undefined

Taking the language of the past seriously : the linguistic turns in Finnish and Swedish history dissertations, 1970-2010

Year of publication

2020

Authors

Partti, Kenneth

Abstract

The linguistic turn in historical research has shifted the interest of an increasing number of historians into problematizing the nature of past language. In this study the linguistic turn has been divided into five different approaches— conceptual history, linguistic contextualism, discursivity, linguistically constructed gender, and narrativity. This categorization is based on the senior theorists R. Koselleck, Q. Skinner, M. Foucault, J. Scott, and H. White, and the first wave of linguistic turns their works impacted within historical studies. Thus, these linguistic turns have foreign background and they have been gradually imported into Finland and Sweden. It is an interplay between local historical traditions and foreign scholarly adaptions. By analyzing doctoral dissertations of history defended in Sweden and Finland in 1970–2010, and the reviews of them, similarities but also differences are seen between ways to conduct historical research in these countries. Less than 10 percent of the dissertations in both countries included references to linguistic turns: in the Finnish case circa 9% and in the Swedish case 6%. Linguistic turns themselves have become diversified, both in international and national debates. Their impact on Finnish and Swedish historiography has been notable, but not comprehensive. The role and essence of language has been acknowledged more widely and deeply during the last few decades, but the applications of linguistically oriented approaches remain within a limited number of scholars. The pace of adopting and elaborating linguistic turns tells also about the historiography of these countries more widely. In Finland, the discipline of general history (yleinen historia) has a long tradition of being internationally oriented, and the applications of linguistically oriented methods validates this fact. In turn, the discipline of the history of ideas and science (idé- och lärdomshistoria) in Sweden has created links between their methodological starting points and linguistic contextualism or conceptual history. Historians from both countries have contributed to linguistically oriented methods with their local and national applications, but the pace and coverage has been quicker and more extensive in Finland. This reflects openness to international debates in a smaller nation state.
Show more

Organizations and authors

Publication type

Publication format

Monograph

Audience

Scientific

MINEDU's publication type classification code

G4 Doctoral dissertation (monograph)

Publication channel information

Journal

JYU dissertations

Publisher

Jyväskylän yliopisto

Open access

Open access in the publisher’s service

Yes

Open access of publication channel

Fully open publication channel

Self-archived

No

Other information

Fields of science

History and archaeology

Keywords

[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object],[object Object]

Publication country

Finland

Internationality of the publisher

Domestic

Language

English

International co-publication

No

Co-publication with a company

No

The publication is included in the Ministry of Education and Culture’s Publication data collection

Yes