'Are We Mongols?' (cont.)

....

Finland is a country historically sandwiched between two empires (the former Swedish and the Russian Empires) and had involuntarily belonged to both. Due to this geography, Finland’s identity as a country, a nation, and even as a linguistic-racial group was inevitably in flux.

At a time when social scientists believed that language and race were inextricably related, Finland’s ‘odd’ language relegated it to a mysterious origin prone to fanciful interpretations and theories.

Unlike her Scandinavian neighbors Norway and Sweden, or her Slavic neighbor Russia, Finland did not speak an Indo-European language (the closest related well-known languages are Estonian, Hungarian, and possibly Sámi). Since pockets of Finno-Ugric speakers of other languages exist in Russia, theories arose about the ‘nomadic’ nature of Finns and even their possible origins in places Mongolia. Moreover, since the Sámi (or inhabitants of Lapland) were essentially the only indigenous people in Europe, and the Sámi language appears related to Finnish (this is debated in some quarters), it was not difficult to conclude that the Finns were some kind of ‘other’: Asians, natives, nomads, or other far-from-Europe type of people.

While Finland belonged to the Swedish Empire (until 1809) such musings were relegated to the background because her identity was subsumed into that of greater Sweden. However, with the Russian incorporation of Finland as an autonomous Grand Duchy in 1809, suddenly the Finnish people began to be considered in the great European capitals part of the ‘despotic, Asian hoards’, descendents of the Sámi, a people either apart from or on the far fringes of Europe. Implications of inferiority suffused this social construct. In the 18 th century, too, Swedish biologists like Carolus Linnaeus proposed the classification of racial groups through skull typology, thus questions of whether Finns and Sámi were Caucasoid or Mongoloid only fostered such eugenic thinking.

Such myths and associations have survived subliminally even today. For instance, US immigrations reclassified Finns as Europeans in 1904. One of the reasons independent Finland continues stresses its ‘modernism’ in things like electronics (Nokia) and architecture, according Mattson, is a means of bolstering the Europeanness and showcasing the ‘civilized nature’ of the Finns. Alternatively, the remaining Sámi are played up as a tourist attraction, exotic and gaudily dressed in trumped up native costumes –a case of the Finns defining the Sámi as ‘other’ just as they previously had been so defined.

Mattson, active in the Finnish studies program, has taken Finnish at Berkeley for three years and has spent time in Helsinki and northern Finland researching his dissertation which he expects to complete this Spring.

— Eric Kotila