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The Era of Cultural Television - Another History of Finnish Television in the 1970s and 1980s
The Era of Cultural Television offers a new interpretation of the Finnish television history of the 1970s and 1980s, which has previously been interpreted as a transitional period from the politicized 1970s to the liberalization of the late 1980s. The book suggests that Finnish television of this era was characterized by an ethos in which television was seen as a cultural resource for all, playing an important role in social planning and cultural citizenship.
While Finnish television has been studied mainly as a medium for entertainment and information, The Era of Cultural Television offers a new framework by approaching television from the perspective of cultural policy. At the same time, the book brings to the forefront programme types that, despite their importance, have been overlooked in previous research: television drama, international films and series, service programmes as well as educational programmes for children. The book challenges the convention of emphasizing the differences between public service and commercial television and shows that the commercial television company Mainos-TV (MTV) shared largely the same ethos as the public service Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yleisradio). The book highlights forgotten aspects of MTV’s history by describing how the company invested in art and history documentaries and developed new forms of addressing the challenges of modern life in its service programmes.
From the perspective of the current abundance of channels and streaming services, television of the 1970s and 1980s may seem scarce and limited. The Era of Cultural Television shows that scarcity is a retrospective interpretation that does not correspond to contemporary understanding of television. Television addressed an audience that was expected to be highly curious and inquisitive. Television viewers were catered for with a diverse selection of arts programmes, documentaries and educational programmes as well as entertainment. Television brought world cinema, contemporary drama, literature discussions and music education into homes. Current social issues were discussed in educational programmes as well as in drama and situation comedy. Through international programme cooperation, imported programmes and films, television broadened the world view of Finns and increased understanding of foreign languages, cultures and geography. Television programmes also dealt with controversial issues of history and brought out perspectives on the recent past that were not addressed in the history curriculum.
The Era of Cultural Television is based on extensive archival research. The work analyses both programmes, their press reception, and documents from television administration and production. The book is intended not only for readers interested in the history of television, but also for readers more broadly interested in Finnish culture and contemporary history. The book helps to understand how television has been a part of social planning, cultural policy and democratic development, and how television’s cultural programming supported the transition from agrarian Finland to postmodern urban Finland. The Era of Cultural Television is not a nostalgic look at the past. Rather, it invites us to think about what television means today, when the cultural programming of television has spread across different platforms, addressing small taste groups rather than a diverse national public.
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The First-ever. Porthan statue by Carl Eneas Sjöstrand<
The nineteenth century has been called an age of monuments. In some places even one piece made a difference. This book is a study of the intellectual background and physical making of Finland’s first public sculpture, the statue of Professor Henrik Gabriel Porthan by Carl Eneas Sjöstrand. The idealised but sombre Porthan was born under the influence of German neoclassicism. Development on the project was slow but sure. The Swedish artist had to be supported over three years while he was putting together his first monumental piece in Munich and Rome, after which came another three years wait before the cast arrived to Finland. The bronze sculpture, commissioned by the Finnish Literary Society and raised by public subscriptions from people of all classes, was unveiled in the city of Turku in September 1864. Finns took some pride in the fact that, unlike other nations that had raised monuments to kings and generals, here the first place was given to a scholar. In this study Sjöstrand’s pioneering bronze is placed in a wider context and compared with works by his precursors and contemporaries in the international sculptor colony of Rome.
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Church, clergy, and society in Finland, 1600–1800
It is generally recognized that in early modern society, the position of the church and clergy was very central. As many historians have stated over the decades, the church and state were closely connected and their power structures and ideologies supported each other. However, when studying the social and public role of the church and clergy, it soon becomes quite clear how pervasive this phenomenon was. The church not only created but also maintained and acted as a part of international, national, and local communities, structures, and cultures that connected people regardless of their social status and gender. The church was a spiritual, administrative, and social institution and experience environment, whose tasks, scope, and meanings changed and intertwined with the development, needs, and requirements of society. In this book, we investigate from different perspectives the motives and different means by which the church and clergy came to play a significant part in early modern society.
In this volume, the church is considered both as an administrative institution and as a social space and cultural structure. Hence, we do not focus on the history of theology or doctrinal questions. Instead, we consider the social and public roles and meanings of the church. The church as such is understood in this book as transnational, a strong national and local institution, and also a space and structure. The church had its own institutionalized place in society and its activities and rights were defined by law (Church law 1696, the Law of the Swedish kingdom 1734) and by the decrees given by the Royal Majesty. The church had its own archbishop-led administrative organization under the Royal Majesty and it worked in close cooperation with the Crown administration and county governors. In this volume, we understand the clergy as church servants, a trained and appointed professional group, a separate estate (social class), and also as a wide social network constructed by their families.
The approach of this book is social science history. In other words, the book examines the church and the clergy as an integral part of society and the individual communities who lived in the current Finnish territory during the early modern era. The topic is examined on the basis of three conceptual themes reflecting important new areas of research in the study of the social significance of the church and clergy: (1) the clergy and family as part of the community, (2) the church as a jointly built space, and (3) the church as an arena for interaction, knowledge, and politics. We approach this multidimensionality using different research questions, sources, methods, and theoretical approaches. The volume focuses on the 17th to 19th centuries, but many of the church and clergy-related phenomena are much older, and some of them extend to the present, so the articles also move beyond this time frame.
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Experiences of Mental Hospitals. Spaces Engraved in Memories
Finnish psychiatric practice has been heavily based on institutionalization, and mental hospitals have played important cultural and historical roles in Finland. Our multidisciplinary research focuses on the bodily, spatial, affective, and multisensory aspects of the memories of patients, relatives, staff, and their children. The memories were collected and archived in the Finnish Literature Society in 2014–2015. These 92 written pieces cover the period from the 1930s to the 2010s. They reflect significant changes in Finnish psychiatry and provide crucial insights into the various meanings of mental hospitals in people’s lives, and the social and cultural forces that shape attitudes to and ideas about mental health problems, psychiatric care, and service users today.
Drawing on our backgrounds in history, artistic research, and visual, cultural and literary studies, we provide new ways of reading and interpreting the memories and experiences in psychiatry. The study discusses memory, mental hospitals as lived spaces, the history of Finnish psychiatry and the relation between the memories of the different groups of writers. The chapters approach memories from the perspectives of affects and atmospheres, violence and abuse, everyday life at the hospital in the 1930s, feelings of fear and safety in the memories of the children of the staff, and the historically and culturally contingent tensions between hospitals and homes.
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