dancing the Waltz, instead of on the spot like one of the Polska forms that had been more common previously.4 One example of the reaction towards this novel dance comes from an anonymous writer, who wrote in a Turku5 newspaper in 1801:

If you, my lady, want to avoid embarrassment, then stay away from the dances that put you in danger. The Waltzes are such a group, not only because their circular movements are the most harmful: they are also the most indecent and immoral. I want to ask any male if he can have the same respect as before for a girl when he has seen her Waltzing? Even

3 Henry Sjöberg and Anita Etzler, *Folkets danser* (Stockholm: Brevskolan, 1981), p. 136. Translated from the Swedish by Mats Nilsson

4 Ibid., p. 137.

5 Turku was at the time a largely Swedish-speaking town and capital town of the eastern part of Sweden, in south-western Finland.

less can he who waltzed with her have any respect for her. It was well done by Goethe, when he let Werther say that, whatever will happen with love, the girl who he loves should never waltz with someone else.6

The Waltz, and later the Polka, became the popular dances of the nineteenth century and replaced the older Polska and the Minuet. In his book, which has the expressive title *Decorum of the Minuet*, *Delirium of the Waltz*, Eric McKee gives examples to show how bad the new Waltz, as both dance and music, was seen to be by parts of the society in the beginning of the nineteenth century.7 A hundred years later in the early twentieth century, around 1920, Waltz and Polka forms had to compete with jazz (both dance and music) as the most popular genre among those who danced, especially the youth. And there was also a debate around the good and bad elements of this new fashion from America. According to numerous sources, the young lost sight of proper morality by taking part in, and performing, these 'negroid mating games' or 'devilish rites'.8 The targets here were the American music and dance that became popular around 1900, as well as the advent of jazz in Sweden during the 1920s and its popularity in the dance pavilions of the 1930s. During the 1990s we can detect the same moral reasoning about young people's leisure and the dance events that have widely come to be called 'raves'.9

6 Petri Hoppu, 'Folkdansande Eros', *Folkdansforskning i Norden*, 34 (2011), 10–16 (at 10). Translated from the Swedish by Mats Nilsson.

7 Eric McKee, *Decorum of the Minuet*, *Delirium of the Waltz. A Study of Dancemusic Relations in ¾ Time* (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 118, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2005r6k. See also Mark Knowles, *The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances. Outrage at Couple Dancing in the 19*th *and Early 20*th *Centuries* (Jeferson, NC: McFarland, 2008) for more examples.

8 Jonas Frykman, *Dansbaneeländet. Ungdomen*, *populärkulturen och opinionen* (Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, 1988) p. 91. See also the discussion in Alexander Agrell, *Hotet från jazzen. En studie av motstånd mot jazzmusik* (Lund: Etnologiska institutionen, 1984); Johan Fornäs, *Moderna människor. Folkhemmet och jazzen* (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2004); Göran Larsson, 'Onestep & Jumpa: om moralisk panik i 1910talets Sverige', in *Uppsatser i svensk jazzhistoria*, ed. byAlf Arvidsson (Umeå: Institutionen för etnologi, 1998), 8–35; Gösta Rosén, *Kriget om den moderna dansen* (Stockholm: Harriers bokförlag AB, 1952), and Erik Walles, *Jazzen anfaller* (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1946).

9 Michael Axelsson, *Ravekultur. En studie om ravekulturens gemenskapsbildning och den rörliga platsens fasta punkt* (Stockholm: Etnologiska institutionen, 2004); Henrik Edberg, *'De kommer för lätt undan'. En jämförelse mellan moralisk panik i 1960talets England och 1990talets Sverige* (Göteborg: Etnologiska institutionen, 1996); Mikael Eivergård, *Hotad moral — en studie av 1930 och 1940talens debatt om ungdomens*

### 'Folk Devils' as Targets

Morality has to do with feelings and opinions, panic with an uncontrolled reaction, while 'the others' and devils tend to describe what one dislikes. This is how one might briefy summarise theories about moral panic, which are a reaction on a social level and not only on an individual level. It is not just one person, or a couple, whose anxiety about something creates emotional panic, but rather a fear which spreads to large parts of society. This fear singles out other groups or unique events as a harmful threat to the entire society.

Since medieval times (and maybe earlier) dancing has been some sort of folk devil — a behaviour practised by ordinary people that the rulers and elite classes dislike. The combination of body, movement and morality has been an issue for those who do not take part in these activities, especially adults versus the youth. It is said that Augustine of Hippo, who died in 430, formulated his dislike for dancing thus:

It is better to take care of your felds than to dance on Sundays. The dance is a circle, where the devil is in the middle and every movement of the dance is a leap to meet him in hell.10

New dances and new fashions seemed to trigger opinions about dancing. John of Münster wrote in 1594 about the new and 'indecent' dance Volta:

Nowadays everybody in Germany only wants to dance the Gaillard. Especially there is a new, indecent dance named the Volta, which takes its name from the French word *voltiger*, meaning to fy around in whirls. In that dance the dancer takes the lady with a jump, and she also advances towards him, forced by the music, and he seizes her in an improper place, where she has a piece of wood, and he throws the lady and also himself so high up in the air, so high above the foor, that the onlooker believes

*nöjesliv* (Uppsala: Etnologiska institutionen, 1987); Peter Nilsson, *Hon dansade som en skadskjuten kråka. En uppsats om rave och massmedia* (Göteborg: Etnologiska institutionen, 1997); Evalotta Sandberg, *Rave och media* (Stockholm: Institutet för folklivsforskning, 1998), and Stefan Thungren, *Raveeländet. Debatten om ravefester som moralisk panik* (Stockholm: Institutet för folklivsforskning, 1998); Elisabeth Tegner, 'Dans i stormens öga', in *Drömmar och strömmar — om att tolka ungdomars värld*, ed. by Mohamed Chaib (Göteborg: Daidalos, 1993), 65–69.

10 Cited in Mats Rehnberg, 'Från svärdsdans till menuett', in *Det glada Sverige*: *Våra fester och högtider genom tiderna*, vol. 2, ed. by Gösta I. Berg (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1948), pp. 133–82 (p. 170). Translated from the Swedish by Mats Nilsson.

that the dancers will not be able to come down again without breaking arms and legs.11

If moral panic amounts to a spate of moralising that has deteriorated into panic, the folk devils are the group of people, or the activity they engage in, that become targets in this process. Young people's dancing for pleasure seems to be a constantly latent feld of moral panic over time. The dances and dance events themselves are then the folk devils that are believed to ruin young people.

Panic does not always arise, but moralising about pleasure dancing (or bar dances, dance pavilions, discotheques, raves, etc.) is apparently a continuous undercurrent in our society. In these dance environments, dangerous things can happen, especially connected with (alcohol and/ or narcotic) drugs, and with the physical encounter between human bodies. 12 And if dancing and physical bodies are not dangerous, at the very least they do not constitute pure or fne culture. For instance, in an article in *Göteborgs-Posten* about a danceband trip by boat, the headline read 'The ape stage, round trip'.13 Even some of our very well-known and popular performers, such as Hasse & Tage, uphold the image that many of us have of pleasure dancing. In the monologue *Stadslollan* [The City Wench], performed by Lena Nyman, the 'wench' gets pregnant as soon as she sets a foot in the 'boondock' barn dance. 14 In another of their conversations, Hasse & Tage allow the punkrocker Trindeman Lindeman to reveal why dance music exists: if it did not, the whole dance foor would be impounded for disorderly conduct.15 The implication is that what one does on the dance foor becomes, with music, more or

11 Ibid., pp. 160–61

12 Christina Carmbrant, 'Olaglig ravfest i kyrkolokal. Tre unga greps — fera olika sorters droger i beslag', *Göteborgs-Posten* (16 October 2000), p. 9; Rasmus Malm, 'Regisserad jakt på droger', *Dagens Nyheter* (2 November 2000), part B, pp. 1, 4; Ebba Malmström, '26 unga greps vid razzia mot ravefest. Polisen tog stora mängder narkotika i beslag', *Göteborgs-Posten* (27 Nov 2000), p. 11, and Jan Nyman, 'Världarnas krig', *Göteborgs-Posten* (10 December 2000), p. 11.

13 Frida Boisen, 'Apstadiet tur och retur. Om en rock'nrollkryss till Norge och tillbaka', *Göteborgs-Posten Aveny* (3 March 2000), [n.p.].

14 Hans Alfredsson and Tage Danielsson, '1973: Stadslollan. Monologue with Lena Nyman', in 'Glaset i örat på Berns', *Guldkorn från Hasse & Tages Revyer* (Svenska Ljud/Sonet Grammofon AB, 1998) [on CD].

15 Hans Alfredsson and Tage Danielsson, '1979: Punkrockare Trindeman Lindeman', in 'Under Dubbelgöken på Berns', *Guldkorn från Hasses & Tages Revyer* (Svenska Ljud/Sonet Grammofon AB, 1998) [on CD].

less what one otherwise does in bed. My point here is not that Hasse & Tage are extreme; on the contrary, they only express prevailing norms, which is why we laugh when we recognise ourselves in their incisive formulations. Similarly, there are examples of pictures in which dance is represented as something superfcially calm and innocent, but when one folds the picture in a certain way the real subject emerges — sex.16

Today the folk devils probably have a greater opportunity to defend themselves, and argue in speech and writing, than ever before in history. The perspectives of the dancers and participants, and a 'defence' of rave and disco, appear for instance in student essays.17 Here one's own participation and understanding allow one to use the theories about moral panic as a defence against the attacks of the moralists. Those who are subjected to moralising cast back the objections by asserting that 'it is simply moral panic' (compare also Thornton below). Even pair dances, such as the Foxtrot, Tango, and Salsa, are explained and defended by their performers nowadays.18 There are also examples of an alleged panic being undiscernible except from a Stockholmer's middleclass media perspective. When going to the countryside, outside the capital, many people did not realise there was any panic about dancing.19

16 Ulf Palmenfelt, *Folkhumor i fotostat* (Stockholm: Prisma, 1986), p. 85.

17 Lotta Björkman, *'Go with the fow'. En studie av rumslighet*, *rörelse och tidlöshet* (Lund: Etnologiska institutionen, 1996); Anna Cecilia Weschke, *Nattklubbens själ* (Göteborg: Etnologiska institutionen, 1993), and Kajsa Wiklund, *Saturday night fever. En studie av dans*, *agerande och kommunikation på diskodansgolvet* (Lund: Etnologiska institutionen, 1997). Cf. also Maria Pini, 'Cyborgs, Nomads and the Raving Feminine', in *Dance in the City*, ed. by Helen Thomas (London: Macmillan, 1997), 111–29, https://doi. org/10.1057/9780230379213\_7

18 Sonia Abadi, *Milongan — omfamningarnas basar* (Stockholm: CKM media AB, 2003); Johan Borghäll, *Salsa! Och livet i Havanna. Om musiken i dansen och dansen i musiken* (Stockholm: ICA bokförlag, 2001); Birgitta Holm, *Pardans* (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2004); M. A. Numminen, *Tango är min passion* (Jyväskylä: Alfabeta, 1999); Sam Savander, *Dans*, *inte bara en sexjakt. En deltagares analys av umgängeskulturen*  (Skelleftehamn: Artemis, 1997); Kerstin Thorvall, *Nödvändigheten i att dansa* (Stockholm: Bonnier pocket, 2002), and Liisa Ängquist, 'Är det du eller jag som för'*. En etnologisk studie av några generella drag av sällskapsdansens förändring under de senaste femtio åren* (Umeå: Etnologiska institutionen, 1996).

19 Anna Wennerlund, *En förförd ungdom*? *Om nöjeslivet och moralisk debatt i 1940talets Karlstad* (Göteborg: Etnologiska institutionen, 1995); Chatarina Wiklund, *Om dessa backar kunde tala! Berättelserna om Fällforsen*, *Övre Norrlands största danshak* (Umeå: Etnologiska institutionen, 1997); and Eva Helen Ulvros, *Dansens och tidens virvlar. Om dans och lek i Sveriges historia* (Lund: Historiska media, 2004).

### Moral Panic — Morality in Panic?

The concept of moral panic was not coined by Stanley Cohen in 1972, but rather by his colleague Jock Young. An article by Young in 1971 discusses the general anxiety caused by statistics over the growth of drug abuse, and states that 'the moral panic over drugtaking results in the setting up of drug squads', which in turn causes an increase of drug related arrests.20 It was, however, Cohen who in 1972 introduced the concept to a wider public in his book *Folk Devils and Moral Panics*: *The Creation of Mods and Rockers*. During the 1960s, rumours fourished about what transpired when two youth groups as diferent as Mods and Rockers met on the beaches at the English resort of Brighton. When Cohen subsequently investigated what allegedly happened and what he could establish to have occurred, great diferences emerged. It was when he described these diferences, and how they could be disseminated, that he gave shape to the idea of moral panic as well as to folk devils.

For Cohen and his younger colleague Kenneth Thompson, 21 the key element in a moral panic is a series of events or phenomena that generate each other — or, even better, a spiral of events and actions that fnally lose their force and die out.22 First, someone or something is defned as a *threat to fundamental social values or interests* by somebody else, usually called a *moral entrepreneur.* The threat is then depicted in an easily recognisable form by *mass media*, which in turn contributes to a *rapid build-up* of the public interest in what happened. Authorities and *opinionmakers* begin to get involved. Next, the panic *disappears* without visible traces as easily as it arose, or else it results in *social changes* of some kind, such as a new law. The actual cause of the panic seldom disappears, despite the panicked moral activities. An alternative formulation is that a moral panic occurs when the public, via mass media, is alarmed with the help of entrepreneurs, those moral crusaders who hound the authorities for more social control and moral rules resting on an absolute ethic. The

20 Quoted in Kenneth Thompson, *Moral Panics* (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 7.

21 Stanley Cohen, *Folk Devils and Moral Panics*: *The Creation of the Mods and Rockers*, 3rd edn (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 9, and Thompson, *Moral Panics*, p. 8.

22 Thompson, *Moral Panics*, p. 6.

actions of moral crusaders (entrepreneurs) can be seen as symbolic of social dissatisfaction among certain groups or classes in society. 23

The threat that the moral crusaders experience or observe, and the culprits they blame, become evil *folk devils.* 24 These stimulate strong feelings of righteousness, primarily among the moralising groups themselves. The literature about moral panic often concerns itself with morality among the deviants — as well as how and why the panic arises. My own interest as an ethnologist is really in the panic's 'victims' and what or who they are, or how they reason. For example, what is it in dance and music that threatens? And, perhaps most importantly, how do the folk devils themselves, or rather the people who perpetrate the devilry, experience the questioning of their morality and their activities? These issues are confronted much less extensively in the literature. Moral panic has two characteristics on which everyone seems to agree. It concerns a social group's worries over the behaviour of another group or category of peoples, at the same time as there is a growing degree of enmity toward the indicated group, which is seen as a threat to the social order. Thompson points out another common feature: that panic implies some measure of inconstancy and disproportionality.25 Here panic means 'generalised fears and anxieties of a large part of the population'.26 Moral panic arises when the ofcial picture of, or the press reaction to, a deviant social or cultural phenomenon 'completely lacks proportion regarding the true threat that exists'. In addition, Cohen notes that there is a periodic tendency to identify and create folk devils as scapegoats (in his case, Mods and Rockers), whose activities are viewed by hegemonic groups (the moralists) as evidence of an internal social breakdown. 27 This suggests that the creation of moral panic is a part of these groups' method of exercising power.

Moral panic, then, is collective in its performance and behaviour. It is relatively spontaneous, volatile, ephemeral, impetuous, extrainstitutional, and short-lived, arising in situations where clear defnitions

23 Ibid., p. 13.

24 Cohen, *Folk Devils and Moral Panics*, pp. 2–3.

25 Thompson, *Moral Panics*, p. 9.

26 Philip Jenkins, *Intimate Enemies. Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain* (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992), p. 4.

27 John Springhall, *Youth*, *Popular Culture and Moral Panics. Penny Gafs to GangstaRap*, *1830–1996* (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 4–5.

or explanations and patterns of action set by the mainstream culture are lacking. The episodic character of these panics distinguishes moral panic from other actions by, for example, more long-lived political or environmental groups. This distinction in is often considered important by scholars.28 However, it is difcult to see that political or environmental groups *themselves* would be excluded as moral entrepreneurs. The distinction between moral panic and these other actions ought to lie precisely in whether we are dealing with longer activities which surround moral or other issues, but which are not themselves panicked; or whether we are dealing with a moral/political opinion that creates a panic among infuential groups in society.

According to Sarah Thornton, a British researcher in youth culture and media, moral panic is the culmination and fulflment of young people's cultural goals, in the sense that negative news coverage baptises and confrms transgression as a desired immoral act. Moral panic is, for example, one of the few marketing strategies open to relatively anonymous, late modern instrumental dance music. The tabloid press is in many ways essential to the British youth movement — it helps to delimit the subcultures, at the same time as it diferentiates them from the mainstream culture. Positive judgements are the kiss of death. To be misunderstood in the mass media is often an aim, and not an efect, of the youth culture's search for identity. 29 Thornton adds:

'Moral panic' is a metaphor which depicts a complex society as a single person who experiences sudden groundless fear about its virtue […] its anthropomorphism and totalization mystifes more than it reveals. It fails to acknowledge competing media, let alone their disparate reception by diverse audiences. And its conception of morals overlooks the youthful ethics of abandon.30

As for counterattacks, some researchers' critiques of moral panic contain as a clarifying concept the very notion that it has become a simple, sociological excuse or an insult to throw back at the social reactions which surround, for instance, football hooligans and welfare freeloaders

28 Thompson, *Moral Panics*; Jenkins, *Intimate Enemies*; Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, *Moral Panics. The Social Construction of Deviance* (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

29 Sarah Thornton, 'Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave Culture', in *Microphone Fiends Youth Music*, *Youth Culture*, ed. by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 176–92.

30 Ibid., p. 184.

in our time.31 Scientifc concepts spread into everyday language and their usage, signifcance and meanings are changed, as social science and daily life constantly infuence each other.32 This dual hermeneutics implies that moral panic has become clearly loaded with ideology, and is more of a polemical than an analytical concept.33

Mass media, as much as the concept of moral panic, is thus employed by both sides — the moral entrepreneurs and the folk devils. To the former, media are a way of spreading their message and creating moral panic, but also a way of trying to afect and alter what causes the panic. Folk devils, the other party in the struggle for interpretive priority, defend themselves by claiming vulnerability to moral panic. But the moralists (and probably also their victims) tend to exaggerate the media's ability to infuence behaviour in people who are less educated than they are, at least according to John Springhill. The mass media play a double role, since in addition to being interlocutors for both parties in a moral struggle, they can be, through their news coverage and journalism, a source of moral panic. 34

#### Ignorance at a Distance — Morality and Power

The moral feld revolves in two overlapping spheres: ofcial and nonofcial. When they are articulated together, a moral panic may arise, though it need not.35 Rumours belong to the nonofcial sphere, and their life resembles that of moral panic in many ways.

Rumour begins somewhere, is set in motion and multiplied, and starts to circulate. The process expands and reaches a high point, then declines and splits into lesser sources of rumour. Finally, it usually ceases completely — or is laid latently in the collective memory for the future.36

31 Jenkins, *Intimate Enemies*, p. 8. Compare also *Godmorgen världen*, Sveriges Radio P1, 13 February 2005; and *Kulturnytt*, Sveriges Radio P1, 23 March 2005, where the reactions to the accusation of 'child pornography' towards a children theatre project shown at the University College of Film, Radio, Television and Theatre were rejected as 'mere moral panic'.

32 Antony Giddens, *Modernitetens följder* (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1996), p. 22, and Mats Nilsson, *Dans — kontinuitet i förändring. En studie av danser och dansande i Göteborg 19301990* (Göteborg: Etnologiska föreningen i Västsverige, 1998), p. 39.

33 Thompson, *Moral Panics*, p. 10.

34 Springhall, *Youth*, *Popular Culture and Moral Panics*, pp. 158–59.

35 Thompson, *Moral Panics*, p. 6.

36 Jean-Noël Kapferer, *Rykten. Världens äldsta nyhetsmedium* (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1988), p. 8. Translated from the Swedish by Mats Nilsson.

Jean-Noël Kapferer sees rumour as a collective consultation, and refers to the sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani's defnition of rumour as 'the group's common exploitation of its intellectual resources to fnd a satisfying explanation of the event'.37 Kapferer summarises this with the formula R=B\*O, where R is the rumour, B is signifcance for the group, and O is lack of clarity. It is easy to perceive that insignifcant events or people are not subjected to rumours, or that no rumours arise if everything is unambiguous and clear. Yet, how often does this really apply?

Thus, one angle of approach is to assume that fears and anxiety are what create rumours (and legends) as well as moral panics. The rise of rumours, legends, travellers' tales and similar narratives is almost always rooted in ignorance about what they describe. When we recount and discuss things we do not know very much about — they might be called 'the unknown', and what we seldom encounter, 'the unusual', or what we cannot understand or control, the 'uncontrollable' — we move in the uncertain borderland where belief and knowledge are inseparable.38

All industrial countries have periodic outbreaks of moral panic. This is a hallmark of modernity and of late or postmodernity. Rapid social changes and growing social pluralism increase the potential for value conficts and lifestyle confrontations, which entail moral enterprises to defend or assert a group's values against others. It happens in the public arena where the media ofers opportunities for reinforcement and articulation of fears and demands for social control and regulation to defend one's own values.39

The very fact of a recurring cycle might suggest not so much a persistent irrationality or media induced 'panic', but rather the expression of fundamental contradictions in relations between classes and generations. We should give more emphasis to the *continuity* of the apprehension and loathing of 'modernity' which such fears represent and the specifcity of the various constituencies, populist, conservative and fundamentalist, from which they emerge […] Unfortunately, because of modernity theory's emphasis on dramatic change, its proponents tend to underestimate continuities between preindustrial and urbanindustrial popular culture.40

Cohen points out that there is a periodic tendency to identify and create folk devils (such as Mods and Rockers) whose activities are regarded

39 Thompson, *Moral Panics*, p. 11.

40 Springhall, *Youth*, *Popular Culture and Moral Panics*, p. 159.

by some groups in society as signs of internal social collapse. 41 When a moral panic arises, it revives dormant stereotypes or folk devils. They linger on as latent motives and are activated when a diversion from other social problems is needed.42 Moral panics thus regenerate the dominant and established system of values in a period of anxiety and crisis, while folk devils provide a necessary external threat in the dichotomy between social anxiety and interest groups' policies.43 As a comparison, the folklorist William R. Bascom considers the overall function of folklore to be an important factor for a society's survival and a culture's stability through time.44 Outbreaks such as moral panic can therefore be seen as a collective safety valve, and the stereotypes of folk devils as a part of the eternal folklore.

Changes in society often cause anxiety in large groups of citizens. The defciency in awareness and knowledge of new conditions and technologies creates insecurity and aversion. Relevant here are theories about modernisation and globalisation, where it is precisely change that creates insecurity.45 Moral panic is connected with a fear of new technology alongside elaborated forms of popular culture. Ever since the early 1800s, commercial forms of entertainment have been demonised by some groups in society—those who think they have superior knowledge to others.46 What is culturally 'over there' but is physically close, which we know little about despite its being nearby, is sometimes experienced as threatening. Our anxiety and ignorance then easily lead to moral panic in the face of these devils, or diabolical phenomena. My thesis about the causes of moral panic and the creation, or rather activation, of folk devils (stereotypes) is that they have to do with cultural distance and inadequate knowledge of the phenomena that each of us now and then demonises in an attempt to wield power. The lack of knowledge refers mainly to our lack of experience of what we moralise about, at least in the same emic sense as those who are subjected to moral lectures.

41 Cohen, *Folk Devils and Moral Panics*.

42 Springhall, *Youth*, *Popular Culture and Moral Panics*, pp. 5, 14.

43 Jenkins, *Intimate Enemies*, p. 7.

44 William R. Bascom, 'Four Functions of Folklore', in *The Study of Folklore*, ed. by Alan Dundes (Englewood Clifs, NJ: PrenticeHall Inc., 1965), pp. 279–98.

45 Zygmunt Bauman, *Globalisering* (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2000), pp. 39 and 43.

46 Springhall, *Youth*, *Popular Culture and Moral Panics*, p. 159. Compare with Pierre Bourdieu, *Kultursociologiska texter* (Lidingö: Salamander, 1986) and his concept 'distinction'.

The moralist seldom, if ever, meets, in their own arena, the people and phenomena that they react against. The indirect wielding of power by the moralist is due to defcient experience and typically a position on the fringes of real power. One feels threatened but cannot protect oneself and does not know how. Hence, one tries to make the real powers do something, to save oneself the confrontation with immorality, and thus evade an encounter face-to-face with the folk devils.

The dilemma is that, to avoid panic and 'meaningless moralising', we must relativize and question certain claims about what, sometimes with good reason, we dislike. We must examine our own 'centric' attitudes (whether they involve ethno, socio-, or chronocentrism, or the like) and values. Are all young people at a rave on drugs? Why are they attracted there? What is in fact bad and immoral, and from whose perspective? Why do we think computer games, casinos, 3Gmasters, or cell phones are dangerous? Is the creation of folk devils about a genuine fear of technology, more conscious ideological dissociation, or purely moral issues?

Fig. 13.2 *A Drunken Party with Sailors and Their Women Drinking*, *Smoking*, *and Dancing Wildly as a Band Plays*. Reproduction of an etching by C. H., c. 1825, after George Cruikshank. Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0, https:// wellcomecollection.org/works/y4vwqhg7

#### Back to Dance

To conclude, youth culture in general — and, especially, where dance is concerned — has been, and continues to be, a target for moral issues and rumours from older people. But in the twenty-frst century does it cause moral panics as Cohen describes them, or are they more of a 'moral dislike' that doesn't escalate to panic?

I think there is a little more tolerance towards dance today. There are more dance genres and older people dancing themselves today than there were ffty years ago. Middle-age dancing, and dancing as a hobby, have become genres of their own, parallel to more youth-dominated club dancing. So called *dansbandsmusik* (closely related to country and western music), a relatively large and widespread type of music to which people in their mid-ffties and over still dance the Jitterbug and Foxtrot in amusement parks and elsewhere, generally has a low status among the cultural elite as well as musicians and musicologists.47 But it does not create moral panic.

Dance courses are a relatively modern phenomenon, at least for the public at large. My thesis is that these courses are a way of handling the morally difcult aspects of dancing and body exposure, and of institutionalising and disarming the dangerous borderland in which pleasure dancing in a public hall occurs. Here the interest, notably among women, now seems to be in oriental dances,48 Salsa, 49 or Tango. 50 So, maybe the moral panic entrepreneurs have left the dance feld and are now concerned with the internet and computer games, which seem to be the new folk devils. However, there might be a potential moral panic concerning dance in the rather new phenomena of pole dancing (dancing on a pole as in a sex club), especially when there are courses

47 Mats Trondman, 'Självbedrägeriets och misskännandets princip. Till kritiken av dansbandskulturen', *Mardrömmar och önskedrömmar. Om ungdom och ungdomlighet i nittiotalets Sverige*, ed. by Fredrik Miegel and Thomas Johansson (Stockholm and Stehag: Symposion, 1994), pp. 177–212.

48 Magnus Berg, 'Orienten på en höft', in *Där hemma*, *här borta. Möten med orienten i Sverige och Norge*, ed. by Åsa Andersson, Magnus Berg and Sidsel Natland (Stockholm: Carlssons, 2001), pp. 145–222; Karin Högström, *Orientalisk dans i Stockholm*, *Femininiteter*, *möjligheter och begränsningar* (Stocholm: Stockholms universitet, 2010); Maria Kihlstenius, *Längtan till kvinnlighet. En studie av svenskor på kurs i orientalisk dans* (Stockholm: Institutet för folklivsforskning, 1996), and Hanna Särborn and Cecilie Mykkeltvedt, *Orientalisk dans. Snusk eller konst*? (Göteborg: Etnologiska institutionen, 1993).

49 Britt Ramström, *Livets krydda. Salsadansare i 1990talets Göteborg* (Göteborg: Etnologiska institutionen, 1998).

50 Birgitta Holm, *Pardans*.

for children from six years of age. I have not seen any public reaction that has become a big business at the time of writing, but since there are courses and exercises for young children there is fuel for a spark of moral indignation that could become a fre when it comes to pole dancing.

In light of the examples mentioned above, I see the Waltz as just one dance form through history that older people and the authorities disapproved of when it was new. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, couple dances like the Waltz and the Polka were new and provocative for the older generations, since young men and women were physically very close when dancing — and they could not be controlled in the way that was possible, for instance, in the Minuet or contra dances. After a while, the Waltz became the conventional and morally accepted way to dance. Early in the twentieth century, jazz dancing and the Foxtrot became the folk devils and the immoral dances.

#### Bibliography

#### Secondary Sources

Bourdieu, Pierre, *Kultursociologiska texter* (Lidingö: Salamander, 1986).

Thorvall, Kerstin, *Nödvändigheten i att dansa* (Stockholm: Bonnierpocket, 2002).

#### Newspaper Articles

#### Radio Programmes

*Godmorgen världen*, Sveriges Radio P1, 13 February 2005.

*Kulturnytt*, Sveriges Radio P1, 23 March 2005.

#### Compact Disks

#### DVDs

*Det kungliga bröllopet 19 juni 2010*, dir. By Lars Bjalkeskog (Nordisk Film, 2010).

## 14. Nostalgia as a Perspective on Past Dance Culture in Finland

*Helena Saarikoski*

My ongoing study concerns a late development of the dances that form the subject matter of this book. Sometime in the mid- to late nineteenth century, local groups of young Finnish men in rural villages started to organise dances for their own amusement, so that they could invite girls of their age to have fun with them. In contrast to older popular dance culture, they danced couple dances, and they danced for their own amusement and as a leisure activity, not only as a ritual on designated occasions. This phenomenon in Finland was a modern development. Rural working-class people adopted and arranged the dances as an expression of a new autonomous youth culture, a new romantic idea of marriage, and a new kind of leisure culture, or popular culture.

Unlike music, which was always played to accompany dances and written by named musicians, composers and lyricists, the dances were considered of common creation, known and danced by everyone. From the very beginning, these dances were also considered exotic novelties, arriving from foreign countries and big cities far away from Finland, whether in Central Europe, North or South America, or elsewhere.1 A young person typically wanted to master the dances that formed the local repertoire à la mode, so as to be able to take part in youth culture, on local dance foors.

In 1991, a collection of manuscripts was gathered by the National Museum of Finland (NMF), written by elderly people recollecting their

1 Helena Saarikoski, '"Taian tantsihin ruveta". Tanssikulttuurin muistomerkki 1800 luvun alkupuolen Vienasta', in *Tanssi tanssi*: *Kulttuureja*, *tulkintoja*, ed. by Helena Saarikoski (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2003), pp. 119–45.

dancing youth. These written memories formed the research material for my study. The material on pavilion dances is extensive and consists of approximately four thousand standard pages, from 543 respondents. Of this amount, roughly a quarter is defned as the research material proper in my study, according to the criteria of its being a personal experience narrative or a narrative of specifc events from participants' point of view.2 The respondents, who were mostly elderly people by the time of the inquiry, were asked to talk about dances and dancing at pavilions in their youth. The narrated events took place between 1910 and 1970. After two decades of discos triumphing over couple dances as the amusement of choice for young people, the couple dance culture had come to be considered as a 'vanishing folk tradition', a suitable subject for an inquiry by the Museum. The inquiry produced unique material for cultural dance research: a large collection of vernacular writings by ordinary people, describing their own dancing, in the form of personal experience narratives.3 To approach dancing and dance events via such narratives, I developed a narrative-ethnographic method of source criticism. Such narratives of days gone by are deeply embedded in contemporary discourses concerning and defning the subject matter. I looked at the respondents' personal experiences on past dance foors, as they were framed and shaped in the discursive realm of the narrating time.

## The Dances and Dance Culture

New couple dances became popularised in Finland in successive waves of dance and music culture: frst, in the 1840s, the Waltz, and later the Tango, the Foxtrot, *Humppa* (two-step), and, fnally, rock 'n' roll dances. Forms of longer duration such as the Polka and the Schottische and, to an extent, the Mazurka, were practised along with the new ones. The dances were introduced in Finland largely by professional dance

2 I explored these criteria in two methodological articles based on a preliminary sample study. Helena Saarikoski, 'Tanssi kirjoituksena, kirjoitus tanssina', *Elore*, 17.2 (2010), 4–9, https://doi.org/10.30666/elore.78872, http://www.elore.f/ arkisto/2\_10/saarikoski\_2\_10.pdf; and Helena Saarikoski, 'Menneisyyden ruumiinkokemusten tutkiminen kirjoitetuissa aineistoissa', in *Tekstien rajoilla*, ed. by Sami Lakomäki et al. (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2011), pp. 117–36.

3 Sandra Stahl Dolby, *Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative* (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989).

teachers and as part of the social customs of the elite.4 The dance forms, however, soon became assimilated into popular dancing and the dances themselves were arranged and developed into local variants by common people.5

Throughout the twentieth century until the 1980s, the coupledance forms, or simply *dances*, were an everyday and common form of socialising for young people in Finland. From the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, the dancing events of the youth in rural villages developed into a regular institution, in connection with a new kind of autonomous youth culture and the early developments of modern leisure culture. 6 The rural dance institution was characterised by dance events organised on a weekly basis by local people — frst, by young men in a village, and, later, by the nascent civic societies, the local youth societies, labour societies, sports clubs, and so on. Small dance stages (literally, *tanssilava* in Finnish) or temporary roofed dance venues (also called *paviljonki* in Finnish) were built for summer dances by local young people, to be their meeting places for amusement and socialising. From the frst decades of the twentieth century onwards, local civic societies built their own houses (*talo*, lit. 'house', or *seurantalo*, 'society's house') which were also to serve as dance places. A temporary dance foor, or an open-air stage for dancing, could also be built just for one occasion, for example, for wedding dances or for St John's Eve, or Midsummer dances. 7 The new dances were accompanied by local musicians; often there was only one musician playing the fddle or the accordion.

4 E.g. for the Waltz, Petri Hoppu, *Symbolien ja sanattomuuden tanssi* (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 1999), p. 203; referring to Gunnel Biskop, 'Om borgerligt valsande före 1840', in *Kring tiden. Etnologiska och folkloristiska uppsatser*, ed. by Anna-Maria Åström and Ivar Nordlund (Helsingfors [Helsinki]: Society for Swedish Literature in Finland, 1991), pp. 86–96.

5 For France, cf. Eugen Weber, *Peasants into Frenchmen* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), pp. 368–69, and pp. 446–51.

6 Matti Sarmela, *Reciprocity Systems of the Rural Society in the Finnish-Karelian Culture Area* (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennicae, 1969), pp. 128–50.

7 Aila Nieminen, '"Tanssilava, järvi ja hanuri". Lavatanssit Suomessa vuosisadan vaihteesta 1960-luvun loppuun asti' (unpublished MA thesis in ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, 1993), pp. 30–35. 'Helismaa ja kumppanit juhannuskeikalla', 5:35, posted online by Jukka Lindfors, *YLE*, 8 September 2006, https://yle.f/aihe/ artikkeli/2006/09/08/helismaa-ja-kumppanit-juhannuskeikalla (the singer Reino Helismaa and others on a St John's Eve gig; a TV documentary flm of the artists and the festivities in north-eastern Finland, 1948).

Fig. 14.1 View from the Punkaharju State Hotel down to the beach towards the ship jetty and bandstand. Postcard (unknown author), c.1905. The Finnish Forest Museum Lusto, image from the Nuutti Kanerva Collection. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain, https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Valtionhotellin\_laivalaituri,\_Valtionhotellin\_ tanssi-\_ja\_soittolava,\_circa\_1905\_PK0059.jpg?uselang=fi#file

Nowadays, the popular couple-dance genre has a particular name: the Pavilion Dance Culture, named after the specifc type of light building that was erected for dancing; these Finnish dance pavilions were important venues for the dances discussed in this book. Pavilion dancing (Finnish *lavatanssit*) is a popular hobby, and the dance forms are undergoing a minor revival in today's Finland.

The 1970s saw the popularisation of the 'loose' dance (*irtotanssi* in Finnish) — so called by dancers who were used to couple dancing, since in the 'loose' dance there was no dance frame uniting the couple, and indeed no strict pairing of couples on the foor at all. The dance audience became divided along generational lines; younger people went to discos while the elderly still went dancing at pavilions and society houses. 8 Dance music was assigned to two diferent genres, *dance* and *rock*, and bands specialised in one or the other (even if individual musicians could move quite smoothly between each genre).9

Practically all young people danced, in spite of hostile attitudes to dance perpetuated by sectarian Lutherans. Parents usually allowed their youngsters to go dancing anyway, because, after confrmation, it was considered the right of young people to do so. Going dancing was conventional when looking for a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Most older couples, the parents of those who are now middle-aged, met each other at a dance event. This is often evoked as the shared foundation for the nostalgia that is felt towards this form of dance culture and dance music in the consciousnesses of present-day Finns.

The overwhelming majority of ordinary dancing Finnish people (that is, nearly all Finns) learnt to dance by means of imitation, invention and peer guidance. In historical sources, we may trace and date the arrival of specifc dance forms via known mediators, such as dance teachers or artists. However, to trace the 'arrival' of a dance in the life of any individual dancer, the beginnings of waltzing or tangoing in any

8 Sini Kuha, 'Tanssilavat, konvat ja discot nuorten areenana 1960-luvun Jyväskylässä', in *Tanssilavan luona. Huvielämää Jyväskylän Ainolassa*, ed. by Henna Mikkola (Jyväskylä: Minerva, 2005), pp. 55–72. 'Dansholmen, Tolkis FBK', 12:45, posted online by The Archive of the Finnish Broadcasting Company, *YLE*, 26 October 2011, https://areena.yle.f/1-50228262 (dances at the pavilion of Dansholmen, Tolkis VFB; a TV documentary flm of dances in the South coast of Finland, 1966).

9 Sven-Erik Klinkmann, *Från Wantons till Wild Force* (Stockholm: Gidlunds, 2010), pp. 354–83.

particular body and in the lives of specifc individuals, we have to look for diferent kinds of sources: oral history and other unconventional sources of grassroots history.

On the basis of an inquiry that also provided the material for my own study, Aila Nieminen has described the overall choreography of pavilion dances at the level of culturally shared knowledge of dancing customs and etiquette:

To start with, lines or groups of women and of men faced each other on opposite sides of the foor, waiting for the music to begin. At the frst tunes, the men rushed towards the women to choose and catch the one they wanted to dance with. Dance couples were formed usually by a man asking a girl for a dance, according to set turns of asking for men and for women; the *women's turn* or *asking* came later in the evening and was shorter than the men's. Customarily, there was no good reason to refuse a dance, except a man's overt drunkenness (there is no traditional rule concerning a drunken woman, since, before the mid-1960s, it would have been hard to imagine such a sight at public dances). Two women could occasionally decide to dance, for several customarily acknowledged reasons, whereas it was usually not acceptable to dance in a male-male couple, or so-called ox couple.10

Each couple danced turning around its own axis. At the same time, the entire dancing crowd also progressed counter-clockwise around an (imagined or real) central pole of the dance foor. The twofold turning around was a new bodily protocol, 11 frst introduced with the Waltz in the mid-nineteenth century. Acquiring the skill was not easy for the dancers who were used to the more static models of earlier social dances. 12

The dancers' step pattern does not necessarily follow the musical rhythm — actually, it is claimed that the Finnish audience dances to the words and not to the music. 13 Finnish dance music is always sung in Finnish, and the dance itself is characterised by inhibited emotional expression. At a dance event, it is thus the song lyrics that most clearly

10 Nieminen, '"Tanssilava, järvi ja hanuri"'. All translations in this chapter from the Finnish are by Helena Saarikoski.

11 Judith Hamera, *Dancing Communities* (London: Macmillan, 2007), p. 32, https://doi. org/10.1057/9780230626485

12 Hoppu, *Symbolien ja sanattomuuden tanssi*, pp. 202–04.

13 Klinkmann, *Från Wantons till Wild Force*, p. 346.

express the emotions involved. Diferent couples on the foor can follow a diferent pattern to the same music. In practice, the identity of a dance, or dance type, like the Tango, Foxtrot or Two-Step, is more likely to be found in the music than in the dancers' movements.14

It was during the frst decades of this modern popular culture of weekly public dance events that Finland gained independence, after little more than a century of Russian rule of the north-western province, the Grand-Duchy of Finland.15 Finland declared independence after the October Revolution in December 1917. The declaration was followed by a civil war in the spring of 1918. With far-reaching societal and cultural consequences, the country was divided into two warring parties, the working-class Red Guards and the victorious White Guards. The trauma of the civil war was evident in the dance culture, as well as everywhere in Finnish society; the dance venues were divided according to the owner's afliation to one or other of the two parties. For example, a sports club belonged either to the working class or to the bourgeois central organisation, and some of the dancers also felt obliged to choose their dancing venues accordingly.

An old cultural divide was — and, to an extent still is — felt between the Finnish- and Swedish-speaking Finns in the coastal area where neighbouring villages or even houses may belong to diferent language areas.16 The dance audience was divided between the pavilions of each language group and so were dance music and bands. The dance music played by Swedish-speaking bands was infuenced by the Swedish country-like *dansbandsmusik* and the musicians had frequent contact with

14 Cf. Nieminen, '"Tanssilava, järvi ja hanuri"', the appended observation report; dance types are identifed solely on the basis of music and no attention is paid to dancers' movements in this respect.

15 Before 1809, areas that today belong to Finland were known, since ancient times, as the eastern province of Sweden.

16 At the end of 2010, there were nearly 300,000 Swedish-speaking Finns, or 5.5 % of the total population of nearly 5.5 million (*Statistics Finland*, http://www.stat.f/ index\_en.html). Alongside Finnish, Swedish has the status of an ofcial national language. The Swedish-speaking population is not evenly distributed regionally. While the so-called *Svenskfnland*, or Swede-Finland, is more of a cultural concept than a regional one, there are still two Swedish-speaking areas on the South and West coasts of Finland. Åland Islands, south-west from mainland Finland is an autonomous area with Swedish as the only ofcial language.

Sweden, the United Kingdom and even further abroad. 17 The Finnish dance music evolved more into a genre of its own, characterised by the largely romantic-nostalgic *Schlager*-type texts, always sung in Finnish, and the overwhelming popularity of Finnish Tango music. While many individuals were bilingual, the dance organisers, the venues and the music did not straddle the divide, and it was always a little adventure to take a dance trip to a pavilion of the other language group.

The religious, political, and ethnic divides created some of the historic diferences that emerged and became embodied in the popular dance culture, intertwined with the more readily evident generational and gender diferences and identities.

The 1920s in Finland were characterised by a modernist impulse. Besides jazz, Tango was introduced as an exotic dance from the New World. Bigger dance pavilions were built to gather larger audiences. In turn, these groups ran the fundraising of the organising civic societies and also provided for a more professional entertainment business, based on starring vocalists. Larger dance bands were established which travelled across smaller or larger areas, and thus standardised the music played on dance occasions.18 This modernisation thrust was connected to technical innovations such as the bicycle, which enabled people to make longer trips to dance events, and the radio and gramophone was within every person's reach.19 Still, the overwhelmingly agrarian structure of society did not change to any remarkable degree. Indeed, Finland remained agrarian and rural until the late 1960s, the age of the Great Migration to towns and to Sweden in search of jobs in industry and in services.

17 Klinkmann, *Från Wantons till Wild Force*; Anna-Maria Nordman, *Takt och ton i tiden. Instrument*, *musik och musiker i svenskösterbottniska dansorkestrar 1920–1950* (Åbo [Turku]: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2003).

18 Marko Tikka and Toivo Tamminen, *Tanssiorkesteri Dallapé. Suomijatsin legenda 1925– 2010* (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2011).

19 Saara Tuomaala, 'Polkupyörällä pääsee. Suomalaisen maalaisnuoruuden siirtymiä 1920–1940-luvuilla' in *Nuoruuden vuosisata*, ed. by Sinikka Aapola and Mervi Kaarninen (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2003), pp. 355–72; Tiina Männistö-Funk, 'Säveltulva kaupungissa — Gramofonimusiikki uudenlaisena kaupungin äänenä ja makukysymyksenä Helsingissä 1929', *Ennen ja nyt*, 3–4 (2008), http:// www.ennenjanyt.net/?p=272

During the Second World War in Finland, 20 public dances and dancing in general were forbidden, as part of the moral mobilisation of the so-called home front, in support of the warring eastern front.21 The wartime dance prohibition from the central government was met with local resistance. Indeed, the prohibition was not obeyed; people danced during the war, but it had to be done in secrecy.

Fig. 14.2 Dances on the stage of Käpylä VPK, Helsinki, 1945. Photo by Väinö Kannisto. Helsinki City Museum, CC BY 4.0, https://www.helsinkikuvia. fi/search/record/?search=tanssi&page=14

After the war, the prohibition was abolished by the end of the 1940s; this led to an unforeseen blossoming of public dances as a highly popular amusement activity of the new leisure culture. The 1950s and 1960s saw what can be called the golden age of popular couple dance culture.

20 The Second World War in Finland proceeded in four phases called the Winter War (1939–1940), the Interim Peace of 15 months, the Continuation War (1941–1944) and, fnally, the Lapland War, from September 1944 to April 1945, when according to a separate peace treaty with the Soviet Union (1944) the German troops had to be forced out of the country.

21 Sakari Pesola, 'Tanssikiellosta lavatansseihin', in *Rillumarei ja valistus. Kulttuurikahakoita 1950-luvun Suomessa*, ed. by Matti Peltonen (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1996), pp. 7–18; the Finnish war-time dance prohibition is considered unique, at least on a European scale.

From the 1960s onwards, the new rock 'n' roll and Disco-based forms of youth culture meant that the popularity of dance pavilions and of couple dances in general declined.22 This diminishment, which seemed to amount almost to a total disappearance of couple dance culture, was at its most severe towards the end of the 1980s, by the time of the inquiry that produced the narrative material for this study. From the nowdominant city perspective, pavilion dances came to be considered an old-fashioned and weird pastime for elderly people in the countryside, if they were considered at all.23

Perhaps with the coming of age of a generation that possesses their parents' and grand-parents' nostalgia toward pavilion dances, the degrading label has given way to a new vogue for pavilion dances, which are now conceived primarily as a dance genre and no longer as a socialising instrument for small communities. Today, there are hundreds of large dance pavilions and society-house foors that are of national signifcance in Finland, as well as all the smaller pavilions, the dance restaurants, and the night-clubs. Going out to enjoy an evening of couple dances is a popular hobby among many other dance hobbies, and it shows no sign of disappearing.24

#### Ethnographic Approach to Archived Material

Of the popular variants of the Tango, the Finnish Tango is especially famous and Finland possesses one of the most outstanding Tango cultures outside Argentina. The Finnish Tango, like its Argentinian cousin, was developed by ordinary people and became one of their embodied passions of choice.25 But the Finnish Tango developed into a very diferent mood and style of both dancing and music. 26 According

22 Kuha, 'Tanssilavat, konvat ja discot', pp. 67–72.

23 'Dansholmen, Tolkis FBK', https://areena.yle.f/1-50228262

24 Juha Laine, 'Suomalaisten nuorten tanssilavakulttuuri — modernia kansankulttuuria?' (unpublished Master's thesis, University of Jyväskylä, 2003); Kerkko Hakulinen and Pentti Yli-Jokipii, *Tanssilavakirja. Tanssista*, *lavoista ja lavojen tansseista* (Helsinki: AtlasArt, 2007).

25 See, e.g., M. A. Numminen, *Tango on intohimoni* (Helsinki: Schildts, 1998), pp. 5–6; for Argentina, cf. Marta E. Savigliano, *Tango and the Political Economy of Passion* (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).

26 *Tuomari Nurmio — stadilaista tangoa etsimässä*, dir. by Tahvo Hirvonen (Pettuflmi Oy, 2009).

to a comparative perspective, these diferences could be put to use to reveal the difering mentalities of the two peoples. The dance forms could be read as modes of representation and decoded in terms of their representative relationship to the social realities beyond dance.27

From an ethnographic perspective, however, the research questions revolve more around the presentation and self-presentation in dance of and by the dancers than around representation. Dancing is seen as an embodied performance practice in which people present themselves to themselves and to each other, as they see themselves through their dancing. The realities studied are not external to dance, but are seen to emerge in the dancing itself.28

I take what I term a narrative performance perspective on the written material, as contrasted to an empiricist, or so-called recovery perspective.29 The writers are not innocent reporters of past event, but they consciously create stories of their own life history, and, as a means of social action, take part in current discussions.30

To exemplify my approach, I present the following excerpt of the material in which the respondent describes frst how she learned to dance when she was sixteen, in a wedding party, at the end of the 1920s, and then discusses dancing in her youth more generally. The dances took place in Antrea, a small rural parish in southern Karelia near Vyborg, then the second largest city in Finland.

Refreshments frst, then dancing began, and there was a band from Vyborg. Our neighbour's son asked me to dance, […]. I won't come, I said, I can't dance, this Tuomas he said, now tonight I'll teach you to

27 Susan Leigh Foster, 'Choreographies of Gender', *Signs*: *Journal of Women in Culture and Society*, 24.1 (1998), 1–33, https://doi.org/10.1086/495316

28 E.g. John McCall, *Dancing Histories. Heuristic Ethnography with the Ohafa Igbo* (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2000), https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.15520

29 See Natalie Zemon Davis, *Fiction in the Archives* (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).

30 Richard Bauman, *Story*, *Performance*, *and Event* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511620935; Jerome Bruner, 'Life as Narrative', *Social Research*, 54.1 (1987), 11–32; Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, 'Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life', *Annual Review of Anthropology*, 19.1 (1990), 59–88 (at 62–66), https:// doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.19.100190.000423; Eric E. Peterson and Kristin M. Langellier, 'The Performance Turn in Narrative Studies', *Narrative Inquiry* 16.1 (2006), 173–80, https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.16.1.22pet; Michael Bamberg, 'Stories: Big or Small. Why Do We Care?', *Narrative Inquiry* 16.1 (2006), 139–47, https://doi. org/10.1075/ni.16.1.18bam

dance. And as it happened, he asked me to every piece. At frst, I stepped on his feet and also on other dancing couples' feet and all the time had to apologise to whoever's feet I stepped on. After a few hours of these dancing lessons I then got the rhythm and learned the swing of it. By the end of the evening also boys I did not know, wedding guests, came to ask me, and that is how dancing began in my life. The Tango was the frst dance I learned. My second dance was the Waltz.

I enjoyed lively movement and speedy goings-on. I was a slim and tall lassie, and agile too with a reasonably good sense of rhythm, so I always had great fun. I loved the Schottische and the Polka and the Waltz, dances with speed and action. I had three regular Schottische partners [one was my cousin, and one was a former classmate, and the third was a family friend of my younger uncle's]. [This last one] used to go to dances in the Youth Association's and the Lottas' and the Civil Guard's31 social evenings and in the summer to pavilion dances, when he did not have to go to work. He was a good dancer, not lacking speed. All these three men had a similar style of dancing Schottische so that you only touched your partner with your fngertips and kept a distance of stretched arms during the hops, and when the whirling part began, they stormed around and around. Whenever the sound of the Schottische started, one of these three boys, anyone, the quickest, would run from the other side of the hall to ask me to dance, and we would go around at top speed as there were not so many dancing couples on the foor. 32

The meaning of the dances to the dancers emerges and can therefore be studied in the narrative material. Dances become frmly embedded in their historical, cultural and ethnographic contexts and in the emotional and conceptual meanings given to them by the dancers. Meanwhile, the dance itself is not easily separated from the dancers, or the respondents, nor is it described objectively or according to universal descriptive traits that depart from the narratives. Bodies and movements are described in detail, such as the way the dance was frst learned stepping on other dancers' feet, as in this account, and the way the Schottische was danced by the particular partners and divided into the choreographic aspects of the *hops* and the *whirling part*. By accumulating such detailed

31 The Lotta Svärd and the Civil Guard were voluntary auxiliary paramilitary organisations, the former for women. Both organisations were disbanded and forbidden in 1944, by the Allied Commission.

32 Antrea, previously Eastern Finland; NMF:K37/504. Referring to the archived material, a place name is followed by NMF = National Museum of Finland; K37 = Manuscript collection 37 (1991), Pavilion Dances; 504 = identifying the respondent.

descriptions, the embodied practices become articulated conceptually, in the discursive realm. But this will amount to a culture-specifc conceptualisation of the moving bodies and the embodied practices, to a description of the dances as experienced by the dancers; and not to an objective description.

## Nostalgia as Emotion and as Narrative Device

Nostalgia is commonly defned as an emotion: longing for the past or something other which is unreachable.33 The next quote reveals itself to be nostalgic immediately, from the frst intuition. My question is, how to analyse explicitly an emotion in a text? How to make the written text speak out in an emotional voice?

I think the dancing trips of today's youth are diferent altogether. I suppose they'd go out there wearing whatever, although the make-up is always fashy. A dance band must be renowned and have a glamorous vocalist. Who would these days twirl around on a cosy wooden foor of the little workers' or societies' house, accompanied by the gafer next door? Or on a small, uncovered stage in an alder thicket, circled by gnats. Or walk her bicycle on a wood-path fertilised by the cows. The youth today wouldn't care for or have the time to listen to the cheep of the bird in the night, not that they'd hear it from the noise. And surely, they wouldn't laugh at the summer rain on the saddle of their bicycle coming home from a dancing trip. We, the fortunate elderly, had the chance to experience that in our youth, and I too feel like a lucky girl; despite the wartimes, I experienced many merry trips.34

In order to analyse emotions, I see as necessary a dialogue between the supposed writer and myself as the reader. There is no emotion in a written text as such, in the paper and ink, so to speak, and there is no emotion in research without the personal involvement of the researcher with the people she is studying. With written materials, the dialogue and the involvement must be established by methods of reading. In order to make the analysis of emotion more explicit, I therefore describe my personal and emotional reactions to this piece of text and try to clarify the path I took in interpreting it.

33 E.g. Karin Johannisson, *Nostalgia. En känslans historia* (Stockholm: Bonnier, 2001).

34 Forssa, South-Western Finland; NMF:K37/666.

When I frst read this passage, to tell the truth I felt quite irritated. The text is full of stereotypes of the 'good old times' which, as we all know, never existed in the frst place. I felt ofended as a reader since I realised that she had written with a reader precisely like me in mind, representing 'today's youth' or younger people as compared to her. She is considerably older than I am, maybe some ffty years, and with totally diferent generational experiences of the amusements of our youth. I think it is this condescending attitude toward other people's (my own) experiences that I frst read into the text and that annoyed me.

My next reaction was to name this piece of text a *nostalgia piece*, or more exactly, *the* nostalgia piece, in the material I had read through by that point in time. This naming, as I refect on it afterwards, is equivalent to granting a conscious attitude to the writer. The text is not an outcome of an innocent longing for the remembered past. It was the writer's intention precisely to create a nostalgic piece of writing in response to this inquiry. Here I am entering into a dialogue with the supposed writer, as I see her in her text.

In order to understand this text, I then looked for shared grounds for understanding. Of these, nostalgia is the self-evident one. Nostalgia can be seen as largely defning the research subjects of folkloristics and ethnology in the context of modernisation, in the (for the most part) nostalgic discourse of 'disappearing' traditions of agrarian society that must be preserved in the archives and museums and saved by the researchers. The inquiry itself has set the stage for nostalgia as a mood to recount this 'disappearing tradition'.

Looking at nostalgia as a narrative device, there is of course the juxtaposition of the here and now with the object of nostalgia. What is interesting is the amount of highly patterned images and motifs in this small piece of text. Stereotypes of 'today's youth' are contrasted with an idealised picture of past dance trips. It is only in the last lines of the story that the teller refers to her own experiences as the source of this utopia. There are several specifc markers of the good old times, and the less good times of the present: for instance, busy and noisy modernity, again a stereotyped image; noisy both aurally and visually, in the *fashy* make-up and the *glamorous* vocalist. While the story itself is individually crafted and presented as an autobiographical narrative, the writer relies heavily on culturally shared images and notions as the authoritative sources of her text.

The next aspect I noticed was that besides nostalgia there is considerable irony in the story. The reasons for happiness, and for feeling lucky to experience all the gnats and cow fertiliser, cannot be taken at face value as expressions of pathetic nostalgia. They are left enigmatic, without further explanation of the narrator's intentions. The ironic motives, however, do not contest the goodness of the good old times. The irony points at the understanding of the supposed reader: the writer is challenging the interpretive imagination of the reader she has had in mind. She has engaged in a dialogue with her imagined reader, and, in my interpretation, I am engaging in continuing this dialogue, now with the imagined writer or author of the text.

As a possible interpretive frame, I suggest what I have termed a narrative of guts, Finnish *sisu*. The Finnish notion of *sisu* (literally, 'the inner', 'the innermost') conveys endurance and courage, inner moral strength, but also hard work to reach a goal, and it is part of Finnish self-understanding, a trait attributed to Finns in particular as *the Finnish Sisu*. *Sisu* has been explicated as being an *ethos of toughness*, verbalised as: 'Life is hard; we have to manage it; we have managed it; we are proud of that'.35

My suggestion is that in her story the narrator gives content to and animates, or embodies, the notion of Finnish *sisu*. Within this interpretive frame, I can fnd a common ground for understanding between my 'lifeworld' and that of the narrator's, and comprehend the happiness she is claiming. Even if I myself might not identify with the ethos of *sisu* in the way it is expressed in this text, the ethos provides an interpretive frame within which the text becomes intelligible to me; or, to put it more simply, as a native of Finnish culture I can understand what the text is about if it is about *sisu*.

The motives and contents of such a small story reveal themselves to be highly culturally specifc. My initial discomfort with this text arose, in the frst place, from the time diference between the narrated world and my own life-world, estranging me from the narrated past and from its idealisation as well. From that distance, the text could be

35 Matti Kortteinen, *Kunnian kenttä. Suomalainen palkkatyö kulttuurisena muotona* (Helsinki: Hanki ja jää, 1992), p. 63.

approached and made familiar by means of some more general cultural models: the interpretive frames of nostalgia and that of Finnish *sisu*. The former represents, in the frst place, a refective awareness as the researcher of the discourses in which the research is embedded. The latter is admissible as contextualisation in Finnish culture at large. In this interpretation of mine, the popular imagination that was communicated by the narrative was not the goodness of 'the good old times and cosy places in the countryside' as such, but that there is something *Finnish* that is worth remembering and that continues in spite of the changing times.

The narrative in this reading constructs Finnish self-understanding or, one could also say, national identity. Since this is precisely the aim of such traditional collections, and since the writer could be seen to be responding to such a call in the inquiry, one might ask whether there are no other discourses or attitudes discernible in the material than the ordered national-romantic nostalgic gaze at the remembered past.

Fig. 14.3 Illustration of the 'Open air dancing' entry on the Living Traditions wiki, hosted by the National Museum of Finland at the Pyhäsalmi dance pavilion, Northern Ostrobothnia region, Finland. Open air dancing is included in the list of Finnish Intangible Cultural Heritage. Photo by Sari Hovila (2011), CC BY 4.0, https://wiki.aineetonkulttuuriperinto.fi/ wiki/Tiedosto:Pyh%C3%A4salmi.jpg

## Cultural Heritage: An Alternative Perspective to Nostalgia

Finnish folklorist Jyrki Pöysä suggests that cultural heritage ought to be considered as a new perspective on the research subject of folkloristics and ethnology, difering from nostalgia, which dominated much earlier research.36 I explore his suggestion here by presenting one more excerpt from my research material and by comparing and contrasting the two perspectives.

The narrator of this second excerpt frst talks about the dances right after the Second World War, and then of how she learned to dance, as a child, before the war. In the course of her narrative, she describes a local revival of the dance pavilion culture after the war, and we can see that this revival or reconstruction was based on the memories that the young people had of their childhood and the local dance culture that existed before the war.

I'm of the war-time youth; turned seventeen when the racket of war was over. The Fritz burned down my home, about three km from downtown Tornio, and half of the houses in Yliraumo, too.37 The house of the Youth Society was left standing, fortunately. After all the commotion was over, we had a cleaning bee at the society house, there was no shortage of labour, and the bee dances have really stayed with me.38

We had lived through a time of anxiety, but the young had the will to live and hopes for the future, so we started to organise social evenings with all kinds of amusement: plays, old dances, courses on folk dance, and in the end, we had an hour-and-a-half of dancing. This Youth Society really was an important site for recreation in the area; in almost every event there was a full crowd of people, and hardly any disorder at all. I only remember that the Raumo boys were jealous of the Karelia boys, of whom there were many in the neighbourhoods, and many marriages,

36 Jyrki Pöysä, 'The Performative Nostalgia of Work', paper presented in the IV Spring School of Finnish Folklore Society, Helsinki, 15 May 2009.

37 During the Lapland war (1944–1945), the civil population, of ca. 170,000, was evacuated to more southern parts of Finland and partly to Sweden. The German troops, forced to withdraw by the Finnish, used scorched-earth tactics.

38 'Cleaning bee' refers to a gathering of people who volunteer for communal work — here, to clean the society house. Similarly, 'bee dances' refer to the dances held by this collective gathering.

too, were settled between these immigrants and the locals.39 All my siblings were involved in the society, and we all danced.