Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 Finnish Women Making Religion Between Ancestors and Angels Edited by Terhi Utriainen and Päivi Salmesvuori Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 finnish women making religion Copyright © Terhi Utriainen and Päivi Salmesvuori, 2014 All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978- 1- 137- 38868- 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Finnish women making religion : between ancestors and angels / edited by Terhi Utriainen and Päivi Salmesvuori. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 1- 137- 38868- 1 (alk. paper) 1. Women and religion— Finland. 2. Lutheran women— Finland. 3. Women in Christianity— Finland. I. Utriainen, Terhi, editor of compilation. BL458.F56 2014 274.89082— dc23 2014002965 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: July 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 Contents Preface vii Introduction: Critical and Creative Turns 1 Terhi Utriainen, Päivi Salmesvuori, and Helena Kupari Part I 1 “Feeding the Dead”: Women “Doing” Religion and Kinship in Traditional Russian Orthodox Karelia 21 Marja- Liisa Keinänen 2 Convincing One’s Self and Other People: The Case of Trance Preacher Helena Konttinen 43 Päivi Salmesvuori 3 Alexandra Gripenberg’s Feminist Christianity 61 Tiina Kinnunen Part II 4 “Our Life Work”: Professional Women and Christian Values in Early Twentieth- Century Finland 83 Heini Hakosalo 5 “A Touch of the Spiritual World”: An Anthroposophical Core in the Life and Work of Kersti Bergroth (1886– 1975) 103 Tiina Mahlamäki 6 Intersections of Gender, Religion, and Ethnicity in Christian Missions 123 Seija Jalagin Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 vi CONTENTS Part III 7 “I Was Both Lutheran and Orthodox”: Evacuee Karelian Orthodox Women, Bidenominational Families, and the Making of Religion 143 Helena Kupari 8 Life- Based Theology of Finnish Women Theologians 161 Anni Tsokkinen 9 Servants and Agents: Gender Roles in Neocharismatic Christianity 177 Tuija Hovi Part IV 10 Finnish Women Sacralizing Nature 197 Heikki Pesonen and Terhi Utriainen 11 Finnish Women’s Turn toward India: Negotiations between Lutheran Christianity and Indian Spirituality 217 Johanna Ahonen 12 Angels, Agency, and Emotions: Global Religion for Women in Finland? 237 Terhi Utriainen Bibliography 255 List of Contributors 281 Index 285 Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 Introduction Critical and Creative Turns Terhi Utriainen, Päivi Salmesvuori, and Helena Kupari esearch on religion and gender (and in practice, often, religion and Rwomen) has, by now, a history that is several decades long. The central approaches within this field of inquiry are feminist theology, secularist- critical feminist study, and analytic descriptions of gendered religious beliefs and practices in different times and places. Over the years, this research field has opened up various new thematic and methodological routes and taken several critical and creative turns.1 One important development, crucial to the emergence of gender- sensitive historical and ethnographic research on religion, has been to dis- tance oneself from the master narrative that concentrates on the male and often elite model of doing religion;2 within that model, research has mostly focused on the official leadership of churches and dogmatic systems. The turn toward studying “lived religion” means that religion is increasingly approached without theological or other normative lenses in all its real- life complexity. This means that religion is explored wherever people take it, make it, and practice it. The lived religion approach closely parallels the turn toward understand- ing religion as a variety of situated discourses and practices—that is, as the many ways of making religion. Practice- centered perspectives avoid auto- matically privileging particular materials or cases, such as “sacred texts” or official rituals; instead they often make use of materials and cases that the perspectives favoring elite religion have deemed not religious enough— or wrongly religious, heretical. Moreover, practice-base d approaches often also emphasize human bodies, social relationality, and myriad aspects of material life as relevant and necessary foci for the study of religion. Quite often religion is found in “ordinary” and quotidian materials and places, Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 2 TERHI UTRIAINEN, PÄIVI SALMESVUORI, AND HELENA KUPARI which can be related to institutionalized practices and locations in many complex ways.3 As is well known today, the majority of grassroots religiosity all over the world is constituted by women’s undertakings.4 Our point of departure is that women’s religiosity can provide invaluable material and insights for problematizing religious power, practice, identity, and agency in general. For instance, when we read Saba Mahmood’s now-famous Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject,5 we learn not only about the Egyptian Muslim women’s piety movement in a particular historical situ- ation; we also learn about one possible way human agency is constructed, negotiated, and lived in a world where religious and secular powers and realities often coincide and clash. “Religion” and “the secular” have often been seen as separate spheres of life, both in the earlier history of religion and in sociological secularization theories. However, to the authors in this collection, as well as to many other scholars in the study of religion and in related fields of research today, “reli- gion” and “the secular” are closely and often in complex ways tied to one another. Feminist theory has also recently awoken to the postsecular per- spective in order to realize that religious symbols, discourses, and disciplin- ary practices are far from absent in people’s lives and society today.6 All the aforementioned emphases and turns can be encountered inform- ing and inspiring the chapters of our book. The writers very much operate within lived religion and practice approaches. They also pay close atten- tion to concrete social settings, changing subjectivities and embodiments, as well as many quotidian sides of religious life. What we want to add to the study of religion and gender today is a historically sensitive picture of religion- making in one society from the angle of well- selected case stud- ies that analytically describe how women do things with or in relation to religion and how their religion- making relates to the many aspects of life. Our case studies range from women’s folk religion to women’s theology. Prior to this book, Finnish women’s religion- making in the different layers and corners of life and society had not been brought together in this way. Political and Religious History of Finland: An Overview The cases presented in the chapters of this book come from Finland, one of the most northern and eastern of the European countries. The 12 chap- ters provide windows on the changing religious landscape in Finland over approximately one hundred years to the present day. Historically, Finland is predominantly a Lutheran society; even today, statistics count 76 percent Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 Copyrighted Material - 9781137388681 CRITI CAL AND CREATIVE TURNS 3 of the population, which altogether amounts to 5.4 million people, as members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.7 Christianity, in the form of Roman Catholicism, came to Finland dur- ing the High Middle Ages. Traditionally, the eleventh century has been seen as the arrival of institutional Christianity in Finland, although archeologi- cal findings suggest that some Western and Eastern Christian influences had reached Finland already well before the end of the first millennium. At this time, Finland as a unified, centrally governed country did not yet exist. Instead, the Christianization of the peoples populating the area of present- day Finland went hand in hand with the annexation of the lands they inhabited to the kingdom of Sweden.8 In the 1520s, King Gustav Vasa carried out the Protestant Reforma- tion in Sweden. His reasons were not primarily religious; in fact, Gustav Vasa’s actions are an apt example of how European rulers used the religious tumults of the era to their own secular purposes. The king wanted to bal- ance the economy of his poor country by confiscating the lands and prop- erty of the Catholic Church, and to facilitate this move he embraced the newly emerged protestant denomination of Lutheranism, created by the German monk Martin Luther (1483– 1546). Unlike in Germany or in Eng- land, in Sweden (and in Finland, as part of Sweden) the break caused by the Reformation was not violent but gradual. The Catholic bishops