Vainikka, J. (2015) Identities and regions: Exploring spatial narratives, legacies and practices with civic organizations in England and Finland. Nordia Geographical Publications 44(3): 1-172.

Joni Vainikka

We all have our stories to tell. Where we have born, where we have lived and the places we have visited. The spatial history of our lives reveals much about the ways we identify with space and how we narrate our belonging. The way we identify with space is always unique, reflexive and emotional. Space around us can be thought of as scaled, in which the landscapes and communities hold differently scaled spatial meanings. Regions are part of such an identity matrix, but identification with regions is a complicated issue in the late modern world, in which space does not provide a clear and meaningful collective discourse. Regions, however, provide one source of identification. Geography has a rich tradition of regional studies, and it remains important for geographers to understand what regions mean for people today, how individuals use regions in their reflexive identity narratives, how they entitle themselves to regional discourses, how they might feel regions as an obligation or as an inseparable part of the Self-Other dialectic. This dissertation is in short about how reflexive individuals share and narrate their identities and how they understand the spatially and historically defined social. The aim of this dissertation is to understand space as open in relation to different positionalities, life-paths and differently scaled worldviews. People construct their identities throughout their lives. Aside from highlighting the processes that construct identities and the part time plays for individual identities, the research also argues for understanding the role of time in forging the conceptions of regions. The research articles included here explicate the processes of identification with space, the role of identity discourses and belonging for both citizens in civic organizations and regional actors in regional institution, the importance of understanding how regional legacies condition various reflexive identity narratives and how regions form a part of the scalar spatial identities. In addition, the synopsis explains how regions have evolved in the case countries, Finland and England, and questions the relevance of regional imaginaries married to nation-building imaginaries. The four research articles and this synopsis draw from focus-group interviews with four different civic organizations in four regions in Finland and two regions in England. The 15 focus groups in Southwest Finland, Päijät-Häme, North Karelia and North Ostrobothnia were comprised of members of Local Heritage Associations, Youth Societies, Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth/Nature Conservation Association, and the eight focus groups in Devon and Cornwall involved groups of Local Heritage or Old Cornwall Society, Local Association or Amateur Operatic Society, Amnesty International and Transition. In the research, these are categorized as more locally-orientated or universally-orientated social movements or civic organizations. In addition to these focus groups, one of the articles uses one-to-one semi-structured interviews with regional actors in different regional institutions operating in Päijät-Häme. The empirical research was conducted between September 2008 and June 2010. Some of the articles and the synopsis analyse the historical legacies of the countries’ regional systems through historical source materials. The dissertation makes a contribution to geographical knowledge by addressing three main themes. First, I argue that people have a need to identify with space and that such identification draws from their life-paths and their ability to reflect on past experiences. Second, identification with space can take place in multiple scales and individuals construct their identities by piecing together and negotiating different spatial ideas and representations. Third, while regions might form a solid source of identification for some identity narratives, the ways people relate to regions, their histories, symbols, institutions and discourses, depends on the choices the individual makes and how she or he negotiates entitlement and obligation to discursive space among social connections. In addition, the synopsis opens up the regional histories of Finland and England. Along with regions becoming institutionalized, they can be thought of having been synchronized as a part of administrative systems. Yet the legacies different regions have left behind influence discourses of regional identities, identification with regions and how national communities are seen through regional positions. Finally, the dissertation argues that comparing different experiences of regions, regardless of state administrations and regional systems, and that the way individuals tell emotionally driven stories for themselves and to others is, perhaps, the most fruitful way to understand identities and their transformation in everyday life.

Nordia Geographical Publications Volume 44:3 Identities and regions Exploring spatial narratives, legacies and practices with civic organizations in England and Finland Joni Vainikka ACADEMIC DISSERTATION to be presented with the permission of the Doctoral Training Committee for Human Sciences of the University of Oulu Graduate School (UniOGS), for public discussion in the lecture hall GO101, on the 17th of June, 2015, at 12 noon. Nordia Geographical Publications Volume 44:3 Identities and regions Exploring spatial narratives, legacies and practices with civic organizations in England and Finland Joni Vainikka Nordia Geographical Publications Publications of The Geographical Society of Northern Finland and The Department of Geography, University of Oulu Address: Department of Geography P.O. Box 3000 FIN-90014 University of Oulu FINLAND ossi.kotavaara@oulu.fi Editor: Teijo Klemettilä Nordia Geographical Publications ISBN 978-952-62-0846-6 ISSN 1238-2086 Juvenes Print Oulu/Uleåborg 2015 Identities and regions Exploring spatial narratives, legacies and practices with civic organizations in England and Finland Contents Abstract vii List of original contributions x Illustrations xi More than a foreword xii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 The art of identifying with space 1 1.2 Regions – social organizations of space 3 1.3 Seeing what they see 11 1.4 Research questions and the structure of the synopsis 14 1.5 Working with the articles 17 2 Key concepts 21 2.1 Identity and identification with space 21 2.2 Relational and territorial spaces and their alternatives 30 2.3 On legacies and accumulation: Methodological concerns of time 37 3 Tracing regional legacies 47 3.1 Comparing Finland and South West England 47 3.2 On how the ideas of the ‘Finnish province’ were synchronized 48 3.2.1 Territorializing tribes 49 3.2.2 From terras and abitaniums to union of Kingdoms 53 3.2.3 House of Vasa and the use of provinces 56 3.2.4 Provincial landmarks in religion, education and military 61 3.2.5 Geopolitical realities, natural boundaries and the romanticized provinces 65 3.2.6 Civil society regionalism, regional politics and the competitive region 72 3.3 Regional traces in England and county ideas in the South West 74 V 4 Methodological strategies and research materials 83 4.1 Capturing perceptions on things that change 83 4.2 Tapping into spatial identity narratives with focus-group interviews 88 4.2.1 A brief description 88 4.2.2 Methodological traditions 89 4.3 Contrasting scales of action and differing regions 93 4.3.1 The selection of the groups 94 4.3.2 The selection of the case study regions 96 4.4 Focus groups in practice 101 4.4.1 Recruiting participants 101 4.4.2 Creating a conversational space 104 4.4.3 Socio-demographic variables 107 4.4.4 Keeping the discussion going, questions and stimulus 108 4.4.5 Analysing conversations 110 4.4.6 Times of the focus groups 111 4.5 Interviews with regional actors 113 5 Review of the study results 117 5.1 Reflexivity and assembled structures 117 5.2 Narrating spatial identities and the practices of entitling/obligating 119 5.3 Promoted identities, identification and porous/splintered territories 128 5.4 Seeing regions through different worldviews and legacies 131 5.5 Emotional mediums of scalar identification 135 6 Conclusions and discussion 139 6.1 Metaphorically speaking, or the premises of the research 139 6.2 Lessons from a parallel analysis 142 6.3 Revisiting the focus group perceptions and conceptualizations 144 6.4 Why ‘we’ (still) need region-building? 147 6.5 Transforming regions: Openings and future avenues 149 References 151 Appendices Original papers VI Abstract Identities and regions: Exploring spatial narratives, legacies and practices with civic organizations in England and Finland Vainikka, Joni, Department of Geography, University of Oulu, 2015 Keywords: region, identity, relational space, territorial space, time, assemblage, focus groups, civic organizations, social movements, Cornwall, Devon, North Karelia, North Ostrobothnia, Päijät-Häme, Southwest Finland, reflexivity, post- structuralism, history of geography, colour We all have our stories to tell. Where we have born, where we have lived and the places we have visited. The spatial history of our lives reveals much about the ways we identify with space and how we narrate our belonging. The way we identify with space is always unique, reflexive and emotional. Space around us can be thought of as scaled, in which the landscapes and communities hold differently scaled spatial meanings. Regions are part of such an identity matrix, but identification with regions is a complicated issue in the late modern world, in which space does not provide a clear and meaningful collective discourse. Regions, however, provide one source of identification. Geography has a rich tradition of regional studies, and it remains important for geographers to understand what regions mean for people today, how individuals use regions in their reflexive identity narratives, how they entitle themselves to regional discourses, how they might feel regions as an obligation or as an inseparable part of the Self-Other dialectic. This dissertation is in short about how reflexive individuals share and narrate their identities and how they understand the spatially and historically defined social. The aim of this dissertation is to understand space as open in relation to different positionalities, life-paths and differently scaled worldviews. People construct their identities throughout their lives. Aside from highlighting the processes that construct identities and the part time plays for individual identities, the research also argues for understanding the role of time in forging the conceptions of regions. The research articles included here explicate the processes of identification with space, the role of identity discourses and belonging for both citizens in civic organizations and regional actors in regional institution, the importance of understanding how regional legacies condition various reflexive identity narratives and how regions form a part of the scalar spatial identities. In addition, the synopsis explains how regions have evolved in the case countries, Finland and England, and questions the relevance of regional imaginaries married to nation-building imaginaries. The four research articles and this synopsis draw from focus-group interviews with four different civic organizations in four regions in Finland and two regions in England. The 15 focus groups in Southwest Finland, Päijät-Häme, North Karelia and North Ostrobothnia were comprised of members of Local Heritage Associations, Youth Societies, Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth/Nature Conservation Association, and the eight focus groups in Devon and Cornwall involved groups of Local Heritage or Old Cornwall Society, VII Local Association or Amateur Operatic Society, Amnesty International and Transition. In the research, these are categorized as more locally-orientated or universally-orientated social movements or civic organizations. In addition to these focus groups, one of the articles uses one-to-one semi-structured interviews with regional actors in different regional institutions operating in Päijät-Häme. The empirical research was conducted between September 2008 and June 2010. Some of the articles and the synopsis analyse the historical legacies of the countries’ regional systems through historical source materials. The dissertation makes a contribution to geographical knowledge by addressing three main themes. First, I argue that people have a need to identify with space and that such identification draws from their life-paths and their ability to reflect on past experiences. Second, identification with space can take place in multiple scales and individuals construct their identities by piecing together and negotiating different spatial ideas and representations. Third, while regions might form a solid source of identification for some identity narratives, the ways people relate to regions, their histories, symbols, institutions and discourses, depends on the choices the individual makes and how she or he negotiates entitlement and obligation to discursive space among social connections. In addition, the synopsis opens up the regional histories of Finland and England. Along with regions becoming institutionalized, they can be thought of having been synchronized as a part of administrative systems. Yet the legacies different regions have left behind influence discourses of regional identities, identification with regions and how national communities are seen through regional positions. Finally, the dissertation argues that comparing different experiences of regions, regardless of state administrations and regional systems, and that the way individuals tell emotionally driven stories for themselves and to others is, perhaps, the most fruitful way to understand identities and their transformation in everyday life. VIII Supervisors Professor Anssi Paasi Department of Geography University of Oulu, Finland Professor Jarkko Saarinen Department of Geography University of Oulu, Finland Pre-examiners Professor John Tomaney Bartlett School of Planning University College London, United Kingdom Professor Michael Jones Department of Geography Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway Official opponent Professor David C. Harvey College of Life and Environmental Sciences University of Exeter, United Kingdom IX List of original contributions In addition to the synopsis, the dissertation consists of four independent research articles published in scientific journals. Article I Vainikka, J. (2012). Narrative claims on regions: Prospecting for spatial identities among social movements in Finland. Social & Cultural Geography 13: 6, 587–605.1 Article II Vainikka, J. (2013). The role of identity for regional actors and citizens in a splintered region: The case of Päijät-Häme, Finland. Fennia 191: 1, 25–39.2 Article III Vainikka, J.T. (2014a). Reflexive identity narratives and regional legacies. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie (Early view article), 1–15.3 Article IV Vainikka, J.T. (2014b). ‘A citizen of all the different bits’: Emotional scaling of identity. GeoJournal (Online first article), 1–18.4 1 Reprinted with permission from Taylor & Francis. Original published in Social & Cultural Geography © 01 Aug 2012. <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14649365.2012.710912#>. 2 Reprinted with permission from the Geographical Society of Finland. Original published in Fennia (open access) 02 Jun 2013. <http://ojs.tsv.fi/index.php/fennia/article/view/7348/6223>. 3 Reprinted with permission from John Wiley & Sons. Original published in Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie © 10 Nov 2014. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/tesg.12118/>. 4 Reprinted with permission from Springer. Original published in GeoJournal © 05 Sep 2014. <http://link. springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-014-9596-0>. X Illustrations Figures Figure 1. Kanto by Olavi Lanu, 1989. (Photo by the author, 7/2014). Figure 2a. Koli, North Karelia. (Photo by the author, 7/2010). Figure 2b. St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. (Photo by the author, 6/2010). Figure 3. The eastern side of Alexander II memorial depicting Lux (science & art) at the Senate Square in Helsinki. (Photo by the author, 10/2014). Figure 4. On research location before a focus group in Falmouth, Cornwall. (Photo by the author, 5/2010). Figure 5. Locations of the selected regions and the settings of the focus-group interviews. Figure 6. ‘Le rocher ne roule pas’. A gravity defying natural stone in Ruokolahti, Finland, along Highway 6 en route from Lappeenranta to Joensuu. (Photo by the author, 10/2014). Figure 7. Metaphors of time and space in the landscape of Hartland, Devon. (Photo by the author, 05/2010). Tables Table 1. Basic facts relating to the size, population, employment, economics and education of the selected regions and states. Table 2. Locations, compositions, settings, dates and durations of the focus groups. Appendixes Appendix 1. Interview questions in Finland. Appendix 2. Interview questions in England. Appendix 3. Interview questions with regional actors in Päijät-Häme. Appendix 4. The birth places of the focus group participants in Finland and the boundaries of provinces. Appendix 5. The birth places of the focus group participants in England and the boundaries of ceremonial counties. Appendix 6. Places that are mentioned in the text in and around Finland. Appendix 7. Places that are mentioned in the text in England. XI More than a foreword I have a habit of rushing into adventures without prior knowledge. I applied to the University of Turku without any preconception what student life could be like on the other side of the country. Being a flâneur on the banks of the river Aura for one summer day was enough to forget the obvious choice of applying to Helsinki. I moved to Sheffield, England, for a spring period although my experiences of British culture were limited to a one-day excursion in Gibraltar. Still, my stay in Yorkshire had an immense influence on a distant objective of mastering a doctor degree someday. My first hands-on involvement in regional development was through a regional forecasting project in Lahti – a city between Turku and my hometown Lappeenranta – that I had visited only once in 1992. Working at the Employment and Economic Development Centre in Häme offered invaluable insight and perspective on region-building issues. The preparation for this dissertation started in the middle of a forecasting seminar in the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation in Helsinki. Calling back Professor Anssi Paasi was my first transition in qualifying as a researcher. I had again sought an opportunity in a city of which I had little knowledge. There are a few lessons to be learned from this short reflection. I have always wondered the differences between people who have lived their entire lives in one place and the ones that ‘spin the top’ frequently and try to transplant their belonging to a new environment. For me, it has always seemed that regionalism is important for both kinds of people. Those who have to recalibrate their identity narratives use their previous locales or regions as shorthands when they are explaining their past. Those who live their entire lives in a bounded area perform regionalism itself but might not understand the everyday differences the same way. Projecting ourselves to an imagined community and profiling others as members of such a community is a social negotiation that does not generate ‘stagnant edifice’, rather narratives of belonging that are reflected to social discourses that everyone finds different. The other lesson is more methodological and relates to research careers in social sciences. How much prior knowledge should a researcher have to be able to approach research problems with fresh eyes? I have always been open to new cities, meeting new people and open to understanding their stories. I do not think that there is one truth about regions, or such truth has as many versions as there are interpreters and that such truth changes ceaselessly. I have to admit that going into the field, I did not know the full story behind the Finnish provinces or that the Cornwall-Devon border has not ‘always’ been in the same place. Collecting material among people that you do not know can be likened to moving into a new city. One has to be open for people, their ideas and emotions and respect that spaces carry legacies that are not always that obvious. In many ways, the dissertation at hand is a combination – of two counties and four provinces, of civic organizations and regional actors, of English and Finnish understandings of the region and of the everyday practices that contribute to the identifying with regions. Throughout the process, I have felt indebted to my focus group participants. I have immersed myself with boundless enthusiasm to their identity stories, regional legacies and the campaigns and causes of the organizations. Living in four of the six research areas has given some insight of the processes that take place in these regions, but I do not entitle myself to their identity discourses. For me, the landscapes on XII the southeastern side of Salpauselkä, the memories of childhood summers around Lake Ylimmäinen and the texture and taste of fresh Rikkilän Leipä still keep, to paraphrase Modiano, the traces of my footsteps partly in South Karelia. One aim of my work was not to tell the same story twice. While this means that there could have been easier ways to compile the articles, I see no point in duplicating the research frameworks if you have done the research itself as good as you can. This strategy partly plays homage to the late Sakari Tuhkanen professor in physical geography whose words on the nature of pedagogy – “learning is a spiral process” – still echoes in my mind. All of the articles learn from the previous. Yet, they are more different than repetitious. In the first one, I prospect the not-taken-for-granted concepts of identity. By looking at the discussions with open eyes, the article does not insist that there should be a regional identity. In the second, I scrutinize one, specific region and try to understand how every region is a palimpsest or an outcome of former discourses that have different meanings for the regional actors that try to facilitate regional attachment and the citizens who remember or draw from older regional legacies. The third article acknowledges the importance of discourses of regional legacies shaping sharable and reflexive identity narratives. By arguing that people are products of their own life histories, I state that regional communities can work as a common ground for those identities. Also the fourth article has a connection with the past. While the recent interest in emotional geographies is more than welcome, emotions should not be approached in geography as novel, rather as a self-evident realm of spatial cognition. The article departs the most from the regional geography literature by arguing that regions are only a part of the spatial identification of people. In cultural and social geography, the role of theory and conceptual approach is perhaps more important than in other fields of geography. I do hope that a progress in thinking, whether for the bad or the good, can be sensed when reading the articles. Coming to this point would not have been possible without the incentive or support of others. The first person I would like to acknowledge is my school teacher Leena Kotanen. I have talked with other geographers quite a lot of the influence of our biology and geography teachers for later careers. A staggering but yet indefinite result of my ‘survey’ is that most PhD students in geography had a geography major teacher in their high school, who in some way made the pupil realize their gift in spatial thinking. I still remember Leena saying with a pensive tone to teenagers starting a semester: “I am glad if at least one person will take interest in geography.” I guess you could call the following text as interest. The department of geography at the University of Turku was a fruitful, versatile and demanding place to do a master’s degree. I would like to thank Professors Risto Kalliola and Pentti Yli-Jokipii for allowing me to discuss and challenge the nature of geography. Dr. Jorma Kytömäki and his relentless ability to explain with a smile was one of the primary reasons for the development of my geographers’ identity. My interest in studying England owes much to Professor Paul White from the University of Sheffield, whose teaching and guidance in Social Geography in Europe opened up entirely new vistas for an exchange student but also to the late Professor William Mead, whose half a century long research on Finland still gives me encouragement that one can become an expert of and adopt a country other than your own. To Jukka Vepsäläinen and Pekka Savolainen with whom I had the privilege to work with in Lahti, I feel greatly indebted. Even though you knew from day one that I would someday return to academia, you handed me such responsible tasks in research and project management as much as in networking with other agencies right up to ministries. One could not ask for a better XIII place to start as a regional developer. And Jukka, I am grateful for your kind words that “geographers can do just about everything.” I sort of altered your observation for my own use “a good researcher researches anything.” Professor Anssi Paasi earns the greatest thanks for this dissertation. I know that the Academy project plan got transformed, rethought and developed several times along the way, and I know that you agree that real research never knows the answers beforehand. These past seven years have been illustrative of the hard work that researchers have to do. Research is not about changing the world; it is about describing the world as it is so that we could grasp better who we are and where do we want to go. More than anyone, Anssi has pushed me to excel in writing and has done it with trust that I will eventually find a voice that brings something new to geography. I thank you for your patience and giving the room to develop my own concepts with time and rigour. I also want to thank my second supervisor, Professor Jarkko Saarinen. Thanks! I am grateful to several other professors and researchers in geography with whom I have had the privilege to discuss geography and change ideas at various conferences, seminars and workshops: John Harrison, Jouni Häkli, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones, Maria Kaika, Michael Keating, Joe Painter, Maano Ratmunsindela, Chris Rumford, Matthew Sparke, Lynn Staeheli, and many others, thank you. Doing geography became much more meaningful when you can talk about it face to face. I want to acknowledge the constructive comments of several anonymous referees and especially by editors Dydia DeLyser, Bouke van Gorp, Phil Hubbard and John Urry, whose encouragement were instrumental for looking at the broader picture. I would also like to thank John Tomaney and Michael Jones of their approving and sharp-eyed pre-examination. The research would not have been a success without the people who participated in the focus groups and interviews. The members of Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth, Local associations, Local Heritage Associations, Old Cornwall Society, Operatic Society, Transition and Youth Societies as well as the eleven regional actors in Lahti and Heinola, you know who you are and I thank from the bottom of my heart for participating in this research project. Pauli Korkiakoski and Sandra Juutilainen, who transcribed some of the material, thank you for ‘listening’. Aaron Bergdahl, your grammatical advice has truly been invaluable. As every researcher knows, the ups and downs of doing research need a strong social network. For the past fourteen years that I have identified myself as a geographer, I have met some of the most amazing minds who share my passion in doing research in and teaching geography. Toni Ahlqvist, Petteri Alho, Nora Fagerholm, Jani Helin, Niko Humalisto, Mikko Joronen, Eliisa Lotsari, Teemu Makkonen, Kalle Mattila, Maria Merisalo, Laura-Leena Mäkinen, Timo Pitkänen, Mikko Selin, Kirsi Siltanen, Juuso Suomi, Harri Tolvanen, Jukka Tulivuori and Ben Walker: you are the ones who set me on the track of becoming a researcher during my studies at the University of Turku. At my Alma Mater, I am also grateful to Päivi Rannilla for suggesting Social & Cultural Geography for the first journal. Over in England, I show my gratitude to the School of Geography at the University of Exeter for making me feel like home and to Stewart Barr, Ian Cook, Harriet Hawkins and Mary Hilson. David C. Harvey, thank you for your hospitality during my stay in Exeter and introducing me to the English world of geography, and finally to my flatmate Tara Woodyer for letting me win in MarioKart. XIV I am grateful for the funding I received from the Finnish Academy in the project “Region- building, boundaries and identity in a globalizing world” in 2008–2012. Anssi’s work on regional planning, boundaries and keywords and Kaj Zimmerbauer’s work on cross- boundary regions gave a fruitful theoretical space for my own research. Also, I would like thank Kaj for our excursions in America and not letting me stress about conferences. I cannot think of a better way to dedicate time to research than in Academy project. Thanks also to the Yliopiston Apteekki fund. The research community at the Department of Geography at the University of Oulu has provided many good conversations, the ease of knocking on anyone’s door and the freedom to express ideas. Over the years, I have been inspired by several PhD students and researchers. I would like to thank especially Katariina Ala-Rämi, Jonathan Burrow, Mark Griffiths, Johanna Hautala, Petri Hottola, Eva Kaján, Helka Kalliomäki, Pekka Kauppila, Jukka Keski-Filppula, Satu Kivelä, Katharina Koch, Ossi Kotavaara, Outi Kulusjärvi, Juho Luukkonen, Tanja Löytynoja, Maaria Niskala, Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola, Juha Ridanpää, Regis Rouge-Oikarinen, Henna Sormunen and Topi-Antti Äikäs. You always seemed to have time to talk about research-related problems or life. I would also like to thank Mikko Holm, Aleksi Muukkonen, Veli-Mikko Mäkinen, Petri Mälkiä and Anssi Vainikka for being such inspirational friends. Before I end, I would like to express my special thanks to the Martin/Belcher family. Lauren and Oliver have taken great interest in my research and know how hard it can be to combine being a parent and a full-time researcher. You have made this journey so much easier. I am grateful of the friendship of Kaarina Tervo-Kankare and Joose Kankare, for making me feel that Oulu is my home. My parents, Timo and Marja, have showed what hard work and believing in oneself actually means. I know that dealing with such big research material and pushing the arguments require inner strength and you have taught me to never give up on dreams no matter how insurmountable the mountain would seem. Two persons mean the world to me. Vilhelmiina, who has endured my obscure theoretical ramblings that at start might not have made any sense, my anguish of finding myself disagreeing with much that is taken-for-granted and my overlong texts that sometimes wanted to take the entire world with them – you are the light in my world. I have had perhaps the most deeply philosophical discussions with my son Viljami. I once tried to riddle you by asking “You know what?” But you puzzled me more by replying “I know.” With your three-year-olds’ eyes, you see the world anew and help to rethink the obvious. Like that rainbows are formed by drawing them. I dedicate this book to you both; I love you. In Oulu, May 2015, Joni Vainikka XV Figure 1. Kanto by Olavi Lanu, 1989. (Photo by the author, 7/2014). 1 Introduction 1.1 The art of identifying with space The identity of an individual, for me, is a sort of a work of art, which everyone can sculpture oneself. Birgit, 61, a Local Heritage Association member in North Ostrobothnia In 1992, a Viipuri-born Olavi Lanu finished his four-year earthworks project in Kariniemenmäki half a mile from Lahti Market Square. The project included twelve natural stone schemed, concrete humanoid statues whose forms blend in with the lush forest landscape in the self-addressed Lanu Park. At the time, the statues were not finished. In August 2011, photographer Juha Tanhua memorialized the statuary as he did twenty years ago. Lanu had said, “Only when nature overwhelms them, then they look like what I hope them to be” (Lahden kaupunki 2011, my translation). Today, the statues, like Kanto (Figure 1), have become lichenous and covered with moss. They fuse into the surrounding park, creating a dreamlike environment for rediscovery and an urban nature refuge. The earthworks of Lanu function much in the same way as collective spatial articulations such as regions. As cultural constructs that have both discursive and material outcomes, the statuary and the ways individuals and communities frame space can become elemental parts of spatial arrangements and practices. Of crucial importance is the medium of time. While the statues create a perceptual illusion and at first glance look natural, they are constructed to conform to the surroundings. Localities, regions and territories are often institutionalized by the administrative and collective routines that sustain them, and they might appear as the facts of social life that have formative power. Although both the statues and spatialities are loaded with inherited and invented social and cultural meanings, people interpret such objects in dissimilar ways. In his book, The Open Work, Umberto Eco (1989 [1962]) opened the way to post- structuralist understandings by positing that every art-work or construct has to be completed by the interpreter, who in turn interprets objects from her or his knowledge base. The opening quote from a Local Heritage Association focus group from North Ostrobothnia is precisely to the point Eco made; people are free to interpret the collectively created understandings and contribute to their development. In this sense, post-structuralism can be applied to works of art as well as regions – “to the materiality of space and the way humans are embedded within spatialized materialities” (Murdoch 2006: 2). Nevertheless, post-structuralism does not explain well how interpretations tend to get solidified, canonized and fortified with stereotypic characterizations. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1993 [1975]: 102) illustrates that materiality such as art “has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences it.” If we analogously understand cultural, social and political spatialities as works of art, they can be understood as subjects that remain, endure and generate – but also change – the 1 preconceptions of individuals. People create identities partly through space, or as Marcus Doel (2000) understands, people space their identities, but this active spacing also creates meanings for other people in the present and future. The interplay between reflexive individuals and a spatially and historically defined social is, in short, what this book is all about. Understanding that the activation and elaboration of identities take place interpersonally (Martin 1995; De Fina 2003; Vainikka 2014a; see also Tarde 1895), one of my core arguments is that individuals can entitle themselves to spatial categories through reflexive claims (Giddens 1991; Crang 1998; Oakes and Price 2008). Individuals can feel an obligation to fit into or unconsciously perform a certain habitus that has sedimented in as norms (Bourdieu 1977 [1972]), knowing that naming such disposition is conventional. Throughout the research process, my theorization of identification with space and especially with regions has respected the ways people themselves narrate their identities. Resonating with the position Doreen Massey (2005: 10) takes that “space does not exist prior to identities/entities and their relations”, I argue that the multiplicities of identities constitute a spatiality that draws on shared meanings and possible, creative trajectories. While taking a post-structuralist stance, it has to be understood that regions as social organizations of space are not meaningless, on the contrary, such a perspective opens up possibilities to analyse how social spaces are understood as everyday practices, not as taken-for-granted categories simply imposed on people. Scrutinizing the interplay of reflexive, personal identity narratives and the collective discourses of space, leads to a fundamental geographical problem: what counts as spatial and how do we relate to the spectrum of spatial imaginaries? For a lot of critical realists, structures exist external to the human mind. For many post-structuralists, the interpretation of the ‘artwork’ is boundless and the object takes form internally, in the mind. If there is a gap between the spatiality of politics and the spatialities of minds (Agnew 1999; Antonsich 2010a), in what instances could such spatialities work together? But also, if we assume that every act of identification is different, why should we expect a link between them in the first place? One of the key aims, in this dissertation, is to look at those sharable narratives and interpersonal practices that tie the internal with the external and scrutinize how such a link influences identities and the making of spaces. The spaces that surround people contribute to identities whether these spaces are ideas or scalar, connective constellations (Moore 2008; Smith et al. 2009). The freedom of creating individual, sharable narratives of, for example, locales, sites, regions, territories, nation- states, economic communities, rural areas, urbanity or Apollo images, can, however, create social discourses that grant unreflexive identities for others. The emotional narratives and performances individuals attach to these spatialities reflect consciously constructed discourses, labels and meanings but are not completely driven by them. The everyday practices that create a sense of ‘we’ between individuals through shared ideas, symbols and discourses, is what filters into the narratives. Spaces carry inherited meaning systems and symbols, legacies of different times, palimpsest landscapes and place-based practices 2 that have been set in motion before the present. The ‘traces’ visible in space, the memories spaces can engender (Anderson 2010) and the socially shared discourses of space are the building blocks of spatial identification that can be deeply personal and intimate. Identities operate as structuring concepts, with which to make sense of the everyday world, but which also are malleable and able to absorb new meanings and experiences (Breakwell 1986). While the character of individual identities is reflexive, so that people form opinions based on their personal histories, contemporary social and political discourses, economic forms of power and geopolitical reasoning perpetually penetrate into everyday lives. Thus, people are forced to renegotiate their identities and find new ways to accommodate earlier senses of belonging that change the parameters the lead to feeling being at-home. Like Mitch Rose (2002: 384) argues, the categories we construct “are always in a process of dynamic unfolding and becoming.” Regions form a part of the territorial organization of states. They are also mediums of belonging and spatial cognition in everyday life. The emphasis of this research is on the ways people relate to space but especially to regions, how they see regions as parts of their personal identities and how they use, negotiate and adapt them in their identity narratives. Regions in this sense relate to the geographical patterns of everyday life (Antonsich 2010b; Prytherch 2010; Nicholls et al. 2013) and to the narratives and articulations that discursively reproduce such patterns. Like the statues in the metaphor, regions are not passive backgrounds; rather they are perpetually transforming and collectively shared. People produce meanings of them interpersonally and socially negotiate collective identities. Most importantly, these interpersonal and social negotiations often take place regardless of political contexts and administration. Ultimately, the question of how shared narratives create social discourses that start to order space is a question that relates to our freedoms that, by implication, generate patterns for different spatial imaginaries. How ideas of regions tend to crystallize around some meanings and how understandings institutionalize are not permanent as people interpret and create new meanings for space. Before analysing the relationship between identity and regions, it is necessary to understand relevant discussions around the term ‘region’, how perceptions organize the world around us, (re)conceptualize identity, space and time and how the ideas of regions have developed in Finland and England. 1.2 Regions – social organizations of space Region is one of the core concepts in geography. The etymological origins of the word in English date to the fourteenth century when regioun was taken to mean a zone, an area or group of territories showing a common character. The use of the word denotes boundedness or a division of a larger governing structure. The classical Latin term regio denotes a portion of a country, a bounded territory, a parcel of land or a division of a sky, part of a body or a sphere of thought (OED 2013). Especially in the English language 3 usage region implicates that there is a scalar hierarchy invested in it. Talking about regions characterizes the world as scaled. The term bears similarities with the Old French term regal and Latin regalis that signify a ruling royalty of a certain area. The etymologies of the term ‘region’ help to understand that it is not a value-free notion. Regions can easily be used to conceptualize a persistent question in social sciences, i.e. whether (regional) communities are social contracts where personal freedoms are bargained by giving up some freedoms or whether such collectivities are social constructs, coordinated and shared understandings of the world (Hacking 1999). Throughout the history of geography, regions have been used as units of analysis and as a means to understand differences between spaces (Paasi 2009b; Tomaney 2009). The status of the region as an analytical concept has changed: while in the early twentieth century geographers used regions as a history-related concept capable in a Humboldtian way to connect the actions of humans with the processes of nature empirically (Anderson 2010), the post-war need for re-planning social infrastructures favoured the use of regions as a statistical unit. Spatial analysts versed in quantitative methods altered the term conceptually, making it a generic and functional element of regional science (Entrikin 2008). In the 1970s, the increased interest in both place and humanistic geography (Tuan 1977) seemed to make region redundant or a synonym for place in a different scale (Entrikin 1991: 137) or simply a collective synonym for an individual place. Joe Painter (2008a) sees that the geographers’ interest in the region returned in the latter half of the 1970s after regionalist politics had returned to the electoral mainstream in many countries. In Britain, the localities paradigm of the 1980s seemed to breathe life into regional geography, without referring to regions as an analytical concept (Jones and Woods 2013). In Finland, regional geography developed in the shadows of the ‘historical provinces’ that populated much of the regionalist cultural imagination and gave room for the adoption of more functionalist ideas (Vainikka 2012). The ‘new regionalism’ that started to emerge was not a return to traditional ‘forms of life’ but a vision to mobilize discourses of spatial justice and development across the state space through the competitiveness of regions (Keating 1998; Brenner 2004). As I will argue later, traditional regions were themselves political constructs intended to forge ideas of territorial states where each provincial region made a significant contribution to the national whole, which was usually presented as a patchwork of different regions orientated politically for a common national goal (Tiitta 1994; Brace 1999; Crang 1999; Vainikka 2014a). In different eras, regions have had a unique yet integral role in endeavours to describe realms and states and political reasoning behind them. Rather than speaking of ‘old regionalism’ and ‘new regionalism’, it would be more fruitful to say that regions and regional ideologies reflect the contemporaneous times of their conceptualization (Painter 2008a). Since the spatial turn in social sciences, regions have not belonged exclusively to geographers, as sociologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, etc., have ventured into geographical terrains. Additionally, regions have come to represent a multitude of 4 issues and might be best understood as Nigel Thrift (1990) implies ‘floating signifiers’ open for conceptualization from multiple vantage points. Much of the interest in regions since the 1980s has to do with the Europeanization of regions or the Europe of the Regions (Harvie 1994; Anderson 1996; Keating 1998; Painter 2008b); devolution processes in turn of the millennia Britain (Morgan 2002; Jones and MacLeod 2004; Goodwin et al. 2005; Bulmer et al. 2006; Raco 2006; MacLeod and Jones 2007; Jones 2013); post-communism regionalization in Eastern Europe (Kymlicka 2001; Bialasiewicz 2002, 2003; Raagmaa 2002; Zarycki 2007); interest in regional heritage (Prytherch 2009; Knight and Harrison 2013; Egberts 2015); and with the operationalization of regions as agents of competitiveness to some degree detached from the national state space (Storper 1997; Camagni 2002; Porter 2003; Boschma 2004; Bristow 2010; Harrison 2012a). Timely interests aside, regions attract much interest as geographical concepts in their own right since they function as the extensions of state power, mediate local governance and serve as the instruments of social cohesion. Some scholars have critiqued that the advocates of ‘new regionalism’ make one-sided assumptions that regions possess some inscribed social capital that would drive their competitiveness through ‘civic pride’ (Lovering 1999; Bristow 2005; Harrison 2008). While regional marketing and place- promotion that aim to attract investments and new citizens can create new meanings for regional discourses (Boisen et al. 2011), they usually gloss over the actual, multiple and eclectic identities of people and presuppose a positive or a progressive form of regional consciousness. Despite economic and governance discourses that rework and rescale state spaces (Brenner 2004; Lord 2006; Scarpa 2009), regions and their meaning for civil society are only formally understood if identification with them is not scrutinized. It is the cultural and social reproduction of regions, the how, why and by whom, that is currently underdeveloped (Gilbert 1988; Sayer 1989; Antonsich 2010a; Vainikka 2012; Tomaney 2014) given their political and economic value. Within the project of seeing the cultural value of regions, the interest of scholars is too easily concentrated on regions that, as Gordon MacLeod and Martin Jones (2007: 1178) note, exemplify “how sub- national regions are mobilized as political territories” or “how certain regions are being (re-)constituted as cultural spaces of belonging and democracy, often forged through an insurgent politics of identity”. While research that teases out near-ethnic ideas used for gaining political power and recognition, for example in Catalonia (Häkli 2001), the Celtic countries (MacLeod 2002) or Silesia (Wódz 2007), is important, such endeavours do not necessarily add knowledge on the continuing importance of regions if comparisons are not made to somewhat ‘neutral’ or archetypal regions (Vainikka 2014a). Geographers and scholars within social sciences have long discussed the ontological basis of culture and how cultures might be bounded. Questioning the ideas of superorganisms – reified cultural categories or encompassing spatial ‘containers’ (Bidney 1953; Zelinsky 1973) – scholars have underlined the fragility of socio-spatial categories and their transforming nature (Duncan 1980; Appadurai 1996; Thrift 1996). While critiques of practice-explaining categories were expressed also at the turn of the twentieth 5 century, making recurrent references to the ‘performativity’ of socio-spatial categories seems to be a requirement of the age of liberal pluralism. Regions were perhaps the most important geographical keyword in the first part of the twentieth century. For civil society, it is questionable whether regions are in any way ‘back’ or have become more important than before. Anssi Paasi (2004: 541) notes that the actual geographies continue to make sense “as expressions of social practice, discourse and power.” People construct routinized connections with their everyday landscapes and communities (Tomaney 2013), and regional symbols and discourses are examples of the signposts that offer a chance for individuals to become emotionally “imbricated within particular ecologies of place” (Conradson 2005b: 107). Arguably identification with space is a specific condition of the human understanding. Ideologies, cultural connotations and regions themselves transform but identification with space itself cannot be conceived to have gathered any more difference now than any other time. In order to conceptualize the term ‘region’, we must admit that the present always works to ‘other’ the past as a homogeneous antithesis of modernity constructed by contingencies perceived from the present (Deleuze 1994 [1968]; Dodgshon 2008b). While I do not wish to argue against contingency itself (Simandan 2010), it has to be stated that if regions are taken as social constructs, they must be understood as the reflections of the political ideologies of the time, not as frameworks we can extend to past or present (Lowenthal 1985; Tosh 2010). We can count numerous mechanisms that help associating with and attaching to regions. Regions appear in school curricula, political speech, newspapers and other media. They have a symbolic value and they occur in the pages of novels, in blogs and in the cultural fabric of songs, poems and films. Regions appear in the names of companies and associations. Sports clubs and events often rely on regional support. Regions can be a source of stereotypes and imaginaries. They can frame dialects and collective memories. Regions can frame the functionality of welfare systems from health care to education and can support the logic of transport systems and teleoperators (see also Paasi 2010). Lists like this provide a persuasive description of the agents constructing regions but tell little about how individuals identify with regions. While some people have no problems following a regionalist plot in defining who they are, geographers should respect different ideas of regions. What needs to be reassessed is the traditional conceptualization of regional identity. Grouping people living in a certain region has more of the elements of using discursive power than of the identification of individuals. Citizens might share similar discourses and practices, but such discourses alone do not provide justification for a shared regional consciousness nor of any ‘division of labour’1 1 ‘Labour’ usually denotes goal-orientated struggle to achieve something, but people who articulate the meanings of space in relation to identity do not necessarily conform to an imagined regional consciousness at all. Steven Lukes (1972) notes that Émile Durkheim in his later work toned down the theories of conscience collective and argued that collective beliefs and sentiments in all societies would become more important than the feelings of local, traditional togetherness. For Durkheim social cohesion is an interdependency between individuals in more advanced societies, but the problem lies in the ways how one correlates interdependence to society, especially when information technologies endow people with the possibilities of being reflexive and not overtly dependent on the ‘symbolic brew’ of a society (Latour 2005: 208). 6 in relation to regions. Regional consciousness is problematic, not because of consciousness per se, but because of the different ways of understanding regions. People have a need to belong to somewhere (Tajfel 1981), but this belonging rests more on the reflexive ideas of the self, the life-paths one has taken and the freedom to entitle oneself to a regional discourse and use it as a part of the narrative of Self in a way that makes sense to those in the imagined, encountered or networked community. Thus, ideas of regions are divergent and in order to understand individual imaginaries we should conceptualize spatial identities on the basis of the analytic concepts that make sense in different parts of the world. The reason I use ‘identities’ and ‘regions’ as separate terms in the title of this dissertation relates to the same issue. Individuals construct their identities through memories, in relation to other people and against new encounters and situations. Regions can be an integral part of such identity, but, regions can also remain as rather tangential labels emotionally and in narratives where people tell themselves and others who they are. Regions act as the mediums of social interaction (Gilbert 1988) and they have been understood as composite and socially interacted venues, where symbolic and institutional power is used by its administration or its advocates. Regions form systems of representation (Allen et al. 1998) that are always in a sense ‘fragile achievements’ (Keating 1998). Even though regions can be conceptualized as ‘socially institutionalized facts’ (Searle 1995; cf. Paasi 2002b; Schlottmann 2008) or socially institutionalized categories created and maintained in historically and geographically specific situations, they do not exist independently of the discourses that are actively used on their behalf. Anssi Paasi’s (1986a, 1986b, 1991, 1996, 2009c) theorization on the institutionalization of regions is now de rigueur for geographers analysing regions (MacLeod and Jones 2001; Deacon 2007; Frisvoll and Rye 2009; Zimmerbauer 2013). He understands institutionalization as a “socio-spatial process during which some territorial unit emerges as a part of the spatial structure of a society and becomes established and clearly identified in different spheres of social action and social consciousness” (Paasi 1986a: 121). While the abstraction was generated to examine the process where some Finnish provinces emerged as discernible regions in the post-war Finland, Paasi has extended the use of the abstraction so that it could be applied for analytical purposes of understanding territorialization processes in other scales as well (Paasi 2009c). Paasi states that the institutionalization adheres to four asynchronous but largely simultaneous processes: The territorial shape of regions takes into account the boundary formation of the region, or “is a process in which the power relations in society, manifesting themselves in political, administrative/bureaucratic, economic and symbolic institutions, for instance, play a crucial role” (Paasi 1986a: 125). Acknowledging the importance of the histories of boundary changes and that the idea of a region can be incongruous to explicit boundaries, the territorial shape cannot be recognized only as the current geographical delineation of a region but must include the struggles and memories of older divides that attribute to the present boundaries. The territorial shape can have different meanings for different regions. For example, discourses of the Cornish territory 7 are extremely powerful in Britain, but in Päijät-Häme, Finland, the territory itself forms a splintered image and people know the palimpsest nature of their region well. Thus, the questions of why the contemporary territorial shape rises above the older one, what kind of symbolic work has been taken to substantiate the territory and how literate citizens are of earlier divides should be considered also, instead of taking the territory as it is. The symbolic shape can be used to understand the formation of the name, emblems and the symbolic universe through which meanings can be included in the region distinct from all other regions. The formation of the symbolic shape is contested since it draws on the history of the region and on the beliefs and visions that hold the power to introduce the names and symbols of a region (Paasi 1986a, 2009c). The symbolic shape can be rather ambivalent. If one followed the names citizens and regional actors give to a given territory, they would vary considerably. Citizens and different stakeholders (Vainikka 2013) might not use the same terminology at all (Paasi 1996: 258). Admittedly, terms used throughout centuries, such as Hämeän or Cornish, serve as identity markers for belonging to a region. Yet, being aware of one’s ancestry can help to associate oneself with the region while living elsewhere (Deacon and Schwartz 2007). Conversely, people can adopt a regional ‘ethnonym’ on the basis of “elective affinity” (Hale 2002: 159). The institutional shape of the regions addresses the development of organizational and administrative structures in which civil society practices are upheld ranging from governmental institutions to third sector district organizations, schools to media. From a normative point of view, even habits and dialects can be seen as regional. The institutional shaping is a multi-scalar political issue related to functionalism and routinized policies. The institutional shape can be well contextualized, for example, to the developments in the Finnish provincial structure in the 1960s when regional planning authorities were commissioned to design infrastructural functionalism. Third sector associations had already started to establish their own regions and most district areas gradually resembled each other (Heinonen 1997). This institutionalization contributed to the ideas of an ‘order orientated regional science’ that sought to create even clearer functional regions (Palomäki 1968; Moisio 2012). The fourth, and the trickiest, stage or shape suggests an establishment of the region in regional consciousness and an acceptance of the region’s specific position in the regional system. As a continuation of the three other stages and with different meanings in different politico-economic scales, the establishment of the region means the functional, sovereign or administrative status for the region, ready to be mobilized for political or economic – basically competitiveness – purposes. Paasi (1986a: 130) claims that the social consciousness and the identity of the region “cannot be adequately reduced solely to the consciousness of the individuals living in the regions”, but it has to be asked what other meanings there are in the world other than the ones individuals have left behind? Meanings, notions, discourses can run through generations, but they are continuously shared, retaught and redelivered by individuals. Such legacies are always made by someone and consciously furthered by others. Identifying with a region requires cultural tinkering 8 of collectively framed values and – more importantly – time for discursive power to settle in. As institutionalization always emerges from a previous type of regional structure, such sea change requires enough symbolic elements that reflexive individuals want to project themselves to a new regionally bounded and named logic. In addition, the establishment of the region requires a system into which regions are institutionalized. Institutionalization of regions can lead to new administrative ensembles, but institutionalization does not guarantee identification nor does it grant them a “role equal to that of other similar regions” (Zimmerbauer 2013: 92). The regional legacies and their relation to the national formation and nation-state itself allow them only to be specific in the system (Vainikka 2014a). Alongside these four stages, Paasi (1991, 2009c) proposes that regions can de- institutionalize through integration or dispersion. Regions form only a part of the spatial identity repertoire (Vainikka 2012). These spatial identities might not even resonate with the normative identity discourses provided by regional actors following an institutional or administrative plot. In order to understand identification with regions, interpersonal practices and narratives shared in civil society are crucial. Individuals can identify with regional spaces irrespective of the institutionalized discourses and arrangements and perceive regional histories that go past the nation- building, justify their belonging through those regional legacies or discontinue such ideas and relate to one’s social environment. The key is to analyse the contexts where regional identities materialize and how individuals negotiate these identity narratives interpersonally. A fruitful way to conceptualize regions is to associate them “with the geographical patterns of everyday life and the claims made in praise and defence of such patterns” (Nicholls et al. 2013: 6). Highlighting the practices of belonging that actually matter for people, even if individuals do not always realize their importance, might help to avoid the Durkheimian trap of staging everyday practices and individual thought as rational and reliant of the scale of the society (Douglas 1987). This premise is crucial in a time when local peculiarities are decreasingly controlled by societal guidelines and paradigms (Escobar 2001; Staeheli 2008; Tomaney 2013) and when identification is not straightforwardly directed at one locale (Savage et al. 2005; Vainikka 2012). The interpersonal making of regions is not enough, however. Following the Kantian idea of the cosmopolitan rights of the individuals2 and treating personalities as ‘anyone’ (Rapport 2012) would normalize the nation as a more-or-less neutral construct that just wreathes around people’s perceptions. The legal, political and economic functions of states create loyalties that help individuals to imagine communities beyond everyday encounters (Anderson 1991). Since the 1980s, it has become evident that the congruence between the cultural and the political nation is in a crisis (Gellner 1983; Antonsich 2009). Scholars questioned the problems associated with the political process of explaining the nation as historical, when such an endeavour itself created 2 Among many, Giorgio Agamben and Julia Kristeva have continued the Stoic discourse of hospitality, mutu- ality and solidarity and the empathic engaging with the stranger (see Amin 2004a). Supporting a postnational account of Europe, such ideas could be criticized for pushing the border elsewhere. 9 cultural contexts for the nation. Even though some scholars see that the longue durée and the long-term geohistories of nations are significant or like Anthony D. Smith (2000: 65–66) underline that the processes of recurrence, continuity or appropriation3 can be used to illustrate how the nation is imagined such an approach glosses over the territorial understandings that operated before and alongside the attempts to explain contemporary nations. By scrutinizing the histories of regions and different regional legacies, we might find out that nations are not that primordial after all. Three implications of post- or more-than-national identities are important. First, as Martin Kohli (2000) and Marco Antonsich (2008b: 119) for instance note, collective identities are not constructs of history but a “consequence of the development of institutions.” While a sense of history and forging myths of a common ancestry are important for making solidarity among citizens, the institutions that citizens adopt, accept and can vote for are usually more important for a sense of community. The older the institution, the more taken-for-granted collective identities it can foster. Yet, some past social organizations can leave powerful territorial traces that keep regions or nations as palimpsests and at the same time cast doubt on the coherence of such identities. The second is that nations are always assemblages of ethnocultural relations. The liberal pluralism that Will Kymlicka (1995, 2001) has argued for offers is one way to understand multicultural nations. Liberal pluralist multiculturalism understands contemporary regions, not as the pieces of the nation, but as the asynchronous remnants of earlier territorial ideas that were patched together to create a sense of nationhood (Vainikka 2014a, cf. Johnson and Coleman 2012). Third, while we might be witnessing a rescaling of the state, nations are not disappearing (Antonsich 2008b; Painter 2008b); they are only renegotiated alongside other scales with which individuals might identify. Furthermore, regions provide a lens through which citizens understand nations since regions harbour culturally situated practices, where the national space can take different roles. Nation- states are not the only territorial labels attributable to individuals nor are they understood similarly in different parts of countries. In summary, the conceptualization of regions I am driving for in this dissertation requires an understanding of difference as constituting identity; an interpretation of materialism, perception and accumulation as the elements that construct space; and a theorization of time as composing the narratives, legacies and practices that enable identification with space. 3 Smith uses Kalevala as an example of appropriation. Collected primarily from present-day North Karelia and Viena Karelia, Kalevala is more than anything else, a collection of oral history. A collection of legacies that (mostly) lacks place names, dates and authorship and is a mixture of real and transformed events, some of which were told from the Baltic Sea to the White Sea. As such Kalevala cannot be claimed to belong to any one territory or any one time, even if it has been appropriated or idealized as a story of a nation. 10 1.3 Seeing what they see In the early 1810s, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Arthur Schopenhauer entered into a debate on the nature of colour. Supposedly, the discussion was prompted by Goethe’s journey to Italy in the 1780s. The painters he met were able to articulate rules for the techniques they used, but in terms of colour and colouring they were perplexingly informal (Sepper 1988: 23). Wishing to transgress the Newtonian theory of colour, Goethe believed that colours are the result of the interplay between lightness and darkness. Classifying the nature of colours into the physiological, the physical and the chemical, Goethe wanted to show that colour was not only a physical feature, but also perceived by the subject (Crary 1992). Schopenhauer went much further and explained that colours are formed in the human retina and thus solely physiological. He considered that colour is thoroughly subjective – formed of elements that are projected and exist only for a perceiving, knowing subject (Lewis 2013). First and foremost, Schopenhauer thought that objectivity could never be achieved in relation to colour. As we now know, colours are different wavelengths of light that reflect and scatter from or absorb into surfaces that the human eye sees, depending on the processes in (and the structure of) the retina. It would be easy to say that Goethe was blinded by his own arrogance towards Newton (Sepper 1988), or that Schopenhauer, often likened to an enfant terrible (cf. Paasi 2009b), leaned too far towards subjectivity. Differences that operate with realism and idealism have intrigued philosophers to ponder whether our social constructs have an independent element to them or whether reality is purely in our own interpretation. Perhaps as many scholars have wished to shun such discussion and claim that the world is both realist and idealist (Bergson 1911 [1896]). The Newton/Goethe/Schopenhauer discussion suggests that the ways in which people project objects and social realities are influenced by discourses of social power. While Goethe and Schopenhauer talked about the sensations colours engender, they were perhaps more interested in compartmentalizing colours (Currie 2008) as representative of some culturally situated values. Theories that involve some kind of interpretative aspect, whether related to colour or space, can be approached through Cartesian-Newtonian objectivity; through hegemonic discourses that societies and history have fortified; through a need to redesign theory or institutional structures; but also as a subjective experience shared with others. Thus, when researching individual or group responses to any socially defined category, we must keep in mind that such responses are influenced by the material reality, discourses people have been exposed to, and by contemporary discourses invoking older ideas. I argue that the way research with its theoretical frameworks and approaches reconstructs reality has a direct impact on what is conceived to be a result. In relation to identity and regions, we need to clarify whether we are scrutinizing the social discourses themselves or the ways people understand them. The difficulty is to make distinctions between everyday practices and political struggles that have led to certain spatial imaginaries. 11 The colour discussion is a good indicator of the absurdity of the attempts of trying to reach a definitive account on reality. In a polemic writing, Eero Paloheimo (2014: 27) reflects how reality is entangled with the observer so that, for instance, “we cannot be sure whether the colour ‘green’ is the same for other humans let alone for other living beings”. Nonetheless, the way an individual perceives the colour ‘green’ is the only one that makes sense to that individual. Perception does not provide shorthand for reality but offers the building material for shared knowledge. That what is shared is always a ‘relational and fluid achievement’ and has the potentiality of coming into being and transformation. Making hybrid geographies is not a matter of ‘mixing primary colours’, but a renegotiation of the meanings of those colours for geographies (Demeritt 2005). If we hypothesize that it is the individuals and their difference that defines societies (Tarde 1895; Deleuze 1994 [1968]), then this is the point where comparative studies step in (Thomassen 2012; Vainikka 2014b). While the historical and institutional formations of space and especially of regions can be conceptualized as an encompassing discourse that operates beyond the individual interpretation, it is the multiplicity of individual narratives – following or ignoring such discourses – which create the spatial or regional ‘reality’. Such ‘reality’ is not predetermined or objective (see Galison and Daston 2007) but variegated and influenced by reflexive life histories, selective attitudes, opinions and emotions of belonging towards space. Not only is space but also how people proportionalize space and understand space through scale “the actor’s own achievement” (Latour 2005: 185). What this means methodologically, is taking an approach that does not take space as a self-evident reality of institutionalized spatial organizations but rather leaving the room for people to articulate their own understandings, with their own words and ideas. Researching ‘seeing what they see’ has to respect the practices, narratives and emotions of people, but also study people whose ideas of space might vary the most. It might turn out that people describe the colour green or the region as everybody else, but chances are that such concepts are mixed with other colours or spatial articulations. The approach has some commonalities with what Eric Sheppard (2008) calls the emergent permanence of ‘local epistemologies’. Our perceptions are our own, but they are made meaningful when shared with other people. Three concepts that are of great importance in a project of ‘seeing what they see’: the positionality of the reflexive research subject; the ways in which perspectives are qualified, attested and challenged in a social environment of the research subject; and to some extent the background and the historical-theoretical approach of the researcher. In other words, the individual, the interpersonal interactions and the role of the researcher are important questions in generating arguments. Describing these methodological issues helps to explain how the actual verbal interaction takes place, what kind of issues people are willing to share with a researcher and what kind of impact the researcher has to the responses in an interview situation. What is key here is to realize that people are ‘reflexive agents’ who make sense of the world without our academic concepts (Crang 1998), but also that academic concepts filter knowledge. Thrift (1999: 304) argues that 12 with our methodologies we are not searching for understandings that represent our conceptualizations, rather we are seeking to understand how our concepts ‘resonate’ with the empirical material and that such material is always made in contextual time and space (see also Thrift 1996). More than asking direct research orientated questions, research has to let participants confidently share attitudes and opinions especially in regard to emotionally driven identity narratives (Katz 1999). The argument is not for strict empiricism, but for research based on actual, ordinary people, which informs the ontological accounts of space, not the other way around. For example, for the past ten years, human geographers have debated the nature of scale. Some human geographers have seen no problem in expurgating ‘scale’ as too problematic (Marston et al. 2005; Escobar 2007; Larsen and Johnson 2012), others critiqued efforts to construct ontologies that do not engage with the realities and understandings of more-or-less ordinary people (Leitner and Miller 2007; Kaiser and Nikiforova 2008; Moore 2008; MacKinnon 2011; Vainikka 2014b). Scale is one of the most problematic keywords to analyse, but claiming an ontological impasse on the ground of epistemological multiplicity is not a fruitful way forward. If we want to test our concepts, it should be done through empirical case studies, comparative analysis and reviews of study results. A framework of ‘seeing what they see’ suggests a method of relating to research participants. Though there are many ways to collect material, I think that on-site focus groups respect the ways narratives are formed and reproduced in everyday life. While they do not take the researcher out of the equation, letting the participants share ideas and perspectives with people they know, is a fruitful way to tap into everyday understandings (Secor 2007). The danger of the research becoming an act of description through a camera obscura4 is significantly smaller, since focus groups by definition are interested in interaction between the participants and knowledge is created by and for the participants (Bosco and Herman 2010) not as one-way information sharing towards the interviewer as in one-to-one interviews or through the experiences of a participant observer. Focus-group interviews are at the intersection of asking direct questions and participant observation. It allows the research participants to set the tone of the discussion, progress and social interaction on a set of topics with other participants that share some ‘common ground’. In the studies that follow the focus groups are constructed of the members of local groups of social movements and civic organizations. My hypothesis was that participants in these groups would provide certain ‘scaled’ perceptions of space and narrate their identities interpersonally. While labelling people as more local or more universal is not always 4 Applied, for example, by Jan Vermeer, the seventeenth century artist behind The Geographer and The Soldier and the Laughing Girl, the camera obscura is an optical technique that helps to find perspective and to show relative sizes (Seymour 1964). Using such method renders descriptions of what we see into a discourse of perspective itself rather than an artistic impression. Furthermore, using such method places more impor- tance to the positionality of the describer. Human geographers have for the last 20 years discussed the effects of situated knowledge and self-reflexivity in regards to generating knowledge (e.g., Rose 1997; Longhurst et al. 2008). While discussing how the acts, presence and history of the researcher influences informants are important, on-site focus groups are a fruitful way to lessen the influence of the researcher’s perspective. 13 supported by the material, the contexts of the groups play an integral role in shaping the conversations in the focus groups. In the end, I am analysing how individuals share their identity narratives framed in a social situation that for many of the participants is of an everyday interest or an outcome of rather long personal relationships. As such the material consists of like-minded people talking about different scales of space and the issues of identification through narratives and the legacies and practices that constitute those narratives. 1.4 Research questions and the structure of the synopsis Regions form a part of the territorial organization of states. In addition, they are key mediums of belonging and spatial cognition in everyday life. This research explores how people relate to regions, how they see regions as parts of their personal identities, how they make narrative claims on regions, negotiate the meanings of space and adapt new discourses and practices to their identity narratives. I argue that regions are not passive backgrounds; rather people make regions meaningful interpersonally and negotiate collective identities often regardless of their political contexts. The research does not take regions or discourses of them for granted. Rather it deconstructs the contingent histories that have produced regions. I argue that only by understanding how regions came into being, and the legacies different times have left, can we realize the value and meaning of contemporary regions. In addition, the research takes a critical approach to identities. I want to emphasize that the starting point when scrutinizing the processes of identification should be the treatment of every identity narrative as an unique story so far (Massey 2005) and every individual a product of his or her history. People are reflexive about their identities and imposing a social discourse upon these identities can explain only part of their stories. Conceptualizing identity from the perspective of the individual is, I argue, the only way we can progressively understand the act of identification and belonging to any spatial construct. In the previous pages, I illustrated my approach to regions and my argument for the necessity of methodologically understanding subjective perspectives towards regions. In the next section, I will deepen the conceptual background of this research project. I open up the thinking behind the four articles by explaining the concept of ‘identity’ through a debate between Gabriel Tarde and Émile Durkheim; through discussions of reflexivity and structure; and through Gilles Deleuze’s problematization of identity and difference. The section is not an ode to individualization, rather an attempt to shed light on the concepts of entitlement and obligation that, in reference to collective discourses, help to understand identification without referring to a territorially defined us and others (Vainikka 2012). Mobility and the availability of identity categories – or perhaps more aptly the reappraised performativity of identity – have led geographers especially to think 14 in relational and territorial terms. The section on the relational and territorial spaces is a nod towards the discussion where human geography continues to be remade. In tune with most scholars, I argue that relational and territorial conceptualizations of space cannot be understood separately. They should be theorized as geographical phenomena that are mutually constitutive. In addition, I will proceed beyond the relational/territorial divide by opening up useful concepts for understanding space, such as the phase space, assemblage and positionality/situatedness. In addition, I think it would be fruitful to have more discussion about time in geography. Too often, time is conceptualized simply as past, present and future, without discussing the problems associated with seeing the past from a contemporary vista. We carry our time horizon into the past, and even to the future, without considering that, for example, current regional vocabularies did not make any sense in the past. The anachronistic reading of the past that has plagued especially Finnish history is most evident in studies where a province is termed historical without considering what the historical means. The emphasis on the history of Finnish regions is salient for a reason. Since time is one of the most crucial, although not commanding, feature of identification, it is helpful to present and understand the different modalities the regional transformation has made. Although most of the Finnish contemporary provinces and municipalities are institutionalized, they are always considered against the ‘historical provinces’ or discourses of a synchronized history of the 1850s, as the legacies of different regional constructs were amalgamated into this nationalistic discourse. Identification with regions varies between generations, across regions and along people’s interests. Understanding how people reflect upon and narrate their own identification requires going deeper into the regional legacies that reside outside nationally given discourses. Neglecting histories beyond the nineteenth- century only reifies the nineteenth-century sense of history and encapsulates current understanding into a history that as such never was. In my analysis, I have used original documents as much as possible, whether they were in Latin, Swedish, German, French, Russian or ‘old’ Finnish, simply because later descriptions and translations can easily lose the original meaning. The section on the origins and transformation of Finnish regional constructs and my take on English regions or territorial articulations can also be read as a development of (North) European ideologies. Such ideological shifts that most often accompany territorial transformation places doubt on the contingency of geohistory, not so that regions or nations would be primordial, rather because transformations take place according to the beliefs and ideologies carried in specific times. The legacies that these decisions have left should not be judged; they are a continuum that can create a palimpsest space where traces of older borders and imaginaries of past communities continue to shape our present understandings. Analogous to the approach on differences among individuals, looking back with a territorial frame without acknowledging different regional legacies is the same as imposing social categories on people who do not want to be described with such categories. 15 Methodologically, the research opens up new avenues for the study of identification with regions and of regional identities. Using focus-group interviews for the study of belonging, identity and emotionally charged spatial narratives brings new insights on the social negotiation of belonging and the ways ordinary people apply and adopt regions as categories of thought (see also Antonsich 2010a). I conducted focus-group interviews with local groups of civic organizations in both Finland (North Karelia, North Ostrobothnia, Päijät-Häme, Southwest Finland) and England (Cornwall, Devon). The groups in question, Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth/Transition and Local Heritage Associations, Youth Societies/Local Association/Amateur Operatic Society, work as a further sampling of possible scalar visions, contexts and emphases that are more universal or more local and locate in urban and rural areas. These materials are used variously in different articles but also in parallel with interviews with regional actors or ‘elite’ in Päijät-Häme. I use the theoretical background and the research material to contribute and answer the following research questions: 1. In relation to spatial identification, do regions provide a meaningful source of identification? In what contexts people identify with regions? 2. How do regional actors conceptualize and facilitate discourses of regional identity and do citizens believe in such collective, institutionalized discourses? Can institutional regionalism patch splintered imaginaries of a region? 3. How do people with differently orientated worldviews recognize regions in the identity narratives and how different regional legacies shape these narratives? 4. How do people negotiate and piece together multiple, bounded senses of belonging? What emotional mediums and approaches do people use when they rescale their identification and imagine, operationalize and question the binaries between ‘us’ and ‘others’? 5. What implications does an analysis of Finnish and English spatial experiences entail for the conceptualization of the term ‘region’? The review of the research results answers to the first four questions based on the four research article included here. I will also illustrate the methodological value of the focus-group method in the analysis of social constructed and shared identities. I end with a discussion that brings the theoretical approach, the empirical material and the results together. I also tackle the last question in the discussion and present a question on the need for region-building. I end with a reflection of future avenues this dissertation opens. Drawing inspiration from Doreen Massey’s (2005) book For Space, at the beginning of each section there are monochrome images to introduce the text. While all of these figures relate to the topics scrutinized in the sections, they also function as a reminder of the theoretical point I want to make in relation to identities and regions. Taking a cue from the ideas of Eco and Gadamer and the discussion between Newton, Goethe and 16 Schopenhauer, I let the reader imagine the colours of these images. After all, regions are only meaningful when they are imagined and adopted by people. While the regional ‘shapes’ can be perceived, part of their importance has to be imagined. 1.5 Working with the articles Before I consider the key concepts and theories of the dissertation, I want to walk through the articles on which the book is based. The first article, published in Social & Cultural Geography, was originally drafted for 2009 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Las Vegas. The core arguments that regions are more often conceptualized politico-economic instruments than social discourses and cultural practices; that regions are only one part of spatial identities; that different factors influence identification, and that the idea that ‘ghost’ regions can outlast without any institution nevertheless, withstood in the published version. While conducting the focus groups and writing the article, I was careful not to treat the region as a given socio-spatial structure and let the research participants themselves define the meaning of regions and the meaning of space for identity. One important outcome of the article was the distinction of regions as a means of social categorization of others from regions as part of the personal spatial identity matrix. The references to competitiveness theories (Storper 1997; Bristow 2005) and mobilities literature (Sheller and Urry 2006) provide useful links to ideas that contribute to and challenge regionalism. In fact, the adoption of the ideas of Henri Bergson owes much to the reading of two mobilities scholars, Peter Adey (2006) and Peter Merriman (2012). Thus, the article provides novel insights by linking up to a broader set of questions. Reading Bergson opened up more possibilities for understanding the difference that time makes. Going back and forth through the research material, the legacies of past regions seemed to structure the responses of the participants more than the institutionalization process to a national structure. In the second article, published in Fennia, I try to take the idea of historical change further. The case study of Päijät-Häme offered a nice example of how former regional structures and palimpsests of old borders in an imaginative map, shape the ideas of a regional community. Päijät-Häme did not seem to fit nicely into the framework of an institutionalized region. Of course, Päijät- Häme has a territory, symbols (some inherited, some forcefully invented), institutions and its place in the regional structure of the society, but it is also an example of an area where the legacies of former regions, migration and the proximity of a metropolitan area challenge institutionalization. As a splintered but also a connected region, the participants themselves seemed to negate the regional identity as a form of identification. The article leaves open who exactly is the ‘we’ that would be the referent for a successful identity politics and regional development itself. The third article was the sixth one I started to draft. After writing a manuscript concerning aeromobility and identity, drafting a paper on identity and scale for the AAG 17 2010 in Washington, D.C. and another one about regions and Europe with Anssi Paasi for the AAG 2011 in Seattle, I gradually started to think more about how people’s past create their spatial identities. I became more critical of not treating regions through what Olivier Kramsch (2012) described as “a template vision”. The most meaningful regional identity claims in the first article had come from regions that had been significant in their own right for several hundred years. Between Southwest Finland and North Karelia, there was a sort of an antecedentness that could not be explained by institutionalization or the nineteenth- century descriptions. Selecting Devon and Cornwall for the international comparison was in retrospect a happy coincidence. As has been claimed by many geographers (Hale 2001; Jones and MacLeod 2004; Deacon 2007), Cornwall is and has been made different in the English context. Often characterized as a Celtic region or Celtic nation by authors that want to underline the ethnic and linguistic characteristics of some of its inhabitants, for most English it is only a county. The comparison of Finland and England has been one of the biggest obstacles in my research, and one of the strengths of the Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie article is the realization that English counties can be treated as regions and can be compared without exceptionalism to other regions in Europe. Yet, I hope that the article would first stir more philosophical discussions of the reflexive ways people look at their histories as perhaps more mobile or more sedentary agents or people that have different viewpoints of space. Secondly, the article also takes a stand as a post-national and pre-national argument. It shows that regions have a value in themselves and that regions should not be treated only as the parcels of the nation-state, but as parts of a historical continuum where different regional legacies are perpetually re-read to create new legacies. The fourth article published in GeoJournal opens up at the close. The quotation of the title “A citizen of all the different bits” is explained in the end and the entire text is used to get there. Each individual have their own ways of relating to space, and they have different attitudes, opinions and feelings towards spatial articulations. The issue of emotions was tangentially approached in the three previous papers, but here I use the literature of emotional geographies to understand that belonging can take various scalar forms and people situate in the world and are able to claim identities to any one spatial articulation. The material for this article combines all the 23 focus-group interviews and tries not to make differences between national spheres or the contexts of the voluntary associations. Rather the paper searches for the emotional approaches people have to space and the similarities the ways of understanding different scalar constructs. It might be the most theoretically challenging of the four articles, even though claiming an identity to “the different bits” is a rather omnipotent statement. People entitle themselves to different identity labels at hand but are not always able to make sense of how they got there. 18 Figure 2a. Koli, North Karelia. While the landscape of Koli has been used as a territorial representation of Finland, the variety of people one encounters on the top makes it a relational space. (Photo by the author, 7/2010). Figure 2b. St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. The tide transforms the castle hill into an island every day. (Photo by the author, 6/2010). 2 Key concepts 2.1 Identity and identification with space The subordination of difference to identity and that of difference to similitude must be overturned in the same movement. Gilles Deleuze (1994 [1968]: 212) Identity is one of the core concepts in geography, humanities and social sciences. At the same time, it is one of the most complicated. The term was used by Renaissance Humanism and Enlightenment thinkers to underline the individual as the context of action and as a unit of reason (Dubow 2009; cf. Rapport 2012), but transformed by national romantic ideals. At the aggregate level, identity refers to qualities and conditions that are essential for categorical memberships and the constancy and the invariance of practices that allow the description of oneness or sameness. Identity also describes the condition of being itself or an individual and the paths and positions that define such being (Olwig and Jones 2008). Thus, identity is often conceptualized as the building block of Self and as a category that allows making sense of the world through identification with a social group or space. Geographers and other political and social scientists have increasingly shied away from ideas that a single social and political structure could grant a concrete, definite and inescapable identity (Kymlicka 2001; Savage et al. 2005; Yuval-Davis et al. 2006). Relatedly, the conceptualization of identity has developed owing to a liturgical acknowledgement that identities are socially constructed (Paasi 1991; Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Jenkins 2008). In order to understand identity and how it is ‘constructed’, it is beneficial to start by asking first what constitutes the social. Conceptualizing identity as a component of both oneness and personality explicates the discussion between structure and agency and the ways territories or political and societal power shapes and are shaped by individuals. The juxtaposition of society and individuals has fuelled some of the most thought-provoking debates in the history of sociology and geography. A late nineteenth-century sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1895: 355 (my translation)) pronounced that “to exist is to differ” and explained “identity is a minimum and, consequently, a type of difference infinitely rare”.5 For Tarde, every individual, object or event creates its own social context, which can be defined according to their features along real and imaginary principles. Heralding spontaneity, contingency and imitation, Tarde explicitly argued against primordial identities, whose origins lie in unlikely singularities. Even if collective histories are constructed and institutionalized, 5 Exister c’est différer; la différence, à vrai dire, est un sens le côté ubstantiel des choses. […] Car l’identité n’est qu’un minimum et par suite qu’une espèce, et une espèce infiniment rare, de différence, comme le repos n’est qu’un cas du mouvement, et le cercle qu’une variété singulière de l’ellipse. (Tarde 1895: 355). 21 so that people would understand time objectively, the ways people socialize into social networks and how they ‘imitate’ their social environment is always unique to the individual. The work of Tarde is often regarded as the starting point of interest in crowds or groups that show cohesiveness and in which an individual is caught up. Bruno Latour (2005) explains that Tarde understood social as ‘principles of connections’ and the research subject of sociology to be the practices that mediate communities and hold societies together without resorting to political projects interested in social engineering.6 Matei Candea (2010: 8) concludes that Tarde was not starting from individuals but “was arriving at them”, foregrounding the relations between individuals, not the individual. However, Tarde’s conceptualizations were mostly forgotten in European sociology in the twentieth century. Émile Durkheim’s ideas of collective tendencies having existence of their own were integral in shaping sociology as an independent subject. Durkheim believed that ontologically living cells and societies could be compared. He claimed that like the single atoms in a cell, the individuals within societies play only a minor part in giving life to societies (Durkheim 1919 [1894]: xv). Durkheim maintained that the society should regain the ‘consciousness’ of its “organic unity” and that the individual should “feel the presence and influence of that social mass” that should “continually govern his behaviour” (Lukes 1972: 102). The monochromatic reading of statistics as the constituents of social laws rendered possible a view of societies as external of human consciousness.7 In short, for Durkheim phenomena are situated, not their elements, and only modern societies can form a conscience collective (Toews 2003). In this respect, one of the most critical points of Durkheim (1919 [1894]: 135) in relation to identity is that the causes of social facts should be sought amongst “antecedent social facts”, not among individual acts or consciousness. Put differently, history explains our present not our modern con- ceptualizations of history. Coupled with political geographer’s ideas of natural, nearly organic territories (Fall 2010), nation-states as societies governed the identity politics of the twentieth century. At the turn of the twentieth-century, two differing concepts of the social emerged; the social created through the interpersonal connections of creative individuals and the social forged by structural conditions constraining individuals. The theorization of the relationships between individuals and societies has spurred a wealth of academic interchanges. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977 [1972]) has conceptualized ways in which individuals are socialized into transforming social domains that generate cultural, social and symbolic capital and work through the 6 Methodologically there are similarities between Gabriel Tarde and the French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blanche. Tarde emphasized empirically rich, near-parochial case studies of local communities and the use of sociologists as ‘monitoring or tracking devices’ (Barry 2010: 186) who would emphasizes the genealogies of the cultural practices of particular locations in order to understand variations. Vidal de la Blanche’s methodological preferences, on the other hand, controlled much of French geography until the 1950s with an emphasis on understanding how the physical characteristics of pays or regions defined the social and economic practices (Berdoulay 2011). While both underlined local studies, Tarde was more interested in explaining difference and Vidal de la Blanche in illustrating how natural features created stasis and national predictability. 7 Mary Douglas (1987: 55), for instance, repeats Durkheimian canon. “Nothing else but institutions can define sameness. Similarity is an institution”. Taking away the institution we are left only with difference. 22 idea of habitus. In his thinking habitus is a principle of structured praxis/practice where the externality is internalized (Bourdieu 1968; cf. Bourdieu 1990 [1987]: 22).8 Inherited dispositions are of crucial importance for understanding habitus. For Bourdieu, habitus follows the social relationships of a field through already circumscribed but constantly renewed practices. While these attitudes and practices were set in motion by collective action, habitus does not lead to ‘finalism’ as individuals adapt to changes (Robbins 1999). Thus, habitus is not a thing; it is a process. Bourdieu conceptualized habitus first among the Kabyle living east from Algiers in order to understand the redundancy of a ‘written constitution’, and described the idea of transforming, observable social relationships as categorical ‘fields’. While the conceptualization tries to settle the external and internal approaches, some scholars have seen the endurance of the field as too controlling in relation to the changeability of the habitus or used the field to describe social structures within nations, hence, privileging the nation. Bourdieu argues that “the boundaries of the field can only be determined by an empirical investigation” not imposing territorial boundaries around social relations (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 100). The field cannot be reduced to the interaction of individuals; it is other than the sum of individual action making congruence between the habitus and field an improbable theoretical condition. Applied from psychological Gestalt theories to understand the relations between the individual and the environment, the field is the analytical space defined by the interdependence of the entities that compose a structure of positions among which there are power relations (Hilgers and Mangez 2014). People, however, inhabit any number of fields, and Wendy Bottero (2010), for instance, criticizes Bourdieu’s conceptualization on the basis that it shadows different aspects of identity and claims that the interplay between fields should be understood through situated intersubjectivity or as a plurality of dispositions (Lahire 2003). Another prominent researcher, whose conceptualizations help to understand the making and remaking of individual and collective identities, is the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, who sees social structures both the medium and outcome of social action. In this ‘duality of structure’, agents constitute structures and structures agents (Giddens 1984, 1987: 222). Giddens gives more freedoms for the agent to move along the structure thus emphasizing the call for social mobility and intersectionality. While giving latitude to defining positional ties within structures, identity is for Giddens (1994: 80) “the creation of constancy over time, that very bringing of the past into conjunction with an anticipated future.” He realizes that the western modern world has become increasingly post-traditional arguing that people are obliged to choose how to act and how to be. This observation, however, comes with a cautionary element towards the emotional world, which, he thinks, often clouds people’s calculative modes of being. 8 Bowen Paulle et al. (2012) maintain that Norbert Elias and Bourdieu were “intellectual siblings” and their use of the term habitus is rather similar. Both writers continue the Hegelian canon that self-reflexivity requires practical involvement and continued interaction with the social context, either to avoid contradictions between self-knowledge and the structures that created it, or to contribute to a social change (see also Breakwell 1986). 23 In addition, unconscious traits, routinization and power constraints that different social structures generate prevents total reflexivity of an individual agent (Giddens 1994: 75; Adams 2003). Reflexivity should not be understood as ‘individualization’ (Honneth 2012) or the “teleology of self-mastery” (Adams 2003: 226), rather as the active ability of people to reflect back on their identities and life-paths but also their ability to choose the categories upon which they want to build their identities. In short, the participatory belonging that comes with reflexivity means different things for differently situated people (Farrugia 2013). From a functional vantage point, some state facilitated social structures, such as welfare, emphasize people’s abilities to make choices that transgress class as a category, making degrees of reflexivity related to state structures (Soysal 1994). From a self-reflection viewpoint, the interests of the state to forge loyal citizens are not tied to granting collective discourses and symbols for an imaginary unity between people, rather in creating a discursive sphere conditioned by language(s) within which societal issues are discussed (Kymlicka 2001). The discrepancy between Tarde and Durkheim (Lukes 1972; Vargas et al. 2008; Thomassen 2012) and the habitual reflexivity that for some researchers has bridged Bourdieu’s and Giddens’ thinking (Sweetman 2003), too simplisticly dissect individual and collective identities from each other, and this is the point where the quotation by Gilles Deleuze becomes important. By arguing that “the subordination of difference to identity and that of difference to similitude must be overturned in the same movement”, Deleuze (1994 [1968]: 212) states that difference is not governed by a normative ‘real’ or a discourse of identity, rather difference must be understood without differentiation and without treating difference as a negation of something. In this sense, Deleuze’s conceptualization of identity denotes a socially fabricated or forged one, an idealization of representation to which there cannot be a counterpart or resemblance. Deleuze’s (1994 [1968]: 50) statement that “difference remains subordinated to identity, reduced to the negative, incarcerated within similitude and analogy”, is an opening to understanding the inherited and unconsciously repetitious practices of one’s social environment that can exist without the imposing similitude, or imposing categories around being. In the light of Tarde’s methodological concerns, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition makes perfect sense (Toews 2003). First, the methodological premise of both writers is to understand that there are no normative starting points for identity narratives and that identity narratives are fundamentally different. Second, Deleuze’s repetition, which is “attributed to elements which are really distinct but nevertheless share the same concept” and Tarde’s imitation as a form of repetition that “goes on differing” and “takes itself as its end” (Deleuze 1994 [1968]: 15, 314) follow a similar logic. Both writers try to weave a form of universal repetition, where powerful ideas spread between people with local adaptations, not according to collectively imagined force. Rather than working as a concept of diffusion, imitation and repetition work perhaps more effectively in local communities, underlining the everyday social connections through which understanding 24 and interpretations are shared. That said, imitation and repetition do not obviate the importance of territorially imagined media (Salovaara-Moring 2004) or mediatization (Thrift 2004) that effectively allows ideas to be shared among people (Anderson 1991). Understanding that the social is formed between people as an intersubjective element is integral for the third type of identity along oneness/sameness, individuality/personality: i.e., a relational form of identity. If we understand identity as a process through which a person presents oneself or is perceived by others, we can partly transcend the duality of agency and structure. Leaning on Tarde’s social facts and imitation and the symbolic interactionism championed first by G. H. Mead (see Blumer 1969), we can focus on the interpersonal relations, in which identities are articulated, qualified and contested. Conceptualizing identity as how people define themselves and how they want to be defined (Vainikka 2014a) does not eradicate social structures such as nation, language, region, class, generation, family, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality and interests. These elements certainly remain the intersectional building blocks of identities, but their meanings are interpreted and negotiated in social interaction. While some authors fear the ideologies of deinstitutionalization in relation to these concepts, increased reflexivity over these categories does not lead to “inner emptiness” (Honneth 2012: 157) but to a reappraisal or rethinking of their situated meaning so that they actually make sense in relation to individual experiences. What must be stressed is that identities are activated, emotionally and calculatively, in interaction with other people (Martin 1995; De Fina 2003). While identity is constructed of categorical memberships (Tajfel 1981; Brubaker and Cooper 2000), people themselves choose the more persistent categories that help them to describe and narrativize their identities to themselves and others. Most often these intersectional categories (Horton and Kraftl 2014) are not consciously thought of and form a “practical consciousness”, which Giddens (1984: xxiii) characterizes as consisting of all the things which “actors know tacitly about how to ‘go on’ in the contexts of social life without being able to give them direct discursive expression.” Identity is not a set of qualities of social discourses; rather people follow and reflect upon the when conceptualizing their identities and attach new ideas and notions to themselves that they see completing or accommodating their idea of Self for themselves and in the eyes of real or imagined others. The concept of a bricolage relates to the idea that, in liberal societies, identities are works of art that everyone can mold into his or her own shape (Vainikka 2012, 2013). Glynis Breakwell (1986) demonstrates that the formation of identity is a process in subjective and social time, where new components are integrated by the process of assimilation, accommodation and evaluation. This definition bears resemblance to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ (1962) conceptualization of the ‘savage mind’ which is a contingent result of memories and experiences that have renewed or maintained ideas of Self not intended for a present articulation of identity, but for its continuous remaking. For Lévi-Strauss, a bricolage is an ensemble of identity elements engendered by 25 memories used in present but also forgotten or staying ‘in reserve’ for future situations.9 Bricolages can also be conceptualized as a momentary mode of being in a place or as Michael Leyshon and Jacob Bull (2011: 163) maintain identities structured by “the narrative of what is at hand”. Thus in regard to identity, as well as ‘humans’ (Thrift 2009: 82), ‘entities’ (Schatzki 2002: 15), ‘events of geography’ (Doel 2000: 125) or ‘spaces’ (Foucault 1986; see also Saldanha 2008), heterogeneity is the norm as there can be lack of intentionality in agency, so that identities are constructed through shifting relations, not through conscious choices towards a desired identity. The multiplicity of identity can make it a messy concept that seems to describe less than its constitutive parts. Greg Noble (2009) notes that identity is constructed around the ‘contingencies of participation’ and follows Michael Keith and Steve Pile (1993) that all investigations of identity are made by freeze-framing the realities that individuals face in their everyday life. Identities, thus, can be highly contingent, not because of openness of choices but because individuals do not always master the choices given. These choices themselves can be fluctuating, inconsistent and contribute to the incompleteness of identities especially in the face of changing political ideologies. The interpersonal negotiation of identities means that identities are never ready. Yet, identities tend to be clustered around culturally hegemonic, collective discourses and representations of difference (Jackson 1989). Not that identities would be controlled by representations above interpersonal processes (Paasi 2009a), but because people tend to give their own meanings to social discourses from their points of view or because resisting such categories makes no difference in their emotional understanding of Self or in the eyes of others. Identity is a process, which is influenced by one’s cultural roots, life-paths and values of the communities one has engaged with. Individuals themselves, not the connections and encounters with other people, construct the context (Vainikka 2013). Identities as well as interactions can be made meaningful and visible by others, but others do not provide a context of identity (see also Latour 2005: 166). Identities can be thought of as value systems that people perform rather differently. Thus, the study of identities is an analysis of fractured and fragmented narratives and performances. Identities materialize through situated and reflexive practices, which “produce the effects that it names” (Butler 1993: 2). Judith Butler’s framework of performativity is one answer to the crisis of representation that Deleuze based his conceptualization of difference, but Butler takes things a step forward by arguing that the narratives of people and the social discourses they tune into do not describe any interior or exterior reality, rather the very speech or way of being perform these realities (Horton and Kraftl 2014). Recognizing contemporary regularities in these performances is the actual social or collective structure (see, however, Nelson 1999). 9 Compare with Alfred Tennyson’s words in Ulysses: “I am part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro; gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades; for ever and for ever when I move” where the identity of Ulysses is sent through his life-path in which he effectively forgets some of its steps. 26 Based on extensive empirical work in Istanbul, Anna Secor (2004: 365) maintains that a critical element of citizenship struggles, and that of identity, is affirming oneself and others the “right to become a producer” of space. Identification with an urban space, for instance, often draws from the discursive power relations between those who have lived in the city longer and those who have moved there at a later stage (Antonsich 2010b). It is extremely important to contextualize the relationships with actual others but also as the individual imaginaries of others. This divide becomes visible, for instance, in an example of David Morley (2001: 427) who indicates that “many people are still forced to live through the identities ascribed to them by others, rather than through the identities they might choose for themselves”. Often the imaginaries of others provide a stronger, and self-restricting, discourse of identity and participation than actual encounters and everyday practice. When talking about identities, it has to be stressed that the freedom of definition is not universal. Furthermore, scholars often reflect such freedom against historical forms of social life but neglect the contemporary social negotiation of identity that takes place in everyday life (Cresswell 1996), which can be constrained by social discourses (e.g., Jakobsen 2012; Koch 2013). Matthew Adams (2003: 231) argues that reflexivity of identities is embedded in cultural settings and within “culturally located, politically normative discourse”. People formulate, often unintentionally, new forms of identification and use emotional or calculative repertoires when identifying and claiming memberships to social categories. Thus, people can entitle themselves to identity categories in their narratives of themselves, if they see the category to describe their personal, experienced world. Identities are also constructed after feeling an obligation to define one’s identity as different from an imagined social community (Vainikka 2012, 2014a). In a Tardean sense, obligation relates to imitation after imagined social pressures. While ascribing oneself an identity is up to how one wants to construct one’s own narratives, these narratives can leave out what others might think are self-evident sections of their identity only because they feel that that identity serves better someone else, not the eclectic or multiple identities of the person. More than thinking identity as a label or a category, many researchers have argued that identity is an active process (Horton and Kraftl 2014). Stuart Hall (1996) speaks of identification rather than identity. Hall echoes the ideas of Lévi-Strauss’ bricolage and Deleuze’s when arguing that identification is “a process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination not a subsumption. There is always ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ - an over determination or a lack, but never a proper fit. […] And since as a process it operates across difference, it entails discursive work” (Hall 1996: 3). Thus, identification is an active socially negotiated process rather than a passive, given category. Identification does not render the categories of identity obsolete, but it underlines the performativity and degrees of affinity in respect to them. People have in many cases learned to perceive the world through different positions and stating that identification is an open process means that someone can construct their entire being in relation to a certain concept, which 27 for another might be only a minuscule piece of an identity puzzle. What counts is how people construct their place, as an accumulated spatially-effected experience (Paasi 1996), or how they understand and narrativize themselves in relation to not only spatial only but also the changing social world, its symbols, power geometries and within the fabric of time. Identity structures around accumulative, situated experiences, and how people name and locate these experiences and memories, how they understand their identities and articulate them is more important empirical question than trying to fit reflexive narratives into rigid identity categories. In order to understand the spatiality of identity, this means a methodological challenge of ‘prospecting’ identities not presuming them. Sometimes the contemporary political categories work as a short-hand for identity, but the trickiness of identity is that once people have learned to use one category, there is always and adaptation or opposition to unlearn such category. An integral point, thus, is to make a difference between the structures that grant an identity and how identity is performed. Family roots, historical layers in the landscapes, urban and rural divides in the ways of life, media, meaningful places, spaces of leisure and mobility, contribute to the spatiality of identity. These spatial experiences sediment over each other, or form rhizomatic connections between each other, but most importantly they continuously mould self-understandings and the identity narratives through which people construct their identities for themselves and others. I understand spatial identity as identification with space and people, which defines being and situatedness, but which leaves the scale of the identification open. More than being bounded to cartographical representations or collectively orchestrated spatial fixes, spatial identities are bound to the perceptions of attachments where time and place are meshed into meaningful memories (Vainikka 2012, 2014a). Within this openly defined analytical concept, sociospatial categories such as regions provide only one form of identification or source of identity narratives. Such a concept is in a sense an essential one since everyone can refer to regional imaginaries if they see them contributing to their sense of Self and in relation to other people who share the same somewhat positioned everyday space. While memberships to different categories are continuously negotiated by and partly for an individual, identities that are based on these categories not only ‘take place’, but they also ‘make place’ (Clayton 2009). Arturo Escobar (2001: 143) convincingly argues that as geographical settings “places gather things, thoughts, and memories in particular configurations; and that place, more an event than a thing, is characterized by openness rather than by a unitary self-identity.” Yet, identities are often performed through banal practices and habits that go unnoticed and uncategorized by individuals. The more important identity symbols, such as flags, signage, structural relations or everyday media, are, the fewer people notice them surrounding everyday lives. Identity stands as both an expression of internal sentiments and an attachment to external icons whereupon the process of self-understanding of one’s positionality in social, cultural and material settings that constantly reproduces itself. With all the relational examples of identities becoming multiple and more mobile (Massey 2005), there seems 28 to be a pronounced kernel of continuity and materiality, which does not always cohere with the administrative spaces. Nevertheless, identifying with regions is optional. Living in a region does not automatically generate a sense of belonging. Awareness of cultural differences between ‘us’ and ‘others’, but also ‘here’ and ‘there’ creates identity categories and discursive boundaries (Bauman 1990; Paasi 2002b; Yuval-Davis 2010). Identities that people construct from social categories are collective, in the sense that they follow the categories and labels used by other people, associations, institutions, administrators, marketers and enterprises, media and literature, historians, monuments and collective memory. Sometimes such categories and labels do have a spatial factor. In such cases, people tap into to the collectively shared discourses that enable the symbolic creation of space and help to dissect one area from another. Still, constructing an identity based on a sense of ‘we’ is not a simple geographical endeavour. Jouni Häkli and Anssi Paasi (2003: 142) state that “from all claims to collective particularity (‘we’/’they’) it is relatively easy to discern the ones that make a special reference to geographical spaces”. Spatial or geographical meaning-making is one of the basic elements of human cognition, but there is a danger of imposing a geographical mind-set on the situated imaging of ‘we’ even though people might not take spatiality as an integral element of ‘we’ in the first place. Relating to warnings by Ash Amin (2004b: 35) of the “compulsion to think regions and regional politics in territorial terms”, a separation should be done between the ‘we’ and the ‘here’ simply because sharing the same place does not necessarily create similar effects. Dichotomies, that have been historically structured, often provide strong discourses of difference, but such discourses are not by a rule spatial, rather people have the right to construct their sense of selves in relation to such dichotomies. Massey (2005) ponders on the ‘throwntogetherness’ of modern urban milieu; the momentary coming together not only of people but ways of seeing landscapes with their traces of different times and imaginaries of local communities that create a sense of ‘here and now’. This throwntogetherness helps to understand different social configurations of locales and how relationships between people, stake-holders and agencies are negotiated but it does not say much of the mechanisms on how a sense of ‘we’ is constructed. After all, people construct malleable boundaries between each other regardless of space (Pratt 1999) that change throughout people’s lives who continuously regenerate and renegotiate their definitions of ‘we’. From a collective point of view, this ‘we’ is not an eternal imaginary, rather it reflects different times and ideologies than its actual progress. I argue that the sense of ‘we’ can be different for every person, but there is a point in understanding the structures through which a sense of social belonging is constituted. Placing one’s identity within an imagined sense of we reflects ‘influences of social location and cultural tradition’ (Calhoun 2003: 544; see also Vainikka 2014a). Whether we are talking about transcontinental tribes of wanderers in the spaces of mobilities (Iyer 2004; Adey 2008; Cresswell 2012), or spaces that carry long histories, legacies of different times that condition identity narratives (Raivo 2002; Laviolette 2003; Prytherch 2009; Tomaney 2013), we cannot hide belonging to these spaces if individuals encounter them frequently. Spaces that at face value might 29 seem relational or territorial both engender identification and the practices embedded in those spaces contribute to our perceptions in relation to other communities. In the end, people use their situated spatial knowledge to interpret the world around them, but when such interpretations and perceptions are adopted as identities is what research on regional identities should emphasis. People are reflexive agents who are able to tell about their past, of their important moments in life, of their dreams and fears, although some of these might be influenced by societal discourses. One’s social environment and the discourses that circulate in such social sphere both have a constitutive power for identification. Identification can take place without conscious realizing, but most often identities become visible through some emotional response in banal situations (Vainikka 2014b). 2.2 Relational and territorial spaces and their alternatives It is more than ever necessary to explore what remains bounded. Marco Antonsich (2009: 801) For the past twenty years, the debate between relational and territorial approaches and emphasis on space has fuelled much of the work on regions in human geography. The proponents of a relational space underline the connections between sites and interpersonal connections within sites (Harvey 1973: 13; Massey 1995; Beaverstock et al. 2000; Amin 2004b; Allen and Cochrane 2007; Pierce et al. 2011; Anderson 2012). Scholars underlining the territorial imaginaries claim that territories not only organize space, they also create meaning (Raffestin 1980; Sack 1986; Paasi 1996; Jones and MacLeod 2004; Tomaney 2007; Elden 2010; Murphy 2013). The relational conception of space is often coined with the term ‘contingent’ where all political action is interconnected in contrast to the territorial framework where local issues are articulated and mobilized into wider issues (Davies 2012). One does not have to go deep into the debate to notice that the schism between relational and territorial geographies resonates not only with the issues of how to deal with the different ideas of the social but also on the matter of time. Some scholars connect the relational-territorial discussion with issues of fluidity and fixity (Allen and Cochrane 2007; McCann and Ward 2010; Murphy 2013). For others, the debate goes deeper into the nature of space and to issues of the freedom of conceptualizing space in contrast to given or inherited territorial constructs (Massey 2005; Murdoch 2006). Massey (1995: 64) sees that the conception of space as “bounded and undisturbed is incorrect” and that space should be conceptualized as open, discontinuous, relational and internally diverse (Allen et al. 1998: 143). Massey argues that space is relational within sites, where different trajectories of people’s stories so- far are thrown-together. As a result, locales are formed of contingent relations and encounters more than actual historical discourses or traces in the locale (Massey 2005). 30 As in much post-structuralist work, while such trajectories seem simply throwntogether, they are often conditioned by language, specialist professions, dreams mediated by others, media, etc. The relational space can be found in connections between cities and city regions. Such porousness, or spread or reach of distinct knowledge-based economies or manufacturing clusters create regions that are incongruous to traditional regions. Amin (2004b: 34) argues that spaces such as regions cannot be granted integrity if “they are made through the spatiality of flow, juxtaposition, porosity, and relational connectivity”. The relational space discussion connects to a wider sociological turn of networks and fluidity where spaces of flows undermine spaces of places (Castells 1989),10 identities become liquid (Bauman 2000) and where global social structures stand on the archipelagos of competitive, interconnected and world cities (Petrella 2000; Taylor 2006) that foster types of ‘rooted cosmopolitanisms’ (Appiah 2005; cf. Calhoun 2003). The importance of territories has not disappeared (Painter 2010). While inter- and non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations (Held and McGrew 2002; Allen 2011) have made nation-states as territories less central, much economic mediation and political power is still invested in nation-states (e.g., Mansfield 2005; Sparke 2005; Agnew 2007). Proliferating mobility increases interest in border control and creates realms of shared border practices (Salter 2008; Paasi 2009a; Martin 2010). While borders can be both instruments and expressions of territory, territories can be formed by different types of borders. Similarly, strengthening networks become stronger only through infrastructural arrangements that facilitate the networks in different scales and regions (Prytherch 2010; Jones and Merriman 2012). Territories are important when they legitimize political power, provide spatial justice and security within their bounds, allow categorizations of language practices, reflect past territorial orders and function as the symbols of cohesive social connections (Soysal 1994; Paasi 2009a; Elden 2010). Simply put, citizens are in contractual relations with territories. While identities can be relational, elective and multilocational for some (Savage et al. 2005; Vainikka 2012), identities can anchor profoundly in territorial imaginaries. Territorial articulations help to organize space; their ‘shape’ can ease the dissemination and sharing of imaginaries. If understood as ‘stories’ they can perform pedagogical and taxonomical work. In addition, people are in contractual relations with the state such that they often take for granted the territoriality of the state, or regions for that matter. While researchers have often argued that it is important to scrutinize “what remains bounded” (Antonsich 2009: 801), territoriality is such an inescapable fact-of-life that people do not often realize their own repetitive practices that form the ebb and flow of the everyday. The relational territorial discussion alongside with the attempt to understand spatial imaginaries as co-constitutive intersects with the ideas of the ‘new’ and older cultural 10 Throughout the 1990s, Manuel Castells stated that the world is comprised of spaces of flows. His ideas of networks have been read with critique and without critique as an exemplar of a postmodern, interconnected era. Yet, his work is not a rich empirical study. The only empirical fact Castells shows about the networked society, is Federal Express routing (Beaverstock et al. 2000). Connections have their own histories and to state that networks or mobility are novel is a clear pitfall (Sheppard 2002; Cresswell 2012). 31 theory. Don Mitchell claims that the proponents of new cultural theory wish “the understanding culture to be constituted through space and as space” whereas the “older cultural theory in many ways stressed time, suggesting that cultural traditions were handed down from generation to generation” (Mitchell 2000: 63, emphasis in the original). Relational space is often thought of as more progressive than ‘traditional’ territories (Massey 1995; Jones and Merriman 2012; Luukkonen and Moilanen 2012). Such an assumption is made without actually contemplating whether a person can actually uphold any more connections or relations at a given moment than she or he can imagine the different legacies or traces of past territories all visible in some way at the site. While power for some actors might have essentially topological qualities (Allen 2011), such a practice is not available to all or cannot be transcendent between people who are part of different power geometries altogether. John Tomaney (2007: 370) warns of treating local cultures and identities as “inherently defensive, introverted, and archaic” and of caricaturing regional identities (cf. Cresswell 2002). While regional identities or collective belonging might not be as visible as, say, in Albert Kahn’s colour photographs of the 1910s, regional peculiarities, characteristics or habits are not simply residuals of older times (Keating 1998; Harvey et al. 2011). Such distinctions change and seldom follow any strict territorial boundary, but contribute to regional differences as do global flows, the mediatization of everyday lives and relationality. Far from excluding each other, relational and territorial geographies support each other. To give a tangible example, Koli hill in North Karelia (Figure 2a) is for many Finns the symbolic landscape of the country. In the 1890s, when artists were reimagining the ‘authentic’ nature of the national territory, scenes looking down to the terrains that would coincide the imaginaries of the landscapes of Kalevala became extremely popular. Today Koli is one of the best-known tourist attractions in Finland, so that when one hikes to the top of the hill the site itself turns into a relational space crowded with people from around the country and abroad. Territorially symbolic space is thus experienced as relational. Indeed, much of the recent literature on relational and territorial geographies states that the two concepts can only be understood together. Kevin Morgan (2007: 1248) notices the need to “overcome the debilitating binary division” between the two since political space is both bounded and porous. Still, when John Allen and Allan Cochrane (2007: 1171) note that power functions through “more fluid, relational institutional settings than any top-down, territorial arrangement” they forget that a territory might be a bottom- up construction, existing because citizens believe in such a cohesive territory. Whether politicians are accountable to their constituencies or whether people have fluctuating and fractured identities engendered by the mobility of themselves and their fellow citizens, the relational/territorial question is more than a political issue (cf. Varró and Lagendijk 2013). We need to recognize that they are counterparts only in a sense that they allow each other to be definable and that other conceptualizations of space are possible as well. The remainder of this chapter will concentrate on three theorizations that make use of both relational and territorial strands: the phase space, assemblage and positionality. 32 Martin Jones (2009) (re)introduced the term ‘phase space’ as a critique of the ‘relational turn’ for forgetting that the actual characteristics of a site are the ones that enable the site to be relational (see also Latour 2005). Understanding space as both relational and territorial opens and historically enables the theorizations of regions as future orientated instead of path dependent but also as the products of their own histories that provide regional discourses a wealth of sources (Jones 2014). Phase space does not negate the relational making of space or a topological stance, but underlines “the context-specific nature of existence and emergence” (Jones 2009: 489). Jones treats phase space as a partial answer to the distinction between realist and idealist approaches to relational space since too often geographers conflate actual material connections and networks with interpersonal connections people make and keep in their memories. Some geographers (Marston et al. 2005; Jones et al. 2007) have tried to resolve the question by resorting to flat ontologies where ensembles organize themselves to unfolding singularities. The crucial separation from the Leibniz-inspired monadology of Tarde, where the social is a principle of connections and from the writings of Deleuze and Latour, is that the flat ontology supports what Jones (2009: 497) terms ‘pure contingency’ that strips the history of sites and the power structures embedded in landscapes and place-based communities, turning iteration and repetition into possibilities (cf. Vainikka 2014b). Thus phase space provides a more nuanced conceptualization compared with flat ontologies where the urge to make sense of ad hoc connections and correlations flattens concepts and objects and renders history into a passive backcloth (Latour 2005; Corsìn Jiménez 2010). In his project of the ‘phase space’ (Jones 2009, 2014), a term introduced first by the late nineteenth-century mathematician Henri Poincaré, Jones emphasizes “inherited spatial structures and emergent spatial strategies” (2009: 498). While his reasoning to “historical geographical periodization” unnecessarily territorializes time, what is helpful is that the notion captures “all the possible spaces in which a spatiotemporal system might exist in theoretical terms” (2009: 499, emphasis in the original). Problematic in this schematic is that it takes on a ‘system’ that is somewhat pre-given in a scaled universe and not structured by the agents themselves. Given that for Poincaré’s phase space was closely related to finding a solution to the three-body problem, where gravity between the bodies dictates their movement and positions, to state that a region is both located in and constitutes a phase space is a simplistic answer. It is the ‘particles’ or reflexive individuals, their relations to each other and the discourses that they believe in that constitute such a space. Regions can organize and mediate understandings of these relations and discourses but do not themselves and without actors constitute space. Of course, as Jones (2009: 499) claims, “regions are historical geographical accomplishments, defined and delimited by shifting relationships”, but the danger here is to perceive history through regions. Making a clear statement that regions are formed through successive rounds of region-building, where new regional structures are based on earlier systems, Jones (2014: 2587) gives room for multiple trajectories to exist as possible futures within a system conditioned by “small deviations in historical geographical conditions.” 33 Another way to understand the interplay between territorial and relational geographies is to understand space as an assemblage that provisionally shows aspects of stability and is composed of heterogeneous parts that act together (Anderson et al. 2012). Manuel DeLanda (2006: 31) claims that “analysis in assemblage theory is not conceptual but causal, concerned with the discovery of the actual mechanisms operating at a given spatial scale”. While he is keen on “getting rid of the idea that social processes occur at only two levels, the micro- and the macro-levels” (DeLanda 2006: 32) and wants to show that the ‘individual’ and the ‘society as a whole’ distorts the conceptualization of space, DeLanda’s conceptualization of the assemblage requires territorial or at least scalar imaginary. People, communities, organizations, cities and nation-states, for example, are all individual singularities, or entities associated with possibilities granted by its dimensions and degrees of freedom. For DeLanda, people thus always exist as parts of populations, where their identities emerge from the interaction of ‘subpersonal components’. Assemblage theory thus gives freedom for an agent or a component to associate itself with other assemblages without the entity that is formed of the assemblage losing its identity (see also Adams 2003). Ideas of assemblages are not against place-bounded practices, but they underline the possibilities of individuals to be part of several different assemblages and thus create an understanding of space from different aspects depending on the situation, other people or simply time of day. The usefulness of the assemblage contra relational space is that assemblages are founded not only on the social connections in place but the geographies of those social connections. Ben Anderson et al. see assemblages as alternatives to relational ideas. For them, stating that everything is emergent from or take place in relations runs at the risk of a relation “becoming a routine to be mastered and repeated” (Anderson et al. 2012: 172). Thinking through assemblage as a word, a concept and ethos, it does not point to any specific spatial imaginary and thus leaves freedom for the assemblage to create its own spatiality. Assemblage is thus both ephemeral and structural and it “privileges processes of formation and does not make a priori claims about the form of relational configurations” (Anderson et al. 2012: 176). Drawing from Deleuze the term ‘assemblage’ resonates with ‘co-functioning’ of heterogeneous parts that make an open, sometimes momentary whole. Here there is a resemblance to institutionalization theory (Paasi 1986a, 1996), where territories, symbols, political orders and acceptance of the public ‘co-function’ in order to establish new, or at least institutionalized, spatial forms only to deinstitutionalize after new regional assemblages. In some cases, we could imagine that regions are made of assemblages of regional social ties (cf. Latour 2005: 218). Assemblage theories enable both territorial and relational imaginaries, the main point is how provisional or how long-term the assemblage is and the scale on which the assemblage is considered. Issues of ‘durability and transformation’ are at the heart of assemblages (Anderson et al. 2012: 180). While couched in terms of coming-together and change, assemblages can become objects of sedimentation, repetition and habit. When regions frame and consolidate traditions, traits, ideals and landscape values, they can be 34 regarded as assemblages. Regions, whose constitutive parts differ from the region itself, can, by implication, become a part of other assemblages. Similarly, individual memories and legacies that different times have left can be thought of as assemblages of the past (Vainikka 2014a) or as ‘cumulative archives’ (Paasi 2002b; Vainikka 2012). With no definitive history, other than what is created in the present, everyone understands the past through his or her own assemblage of memories and sense of history. Thinking through space as an assemblage runs the risk of exteriorizing the agent. Who has the power to define an assemblage and can individuals ever understand assemblages similarly if they are positioned differently in relation to the whole? More broadly, how individuals understand and perceive space and how the positionality or situatedness of an individual operates alongside the conceptualizations of relations, territories, phases or assemblages are important questions. Scholars especially in feminist geographies have been interested in ways the positionality of the researcher influences the research (Rose 1997) or how the objects of a study profile the researcher (Hopkins 2007). My use of the term ‘positionality’ borrows from from Sheppard’s (2002: 318) conceptualization as “how different entities are positioned to each other in space/time”. He uses positionality as a sort of a metaphor of wormholes in a non-Euclidean spatiality “capturing the shifting, asymmetric, and path-dependent ways in which the futures of places depend on their interdependencies with other places” (Sheppard 2002: 308) and underscoring the unevenness of networking capabilities between different locales and different people as well. Only some wormholes are ever created, and while geography depends on the local context it also depends on the “broader forces working through and against actors and places” (Sheppard 2002: 325). Individuals can take different positions in relation to different social, cultural and material settings (Vainikka 2013). Positionality in its strict meaning does not necessitate any location but is a relation to other things not necessarily situated. In a somewhat parallel meaning, I have used the term situated or situatedness, as it plays with the idea that perceptions towards space and assemblages are both place-based (Escobar 2001) and multilocational (Anthias 2001), and like the term ‘situated’ carry geographical significance. Both positionality and situatedness underline the highly contextual relations individuals have towards structures and systems that mediate identities and space. Situatedness has been conceptualized in different ways. Gillian Rose’s (1997) understanding is that knowledge is always situated and as such a partial view of the world. While recognizing such situatedness has not always been a harbinger for scholars, recognizing and being reflexive about research is a way to come to terms with the hybridity of social sciences. David Simpson (2002: 18) uses the term ‘situatedness’ to chart the “emphasis on the availability of self-specification in reference to categories that have previously been deemed largely involuntary”, thus using the term of the increased latitude that allows individuals themselves to characterize how they see they are situated in respect to the rest of the world. Nira Yuval-Davis et al. (2006) suggest that the politics of belonging and the negotiation of space are situated temporally, spatially and intersectionally, so that 35 at different times, societies and people are affected differently. A crucial point in their analysis is the recognition that an individual or a group cannot be expected to relate to a social or political entity given only their participation in it. Relating to the discussion on colour before, even though we can conceptualize space as an inconsistent and fluctuating assemblage, the understanding of such space is founded on the situated positions that individuals occupy and as such perceptions of space are always different, regardless of cohesive and collective factors. Situatedness also renders possible an understanding of scale as a spectrum of spaces to which individuals can claim to belong without privileging any scale over another (Vainikka 2012, 2014b). Acknowledging difference between identities and in some aspects ‘free will’ does not negate the importance of studying the ‘glue’ or ‘gravity’ that keeps networks networked or wormholes connected allowing them to transform continuously. While there is a real ‘territorial trap’ linked to any socially constructed territory (Agnew 1994, 2010), where attention is based too much on the freeze-frame condition of the territory at the expense of its emergence or relations, territories, still, provide a way for individuals to negotiate their identities even though the everyday practices of those individuals have a more relational flavour. Similarly, there is a real relational or topological trap if we become more interested in representing relations than actually talking about those who are affected by power geometries or think that topologies in some way liberate individuals from territorial structures (Martin and Secor 2013). Histories and spatial vocabularies that people use do not always take their cues from various sites, rather people carry the territorial language of their paths and cultural self-understanding with them, which makes a deconstruction of territories in favour of the relational site impossible. Horizontal spatial relations that contribute to and unfold from a site and the inequalities within networked spaces, do not create a borderless world – stating otherwise, results in an incomplete and partial analysis of social relations. Understanding that people are situated in assemblages leaves space open enough to respect the contextual and reflexive identities people use to create, qualify and narrate space. Still, a research project that does not conceptualize time is at the risk of representing only the here and now against the conclusion that identities and the way people perceive space is negotiated through the medium of time. The next section explores the difference time makes and how social legacies and the accumulation of memories constitute momentariness and the readiness to speak about spaces of belonging and regions. 36 2.3 On legacies and accumulation: Methodological concerns of time That sort of huge region means nothing to me, it’s just imposed on a map, you know, somebody had drawn a few lines, but they’re nothing to do with heritage or history or identity, at all, in my opinion. Mary, 63, a member of Amnesty International in Cornwall An easy answer to what is the most significant element for regional identification would be time. Regions transform and individuals change and to be able to say anything about the connection between them requires a conceptualization of time. Thus, our perceptions are not only transient; they are formed of elements and practices that have gathered through time. Henri Bergson (1911 [1896]: 32) asserts: “Perception is master of space in the exact measure in which action is master of time”. In other words, the way we see or understand the world around us cannot be explained only by the moment of an encounter or thinking. Explaining space has to take on memories and adopted ways of relating to objects, but also the different traces and discursive legacies time has left in space. As David Wishart (2004) shows geography is not a purely spatial discipline treating the past as separate sequences; geography acquires its agency to explain and contextualize only with time. Time itself, however, conceals easy conceptualizations, especially when the intention is to concern people and regions, both individual narratives and social discourses. Surely, time has been of interest ever since humans recognized patterns in celestial bodies and understood the primitive idea behind a sundial.11 Philosophers have attempted to define time in various ways since the ancient Greeks. Ronald Hoy (2013) illustrates how in the works of Heraclitus gods represented the eternal. Gods were the same in the past, present and future and though they were in a flux between opposite ends, they represented something that always is. Heraclitus makes a distinction between mortality, the provisional side of things, and the cyclical motion of time that has no inception or is bound only in patterns within the flux. Quite the contrary, Parmenides reasoned that there cannot be time. Concentrating only on ‘it is’, not on ‘it is not’, Parmenides thought that humans could only make sense of what they see, feel and experience in the present. He argued that the ontological ‘it is’ cannot be in the past nor can it be thinkable as a state in the future. The element of ‘pure perception’, as Bergson could have named it, does not include any suggestion of a memory. Against Heraclitus’ flux, Parmenides conceived that there is either a position or motion in time, not both. Ideas of an eternal flux or being in the present, however, did not result in a Stoic sense of determinism and fatality. The Aristotelean idea that the physical world can only be understood through change and that change is directed towards something from its potentiality, created a powerful discourse of time as progress towards an idealized future. However, with Aristotle’s concept of change lies 11 The sundial in Figure 2b is symbolic of time in itself. The castle island that it is positioned has been known from the time of the Domesday book and it, probably, appears in Ptolemy’s Geographia. In addition, the tide that renders St Michael’s mount as an island is a suitable example of the Heraclitean flux. 37 an integral problem. If we allow ourselves to think of time as a change from potentiality to actuality, then on what grounds and by whom can the ‘number of change’ (Falcon 2013: 53) be determined? The linearity of time, deliberated first by Aristotle, must thus be understood from the onset of change to our present time-horizon. How can such an extension ever be objective? This question is problematic in relation to regions. When we concern ideas that resonate with Aristotlean change or issues of transformation, we must be clear in defining what the starting point of such transformation is, what such a choice does in respect to what lies both beyond and between linearity. In Sein und Zeit, Martin Heidegger (1931 [1926]) tries to conceptualize the ontology of being and regards that such a question is rooted in time. Expanding on the ideas of Parmenides, on ‘discovering’ and ‘concealment’ or what is and what is not (in present), and from Aristotle on the nature of change of how the concealed part of being is founded in what history entrusted, übergibt, Heidegger understands that being, other than in its phenomenological sense of ‘seeing’ reality, can only be conceptualized through time. Heidegger (1931 [1926]: 20) maintains that existence or Da-sein, ‘is its past’ that, in retrospect, ‘occurs’ out of its future. Understanding being as a continuum of time, opens and organizes the possibilities of existence (Thomas 1996). Yet, Heidegger’s conceptualization of ‘generation’, in the occurring of the future, Zukunft her geschieht, part (1931 [1926]: 20) is somewhat deterministic. By implying that the past of Da-sein is applicable to a ‘generation’ and that past runs ahead of Da-sein, he leaves little room for the arguments of free will, devalues the present and raises questions about just whose presence or existence is in question.12 Heidegger amended his argument that the present is not constituted only of temporality but can also take form through the opening or ‘clearing the original’ (Joronen 2008: 599) that makes room for new spatialities. What is confusing in Heidegger’s thinking of time, is that he plays with the idea of an original source in relation to thinking about ontology and is ready to hand off birth certificates for original ideas but argues that lack of history is no evidence against the historicity of Da-sein. The incongruence in problematizing time in relation to the ‘origin of ideas’ and to existence could be brushed off by arguing that they answer different questions, but it does exemplify Heidegger’s two understandings of time. What Heidegger wanted to show was that the ways traditions and different lines of thought had wandered or had been ideologized, cluttered the original sources of thinking that represented for Heidegger the purest ways of thinking of ontology. However, by reducing the past between the time of his writing and Aristotle, Heidegger treats much of time as tradition that sinks to the level of the obvious ready to be reworked. While being and the arguments of being are different things, it bears to question whether the 12 Heidegger pushes for a strand of existentialism that should be understood against what he calls ‘personalismus’. He acknowledges that his project does not take into account the theory of relativity and is thus applicable only to the planetary space humans inhabit (Heidegger 1931 [1926]: 47, 417–418). While it is outside the scope of this dissertation, the question whether the sun ‘existed’ before men (Toadvine 2014) is a reasonable division between Heidegger’s existentialism and a phenomenology that includes individuals (See also the point I made against ‘flat ontology’ (Vainikka 2014a)). 38 journey from A to B can be separated from the imagined path between points. Can we understand ideas if the origin is heralded and not the struggles in between? For Heidegger, being is a temporal issue. Still, we can be more progressive, if we turn back to Bergson since Heidegger is quite tangential to the asynchronous nature of change and how time is a question of adaptable perception more than origins, clearings and past-dependent being. Trying to understand the mutuality of realism and idealism and how time is both quantitative and qualitative, Bergson (1911 [1896]: 33) goes to great lengths explaining that “there is no perception which is not full of memories” and that our character is the “condensation of history we have lived” (Bergson 1911 [1907]: 5). For him, time is open and creative, whereas space is a view taken by time. As Deleuze (1988 [1966]: 63) states, we move “from the past to present, from recollection to perception”. Time is a dimension that cannot be compared with spatial dimensions, rather our travel and our accumulating experiences are the ‘facts’ that make understanding of time possible. Perception “propels us toward the present, the real, to space, objects, matter to the immediate or impending future” whereas, and in a different degree, memory “impels us toward consciousness, to the past, and to duration” (Grosz 2005: 97). While the virtuality of past functions can be regarded to be in contrast to the actuality of the present (Hill 2014), for Bergson (1911 [1896]: 49) a “conscious perception signifies choice” upon past experiences. Memory and perception become inseparable when the way we see the world is negotiated through past experiences. The ways we negotiate future instances or the way individuals travel in time is not a straightforward motion. Benjamin Fraser (2008) states that for Bergson space is linear “while it is time that is undirected creativity”, where different instants, memories or affections exist with each other. As Bergson unchains the linearity of time, he simultaneously claims that what is picked up from the past is what makes temporality necessary. The notion of duration that signifies meaningful periods is what is underlined in Bergson’s thinking. This grew from doubt in quantitatively splitting time into meaningless instants (Dodgshon 2008b). For example, for time to be meaningful a step cannot be separated into its parts. The mobility of the step has to be considered in its entirety. While Zeno’s tortoise might have an endless head start, such a position is logically impossible if we think through durations. The pure durations or mobility (Bergson 1922) of arrows, steps or shooting stars were not the only examples of the undivided nature of duration (McHugh 2009). Bergson (1911 [1907]) broadened the use of the notion to include the continuous progress of the past that swells as it accelerates. Duration can be understood as a sense of continuous becoming, “with each new present adding to the past in us” (Dodgshon 2008a: 7), a “conscious experience” (Linstead and Mullarkey 2003: 5) or in a sense which I have used it in terms of identities “the meaningful time spent in certain locales” (Vainikka 2012). At first hand, the ideas of Bergson might seem irrelevant to this dissertation. What could an early twentieth century philosopher despised by the likes of Henri Lefebvre and heralded more by mobilities scholars than regional geographers contribute for a study of spatial identification? Jon May and Nigel Thrift claim that the ‘spatial turn’ in social 39 sciences recognized in the 1990s made geographers a little uneasy. While addressing the importance that space makes, the turn did little to traverse the level of metaphor. In many occasions, space was still “relegated to the realm of stasis” whereas time was “the domain of dynamism and Progress” (May and Thrift 2001: 2). Massey (2005: 11–12) argues that ideas of Progress, Development, Modernization, modes of production in Marxism all suggest a clear and known direction from history towards the future. But what do we do with space that does not change or with change that is known? Massey argues that politics can make a difference only if it treats the future as open. One of her main arguments in For Space is that if time is open, space must be open as well. But why separate space from time if such a manoeuvre comes with a danger of freeze-framing space into passive containers (cf. Noble 2009)? While we can perceive space as it is, it will still carry the traces and legacies of the pasts (Anderson 2010; Vainikka 2014a), or of stories-so-far as Massey (2005) puts it that speak of past and layered power-geometries between sites. History without a location, on the other hand, answers only the questions of where the positionality of such a history is either hidden or self-evident. Bergson’s conceptualization of time resonates with the concept of ‘becoming’, where space and regions are open to transformation (Pred 1984) or emerging (Paasi 1986a). Bergson’s philosophy was that of action, process and movement (Linstead and Mullarkey 2003) and within such a perspective time was foremost experienced, which is the prime reason geographers are interested in time. Bergson held the relation between experience and unfolding time so strong that to measure time converted it to space and supposed that what we observe as unfolding would be contained for such measurement (Bergson 1922: 62). Spatializing time, or partitioning a fluid reality and to create division in that reality was the role of the intellect (Fraser 2008), but here the intellect must not be considered as a Bourdieuan Homo Academicus, rather an act of contemplation or reflection open to everyone.13 The ‘spatialized time’ is influential to the way people understand themselves and the world around them and how they proportionalize their own past, even if every memory image can exist with the other or re-emerge in different contexts. Leyshon and Bull (2011) divide Bergson’s understanding of memory into categories of reflex, cognitive and narrative. While the categories of reflex and cognitive memory are important in how we relate to things, the narrative form of memory that allows organizing thinking is where the ‘creativity of time’ takes place. It is only through narrative claims or storied identities that individuals are permitted to formulate seemingly stable identities (Somers 1994; Leyshon and Bull 2011; Vainikka 2012). Our memories are reconsidered and recalibrated so that each new present slightly alters our memory images. Without narratives that build on memories we would not be in control of who we are, without other people to whom to tell those narratives our identity narratives become elusive. Musing on performing 13 Linstead and Mullarkey (2003) discuss the relationship between intellectual philosophies and the real world. Relatedly, regional geography is sometimes plagued with ideas that regions are “intellectual concepts [that] cannot be said to exist as wholes until recognized as such by scholars” (Wishart 2004: 308), while geogra- phers especially should understand them as categories of practice (Brubaker and Cooper 2000) that differ in people’s minds (Agnew 1999). 40 identity in contrast to the recognition and relational construction of identity, W. H. Auden (1962) composes that: “In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.” The difference between time and memory is crucial. Time for Bergson is always about change taking place in the everyday without eruptions in the fabric of time as “we change without ceasing” (Bergson 1911 [1907]: 2), whereas memory is an intersection between mind and past in a way that we are products of our histories. The choices people make, the different paths, encounters and interactions constitute their identities. Often looking back in time, people start to conceive their identity that is perpetually transforming. Some scholars have conceptualized the unfinished and emerging forms of identity through the concept of place. Paasi conceptualizes ‘place’ against much of the Anglo-American humanistic thinking as “the cumulative archive of personal experiences and meanings which individuals gain from different locations and landscapes during their life-history” (Paasi 1996: 208). John Eyles’ (1985) idea that a sense of place is the sum of the episodes of a person’s life that influences new encounters is related (cf. Breakwell 1986; Fullilove 1996). Such conceptualizations can be understood through reflexive narratives as well. Narratives give room for the individual to define the way they perceive different localities in relation to their identity and leaves the option for the ‘narrator’ to leave out or gloss over some spatial stories from their desired identity story and thus close in the gap between. While I agree that people are the products of their own histories, these histories are not made of objective time. Rather as Bergson (1911 [1907]) illustrates, time matters to people more if it relates to meaningful durations that help in constructing a narrative of identity. Moreover, time itself should be conceptualized as multiple durations and subjective times that together make up experience. We can continue to regard place as an important factor of identity but different locales impact different parts of that identity and can respond to different episodes in a person’s past but also desires or anticipations of a person’s future. In order to understand how time becomes social, it is useful to recognize the differences in Bergson’s and Deleuze’s thinking. Robert Dodgshon (2008b) claims that for Bergson the main factor that enables individuals to be different and reflexive is the space between memory and perception, whereas Deleuze is more concerned about how difference is maintained by our habits. I understand that Deleuze combines ideas of Bergson and Heidegger more than he is generating an opposition to Bergson. Finding it troublesome to discuss the differences between material repetition and how the mind changes as it contemplates such repetition, Deleuze (1994 [1968]) interweaves three types of understandings of time in relation to consciousness. These ‘three syntheses of time’ are more than ‘a succession of instants’ that both constitute time and cause it to disappear. For Deleuze, the passive synthesis of time explains the irrational repetition of habits where the instants of past are contracted into the present. In other words, through our habits we are reliving the past and setting our bearings for the future. Such passive synthesis alone 41 does not explain much since it does not concern the relationality of habits and how our thousands of habits are shaped by other people (Hodges 2008). The ‘active synthesis’ of time encapsulates how memory sort of embeds presents. In such a process, memories are proportioned into a living present and which to an increasing extent generate coexisting levels of the past. Within this active synthesis, the linearity of time matters little since the memories that constitute the present can be drawn from different times. Deleuze plays with Bergson’s idea of duration in such a way that some scholars have labelled aspects of their thinking of time as distaff tradition (Hodges 2008), where memories and identity forging moments are more or less weaved from previous times depending on the present context. Ideas where the present is constituted by the past or where the present is drawn from the past are accompanied by a third synthesis of time, that of ‘empty form’. Deleuze characterizes this as the rupture of time or a metamorphosis that transforms repetitions into something completely new, as a moment where the seemingly eternal nature of the habit is transformed. What is problematic with the concept of the empty form of time, where “time is no longer subordinated to movement” (Deleuze 1994 [1968]: 89) is the limit between its own emptiness and the time needed for emptiness to become a habit and passive time in itself. Playing with ideals that are timeless as such paradoxically replaces previous times with present ideals. This chapter has argued for the role of time and memories for identities but surely there is a social element in time. Lisa Hill (2014: 415) argues that the memories “arise within a wider historical context that is not of [one’s] own making, a historical context that must nonetheless be negotiated each time”. Like Gadamer (1993 [1975]) reminds, our understanding of the present and how we construct our identities is effected by history, or that the forms of traditions are best understood among those who follow those traditions. Related to collective time, Fernand Braudel (1990 [1949]) presented that time runs in three different speeds. Geographical time refers to geological changes in nature, which take place so slowly that individuals rarely notice them, even if such time results in the very geographical features upon which social lives are constructed. The long-term cultural, economic and social history or the longue durée is the time span where patterns that confine the everyday can be articulated. Braudel argues that the continuities of deeper structures are important in understanding how the ‘social’ became manifested and how the history of groups and groupings run in on separate tracks from that of individuals and events. The third type of history for Braudel is in the scale of men, where different events create history. Braudel (1990 [1949]: 21) claims: “We must learn to distrust this history with its still burning passions, as it was felt, described, and lived by contemporaries whose lives were as short and short-sighted as ours.” But why should we trust the social histories described by individuals any better? Hill (2014: 424) rightly reflects that “The past is a legacy that I cannot escape, even though it may not be of my making. Past events create an expectation in terms of what is yet to come, a series of habits and events that synthesize past and future”. Reminding that we are embodied subjects as we use our bodies to perceive the world (Merleau-Ponty 42 1962 [1945]) and that sensing time is an embodied emotion through which individuals can relate to others (Ahmed 2004; Droit-Volet and Gil 2009), we do not have a single and uniform image of the past. While people do project themselves to different collective legacies, real, invigorated or invented and while such a process can help to solidify and substantiate belonging and form a sense of place, past in itself does not control any sense of collectivity. Collective identities emerge from a shared experience of time, not from a shared ancestry. What has to be kept in mind is that when discourses of heritage are constructed, facilitated and even canonized, they are created and validated from that moment. The reconstitution of the past as heritage provides familiarity and guidance, reaffirms and enriches identities and offers a discourse of escape from the present (Lowenthal 1985). Anthony D. Smith (2000: 67) argues that people create personal myths of “being ancestrally related, even if it is purely fictive and ideological in character” and endow a community “with a powerful sense of belonging”. Stating that “the past validates the present through the idea of timeless values and lineages” (Graham et al. 2000: 40) places too much emphasis on the past as a single story or an authoritative account on history. Here we must make a distinction between material and discursive heritage. Material heritage of course needs preservation and decisions are made about what artefacts are preserved and what are held of interest. The discursive heritage, the way we speak about the past and how a sense of ‘we’ has changed without ceasing need qualifying. Crucially, the past is not singular, but it is not strictly contingent either. As we perceive the past from our vantage point we create discourses of it that reflect our times. Heritage is always dependent on the time of its construction. If the past seems contingent, it is only contingent insofar as it resonates to what we have learned, experienced and understood about the values of today. Individual identities in modern societies are often constructed on the basis of what is taught at school and what kind of histories and heritage is circulated in the media. The effect of this is that there are significant generational differences in the sense of history for different individuals with tangible regional differences. What these differences indicate is that they interpret the past in their own way, and more importantly, are free to interpret history, make arguments based on it and qualify their relation to it in their own open-ended and fluid way (Harvey 2010). Conversely, every decision people make, whether about moving to other territories, on the locations of trade or about redefining areas or domains of taxation and jurisdiction are conscious, interdependent or mediated decisions. The trace they leave – a written document, a phrase, a form of practice or a social divide – create legacies that through time can be reimagined or reinvigorated creating another set of legacies (Vainikka 2014a). The main point is that different times leave their own mark on shared, social discourses and that these legacies should be understood as a reflection of the spatial power geometries of that time and not against the desires we might have in imagining our present identities. More specifically in relation to regions, different times and different territorial assemblages are at times still visible to citizens, transforming space into a palimpsest of previous boundaries that might deinstitutionalize but will not vanish (Vainikka 2012, 2013). 43 The term ‘legacies’ work against periodization of time. On one hand, if we try to periodize history into distinct time frames, it too easily cocoons everyday practices and forges an image of similitude that leaves too little room for progress, change and transformation. Cultural habits and traditions change more gradually and adopt ideas that only supplement previous ones. Political spatial reconfigurations eventually have a ripple effect on culture, for example in cases of evacuation (Raivo 2002; Kuusisto-Arponen 2009) or in substantial urban regeneration (Marcus 2001; Jordan 2004), but they do not transform the past, they only mediate our memories. The part in culture that becomes supported only by memory tries to transplant itself elsewhere instead of transforming entirely into something else. On the other hand, periodization is done from the future. Our need for understanding epochs in the past tangles the reading of choices and decisions made in order to change contemporary time. Periodizing time treats eras as self-explanatory when we should instead understand the past as sets of ideas and ideologies that build on from the earlier. Certain legacies can be reconfigured and reinterpreted but it does not change history itself, rather the interpretation creates a new legacy. Relatedly as the periodization is done from the present, or from the future of that period, it unnecessarily paints past societies as stable. Periodization and constructing heritages create an image of our present society as “inherently unstable, improvisational, continuously differentiating” (Ruddick 2009: 223). Stabilizing histories and periodizing time ‘privileges the moment’ as liquid and hybrid (Dodgshon 2008b; Vainikka 2014b). The fluidity of the present is hampered by its own horizon of sight. Histories do not start from any single points rather it is the points in history that generate discourses of legacies that usually include spatial element. Different points in history form a kaleidoscope for open interpretation; a set of legacies that everyone can interpret. For the practices of identification, the histories of places have an influence on the ways people see themselves as parts of their everyday community. In the focus groups Teija, 60, from North Ostrobothnia cited Maarit Verronen’s Luolavuoret that “a person who does not know or does not want to know what lies or has been within a radius of ten kilometres of one’s current home, is an uncivilized person.” She reasoned her participation in a Local Heritage Association through those lines and thought that it is “broadly and obligingly said”. Conceptualizing belonging in such ways relates to the earlier discussions about different ways of seeing and the mobile and more moored or attached ways of being. Thus, the ways individuals and communities discuss, structure and understand spatial relations and regions are more complicated than the canonized national divides. While people can easily justify their belonging with the historical narratives presented to them as facts, it becomes more difficult to illustrate how some historical narrative has survived as such a fact. I have indicated “traditions linger in regional consciousness” and “spatial palimpsest […] affect every new regional construct” (Vainikka 2012). Time is not a linear formation where every transformation would happen after another; rather collective identities are constructed through a selective reading of history (Harvey 2000). Like the quote above 44 by Amnesty member, Mary, illustrates, time and history are important for identification. How people construct their identities should not be defined by the writings of one period, rather the contemporary regional structures and older partly deinstitutionalized regions give an opportunity for people to project themselves through these different times, entitle themselves to different regional discourses upon which they can build their own identity narratives or opt out from any regional imaginaries. Identifying with regions has more to do with how people perform their identities rather than how the regions were used to construct the nation. 45 Figure 3. The eastern side of Alexander II memorial depicting Lux (science & art) at the Senate Square in Helsinki. Designed by Johannes Takanen and Walter Runeberg. Revealed in 1894. (Photo by the author, 10/ 2014). 3 Tracing regional legacies 3.1 Comparing Finland and South West England Comparisons are never easy and they do not contain similar counterparts. The sense in comparative studies is not seeking similar cases to justify culturally situated conceptualizations but finding comparable social processes that, regardless of their opposing characters, can contribute to an analytical conceptualization. The rationale for selecting two different countries for this research was to avoid explaining concepts like identity and region based on nationally fortified discourses. The most useful conceptualizations are formed of studies that open the habitual use of situated terms to criticism and use concepts as abstractions, not as the proper nouns of political systems. The political and regional systems in Finland and in England vary greatly. First, England is one of the four countries in the United Kingdom and the only country without its own parliament, whereas Finland is a parliamentary republic with one autonomic area. Second, until the election in 2010 England was predominantly a bi-party country, which effectively meant that the regional ideologies changed to fit the ruling party politics. Coalition governments have been formed only during times of crisis. In Finland, no party has gained a majority since independence and minority single-party governments have only been formed during societal gridlock, and ideological differences between the parties concerning regional structures have led to different visions of what exactly a region is. Third, the concepts functional region and ceremonial region have a significant difference. In Finland, the current provinces or regions started to take hold in the 1920s as a new cultural assemblage and they were effectively used in regional planning from the 1960s. As organization districts and regional media took shape, they challenged canonized, national ideas of provinces. The regional councils and ‘regions’ that were established in the 1990s on many occasions followed older patterns but made sure also that the regional councils would operate their functional areas from a central city. In England, the counties seem so etched into the ways people discern space that they have become taken-for-granted markers of social space. Counties in many cases date from the eleventh century. Often created on top of earlier kingdoms or shires, they were the bridgeheads of central power administered through a representative chosen by the monarchs. Currently, the administrative counties can have four different statuses: unitary, two-tier non-metropolitan, metropolitan and London borough. While commuter regions are used for the planning and allocation of infrastructure, the greater city-regions of London and Manchester are the only regions that have been created around a functional centre. One obstacle for a comparison is to state English counties as regions, but should a truism prevent the use of an analytical concept? In Finland, the term ‘region’, alue, is used for any territorial ensemble that can be regarded as bounded and as a synonym for a province. In England, the term ‘region’ is politically tied to the Standard Regions or Labour 47 government constructed Regional Development Agencies. In the 2010s, that regional structure started to falter. During the coalition government, regions became ‘curse words’, functioning only as constituencies and statistical units for the European Union. If we look at how the political systems are organized, it becomes clearer how the term ‘region’ could be understood as a bottom-up category rather than a subdivision of a country. Provinces and counties, in both countries, are regions of local government. In Finland, the political representation of regional councils is mediated through the municipalities. In England, some towns and cities have formed their own councils disconnected from the rest of the county. To understand why the ideas of the regions are so different, it is fruitful to understand the historical making of regionalism in both countries. The excavation of histories serves as a background for the articles themselves since the articles do not offer the space for in-depth illustrations of regional legacies. Another motive for the nearly painstaking rigour and criticism towards most characterizations of Finnish regions particularly is that the history writing of regions is at the same time mixed with nineteenth century truisms and ideologies that have shadowed actual histories. The chapter on English history is shorter and emphasizes more the regional legacies of the South West. The main message here is that if we wish the future to be open, we have to beware of the unlikely singularities of our history.14 3.2 On how the ideas of the ‘Finnish province’ were synchronized Careless of mankind, careless of the gods, they have realized the very hard condition of needing not even a wish. Tacitus 98 AD15 The history of Finnish provinces is a convoluted and asynchronous one. It would be easy to dismiss the history of the province in Finland by saying that they date “back to the Middle Ages” (Paasi 2013: 1210; cf. Mechelin et al. 1893: 23). To skip historical source materials and literature is to turn a blind eye to the critical relationship between regions and nations and how they have shaped each other (Vainikka 2014a). Understandably, political ideologies have infused some of the interpretations of history and certainly knowledge that the researchers produce has always been situated (Rose 1997; Kobayashi 2009) insofar that different researchers highlight different things from the same material (Bailey et al. 2009). My intention in this section is not to provide an exhaustive analysis 14 Appendixes 6 and 7 provide a comprehensive list of all the place names mentioned in the synopsis and in the articles. The maps do not, however, indicate the locations of regions since these can be highly time-dependent. 15 In Latin, Securi adversus homines, securi adversus deos rem difficillimam adsecuti sunt, ut illis ne voto quidem opus esset. I use an old translation by Church and Brodribb (Tacitus 1868: 32). 48 of the different conflicting and inconsistent accounts and interpretations on earlier social categories, mediaeval territories and the political premises that created them. Rather, the purpose of this analytical section is to tease out the overlapping periods in the evolution of Finnish regions and to illustrate the historical source materials, which have created regional legacies and which haunt the imaginaries of current regions. The social observation of Henri Lefebvre (1991), that every period creates its own spatial organization or that every epoch creates its own regional structure and vocabulary, lends itself fairly well to the malleability of Finnish regions. While trying to avoid strict periodization (Wishart 2004), I maintain that Finnish regions carry the legacies of 1) tribal areas that can be found in early literature sources, 2) diffusive ecclesiastical territorialization, 3) castle administration, 4) the provincial ideologies of the House of Vasa, 5) geopolitical naturalization, 6) national provincialism, 7) functional regionalism and 8) metropolization and competitive regionalism. As I explained my use of legacies, I think that history must be explained from the past to present, not from the present (Bergson 1911 [1907]: xiii–xiv), understanding the historically-effected settings in which different interpretations have been written (Gadamer 1993 [1975]). Therefore, this section uses mostly original source material and documents with which I try to avoid looking at the history of regions through the canonized or, perhaps more fittingly, synchronized ‘historical provinces’ put forward by Zachris Topelius (1845–1852, 1879). Deconstructing the history beyond the ‘historical provinces’ gives more room for current regional forms. 3.2.1 Territorializing tribes People, who lived in the current territory of Finland during the first millennium, lived off of the resources from forests and lakes, adopted agriculture comparatively late, traded and were in contact with the rest of Europe. Opening up the etymology of the term ‘Finland’ is a fruitful way to understand the evolution of regional categories. It is believed that the term ‘Finn’ in its various forms - Fenni, Phinnoi - has been used since Tacitus and the Roman era. More than other first millennium sources, the excerpt from Tacitus’ De Origine et situ Germanorum, where he idealizes the people of the north being out of reach of the provincial system of Rome that he saw bringing decadence and corruption, have influenced the theories of the etymology of the word. One theory sees that the term ‘Finn’ refers to the Old Norse term finna, meaning ‘to find’, while another theory implies that the root of the term comes from a Germanic term fanþian-, meaning ‘to wander’ (Grünthal 1997). Either way, those who used the definition were not exactly describing the northern people by some social organization, rather a way of living without really concerning whether people might have sections of their own (see Pekkanen 1984). Understanding the insularity is important since the variation within the Finns becomes clearer only during the so-called northern crusades. Three tribes populated the land north of the Gulf of Finland in the late eleventh century: the Finns, Tavastian and Karelians 49 that had their own agglomerations of population and places of trade. Nevertheless, the term ‘tribe’ must be defined quite loosely (Korpela 2008), because it is not definitive that these groups used these names for themselves or whether such terms were used to describe land and people outside their customary territories. In addition, it is estimated that the population number of the groups was rather low (Kirkinen et al. 1994: 29), especially if compared with more organized social structures. Also, the usable areas for mobile forms of living were rather large, from the Gulf of Finland to the Gulf of Bothnia (Kuusela 2013) or to the White Sea (Saksa 1998). Related to this, Kustaa Vilkuna (1964) has speculated that the western Finnish pitäjä and the Estonian influenced Eastern Finnish kihlakunta16 would have been stronger forms of social organization and units of co-operation than rather vast tribes. There are numerous direct literature sources of these tribal areas. Finland, fin*lonti, is mentioned on an early eleventh century Uppland Rune Stone, U582, and Finns were mentioned in Ynglinga, Saint Oláf ’s and Egil Skallagrimsson’s sagas,17 for instance. While the Norse and Icelandic sagas, or family narratives, cover prehistoric periods, they were mainly written between 1220 and 1240 (Jesch 2001; Lönnroth 2008). Karelia, or Kirjálaland/Kyrjålaland, is mentioned in Saint Olaf ’s and Egil’s Sagas.18 In the light of the viking period, from 800 to 1050, Finland and Karelia can be understood as different territories with different social practices. The southwestern part of Finland had close connections with Sveas Uppland, whereas the Karelians living in the Karelian Isthmus and around Lake Ladoga had more trade interests with the Novgorodians. Tavastia, as Tafstalonti, appears for the first time in the mid-eleventh century on a Gästrikland Rune Stone, GS13, that describes a Svean invasion or ledung to the area.19 Later versions of the Chronicle of the Novgorod list in 1042 hostility towards the “Yem” that historians have widely recognized as Häme (=Tavastia). In 1142, the Yem are reported ‘making war’ in a Novgorod province where the ‘men of Ladoga’ took on the aggression. A counterattack by Korel people followed against the Yem in 1143 (FMU 15 & 16; CN, p. 18–19).20 16 The interpretation of Vilkuna (1964) and Väinö Voioinmaa (1915) is supported by the fact that the Treaty of Orešek/Nöteborg speaks of Karelsk gitzla lagh or Karelian jurisdictional districts (FMU 313). No original record of the treaty document has survived. 17 See chapters 16 and 22 in the Ynglinga Saga, chapters 8, 81 and 83 in the Saint Oláf saga (Sturluson 2009 [ca. 1230]) and chapters 7, 9, 10, 13–15 and 17 in Egil’s saga (Alving 1979; Egillin, Kalju-Grímrinpojan Saaga 1994). The Finns who are referred to in King Alfred’s account of Ohthere’s description and in Egil’s Saga can also be in interpreted as Sami people (Valtonen 2008), especially as both of them were written from a Norwegian Sea perspective and as the Sami people lived until early second millennium in what are now central parts of Finland. In addition to the Egil Skallagrimsson’s saga, the Old English Orosius (Bately 1980; see also Tucker et al. 2009) describes an area of Cwenland, but the use of the term ceases around Christianization. The term apparently denotes areas somewhere between the Gulf of Bothnia and the White Sea and it is traditionally thought to survive linguistically in the provincial name Kainuu. Whether or not the Finns in Egils’s saga are actually Finns, is irrelevant to my argument. The use of different names for different groups, Finns, Kvens and Kiriales shows that social organization into ‘tribes’, regions or ways of living took place before 1100 AD. 18 See chapters 14 and 17 in Egil’s saga and chapter 81 in Saint Oláf ’s saga. 19 See GS13 in Samnordisk runtextdatabas (2009) and for a further analysis Williams (2004). 20 It is possible that at first the term Yem, Емь, included both Finns and Tavastians, who both lived across the Gulf of Finland (Gallén 1965). 50 The Karelians seem to have sought allegiance with the Novgorodians, perhaps in interest of utilizing secure trade routes in, for example, fur trade. Thus, the Finnish Gulf was of interest for the seafaring powers and the conflicts between Tavastia and Karelia were tied to trade, use of territories or sheer plundering. Christianity was adopted gradually. Trade connections, the new explanations of the afterlife and military force were key components when older traditions and practices were amalgamated into the new beliefs. The southwestern part of Finland had been tied economically to the Swedish realm since the viking period (Vilkuna 1964; Meinander 2006). As Svealand grew in strength, trade between Finland and especially Uppland increased and the more Swedish settlers and traders moved to southwestern Finland, the easier it was for its inhabitants to adopt a common religion. The legend of Bishop Henry from the twelfth century was understood previously as a crusade, but presumably the English-born Henry’s stay in Finland was only a continuum of established relations. Either way, southwestern Finland became predominantly Christianized before the Northern or Baltic Crusades were officially commissioned in 1193 (Jensen et al. 2001; Munzinger 2006). Christianity, and especially Catholicism, has an evident geographical aspect as it developed clearly defined territories with enduring hierarchies (Sack 1986: 93) and helped to forge enduring kingdoms. Hierarchical structures are one of the hallmarks of Christianization, but to make the structure work new congregates were most often formed around and churches were erected over older and already existing places of gathering (see also Harvey 2000; Vainikka 2013). To say that the Swedish-Catholic rule was constructed over a “virgin land” (Katajala and Juvonen 2006: 14) suffers from the legacy of H.G. Porthan, who argued for the lack of social organization between the ‘tribes’.21 Given the simultaneous interest in the Baltic conversion of Teutonic and Livonian Orders and Danish and Swedish kings, the ‘virgin land’ discourse appears improbable as it also disregards how the subordination of inhabited lands was built on existing places of worship and used the names and terms already established. The rivalry between Swedish and Danish kings on one side and the strengthening Novgorod allied with Karelians on the other side meant that the areas surrounding the Gulf of Finland became a conflict area. Some evidence exists that Orthodox monks had started to convert Karelians around Lake Ladoga already in the twelfth century (Korpela 2008; Parppei 2010). In most occasions, however, belief and presence went hand in hand. 21 Porthan, an early nationalist in the late eighteenth century, suggested that the Finns consisted of a single group that after migration started to differ internally. Leaning to Tacitus, Porthan also believed that Finns did not have social structures, military strategies, chieftains or even a proper belief system. From contemporary scholars, Jukka Korpela has repeatedly adhered to Porthanian legacy, stating that the Finnic tribes could not have organized on a basis other than that of family, while reminding that tribe or stamm ideology arrived from the eighteenth century Germany and that the translation of an extended family was, up until mid-nineteenth century, heimo (=tribe). Korpela (2008, see also Korpela 2003) insists that prehistoric people could not have considered outsiders as ‘other’ or that outsiders could not have formed categories larger than a family. While I agree that extending contemporary or known historical terms deeper into history does not serve critical science (Kuusela 2013: 20), we should not strip away the ability to locate, name and identify other people that people living in prehistoric Finland might come across. In other words, administration is not the only way collective differences are constructed and perceived. 51 The later dubbed Crusades were not only missions of the cross but also attempts to gain the control of taxation and rivalries between realms. The pope granted the regi Suetie a title to all acquired lands from heathens in 1216 (FMU 52), whereas the Laurentinian Chronicle insists that nearly all Karelians were force baptized in 1227 (Jutikkala and Pirinen 2003: 49– 50; Korpela 2008: 23–24). The Indulgencie concesse crucesignatis or pardon for crusaders given by the pope in 1237 (FMU 82) regrets that the Tavuesti dicintur nacio do not keep their faith,22 was an impetus for the Tavastian crusade in 1238–1239 (Lind 1991). The campaign undeniably annexed the core regions of Tavastia to Finland (Proper) and to the consolidated Swedish Kingdom. The time of the crusade should not be understood as the start of Christianity in Tavastia, rather its institutionalization with the subsequent erection of a Tavastehus fortress and coastal forts as a means of frontier defence. Matti Kerkkonen (1962; see also Niitemaa 1955; Heinonen 1997) made a claim that the Crusade created the first eastern border of Finland. While such a demarcation might be a suitable term, the boundary was not a Finnish border, rather a border of the Aboensis bishopric. As a part of the missionary attempts to control trade routes in the Baltic Sea, a Swedish fleet with Finns (Sum) and Hämeans (Yem) and other crusaders attempted to enter Lake Ladoga and were confronted by Novgorod forces in the river Neva in 1240. The corresponding chronicle that probably was written and appended (see Lind 1991) during the late thirteenth century spoke of the people of Finland with the endonym term Sum, suomalaiset, thus underlining the separateness of the two groups but also divided the Finnish people, Finns, Tavastians and Karelians, into two different belligerent groups. The battle of Neva and the subsequent campaign at Lake Peipus increased the influence of Novgorod, but the boundary between the western and eastern churches was far from ready. Karelia remained somewhat ‘independent’ until 1278 when, associated with internal power disputes, Novgorod took tighter control of the area (Kirkinen 1982: 267; Jutikkala and Pirinen 2003: 56). As part of the Karelian Crusade, Swedes established the frontier fortress of Viborg in 1293 in a previously populated bay at the western mouth of Vuoksi.23 Novgorod replied by taking control of a former Karelian stronghold of Korela/Kexholm. Unrest caused by taxation resulted in Karelian mutinies and their pleas the Swedes for help. Whether for reasons of war-weariness or accepting a status quo, the Treaty of Orešek/ Nöteborg was signed in 1323. The earliest survived record of the treaty is from the late fifteenth century, and interestingly Mikael Agricola, Michael Wexionius and Eric Tuneld, in the subsequent centuries, fail to mention the treaty. The indefinite versions of the treaty intrigued numerous interpretations of the boundary (Gallén and Lind 1991), as only the part in the Karelian Isthmus towards the second Salpausselkä is clearly stated in all versions. The border zone lasted for nearly three hundred years in an era when societal structures – church, military, administration, nobility, markets – were developing. At the same time, the boundary created and fortified a mixture of differences between east and 22 The Gravis Admodum concerning Finns in 1171 or 1172 was a similar plea from ‘local informants’ to justify presence in acquired land (Jensen et al. 2001). 23 Due to land uplift the course of Vuoksi moved entirely to Kexholm in the seventeenth century. 52 west and even between Swedish Karelia and Russian Karelia. There are some parallels in dialect borders (Hyvönen et al. 2007), folk traditions (see for example Vilkuna 1940; Siikala 2012), types of ‘national’ deceases and even genetic variations (Salmela et al. 2008; Palo et al. 2009) along the 1323 border zone but these are not clear-cut. Nonetheless, the differences fuel a belief that is a mental construct more than a clear cut cultural boundary (Klinge 1982; Vainikka 2013). 3.2.2 From terras and abitaniums to union of Kingdoms As the western church strengthened in coastal Finland, new regional entities emerged. Nyland or Uusimaa became a significant area of Swedish, but also Danish and German, settlement along the Gulf of Finland. As an administrative unit, the name Nylandia started to appear in the early decades of the fourteenth century. The emergence of Satakunta as a definitive region is more complicated. The marketplaces or even towns along the Kokemäki river were descendants of the Eura culture, whose burial methods have provided a wealth of knowledge of the seventh- to ninth-century livelihoods, culture and migration especially from the Rhein region (Vahtola 2003: 22). Satakunta developed from or into parts of Finland (Proper) and Tavastia, and it is rather conventional to imagine the demarcation of the border or its significance. A popular explanation describes that the name Satakunta is a translation of the Svea system of ‘hundreds’ comparable with Uppland’s Tihundria, Athundria and Fierdhundria described, for example, by Bureus (1631), which in turn might have their “origin in the Roman administration” or centeni24 (Arrhenius 2007: 203). While new regions started to emerge alongside three tribal categories, the Finnish territories were treated with a province-like status for the first time in 1326. The port of Åbo (Turku) had gained the sole right to trade with Reval (Tallinn) and the centralized trade was controlled by the governor of Åbo Castle. Merchants and peasants elsewhere wanted to use other ports and the seals of Åland, Finland, Tavastia25 and Nyland were used for the first time in a multilateral agreement that ‘liberated’ trade in the Gulf of Finland (Suvanto 2004b). Finnish scholars have used these seals as proof of seal provinces (sinettimaakunta), but the text refers to the territories as ‘terrarum Finlandie, Nylandie, Thawistie et Alandie’ (FMU 330). The etymology of the term ‘province’ offers a good explanation for the use of terra/terrarum. The Romans used province to indicate control of an area on behalf of its inhabitants or a ‘sphere of duty’ (OED 2014) outside Rome. In Roman mentality, a province was foremost an administrative, not a geographical fact. The Catholic Church used the term of its metropolitan bishoprics through which the church controlled its subjects. In fact, no civil administrative usage of the term has 24 In Germania, Tacitus (1868: ch. 6 & 12) mentions centeni twice as a number of men that counted for a Germanic area. 25 A copy of a document given in Tavastehus in 1319 speaks of a sigillum terre Tauastie (FMU 291). 53 survived in Europe that would date before the French ‘recensement de feux’ or the census of 1328 (Rey 1992: 1659). The actual seals contain a peculiarity. The seal of Åland and Finland include the term ‘land’, terre, whereas Tavastia and Nyland, and later Satakunta,26 are referred to by their people as abitanicium (Hausen 1900: 27). The difference between these seals might relate to the order of establishing administration or to some unclear demarcation of these regions. The seal for Karelia has never been found. Probably there never was one as Swedish Karelia consisted only of a small part of the actual Karelia. In 1316, only ten years prior to the original seals, the Swedes gave a Letter of Protection to the women who live subjected to Viborg Castle or in the land, terre, of Karelia (FMU 275). There are no records of a similar Letter being given to other regions, which at the same time underlines the role of Karelia as an occupied, annexed land, whose Chief of Castle controlled the administration in Viborg and answered directly to the king (Kirkinen et al. 1994). The fourteenth century can be labelled as the century when Finland started to make sense as an entity with distinct divides. In 1334, inhabitants of Finland, Nyland, Åland, Tavastia and Satakunta were encouraged to move to the river valley of the Bay of Bothnia where Karelians have had their own settlements (REA 74). The colonization can be understood as a strategic race northwards between the bishoprics of Uppsala and Åbo (Vahtola 2003). The term ‘province’ appeared in relation to Finland for the first time in 1340 when the castles of Åbo, Tavastehus and Viborg with their lands, provinces and other pieces of land were subjected to the King’s confidant for four years.27 At this point, Finland signified the lands under the control of Åbo Castle and in 1344 the three castle counties were lumped together as Østerlandia. Later on, the unsuccessful attacks to Novgorod, Black Death and disagreements between the King and aristocracy precipitated the divide of the realm to different jurisdictions. On top, a noble Bo Jonsson had skilfully used the situation to fund the realm in exchange for the control of territories especially from Finland. Subsequent to the Danish conquest in Skåne, Finland as Österland was granted in 1362 a right, like other bishopric and lagman areas in the realm, into take part to the King’s election. In the weakened kingdom, Bo Jonsson effectively used de facto power in Finland titling himself as the general official for Sweden and the governor of Österland (Suvanto 2004a; Meinander 2006: 28). He established new castles to Korsholm and Raaseborg, manors Kokemäki and Borgå and ordered the seizure of a Karelian fortress on the river Oulu. Some of these command centres effectively created new functional areas, but it would be highly anachronistic to state that they served as the basis for the ‘historical provinces’ (see also Taavitsainen 2003; cf. Vahtola 2003: 46, 80). Rather, 26 The term Satakunta appears for the first time in 1331 as a sigillum terre Sathagundhie that was used as an equivalent of a personal seal (REA 63). First known seal survives from 1419. 27 The original Latin text mentions Daniel Niclisson as the King’s advocate in the castles of Åbo, Tavastehus and Viborg or Aboo, Tawistahuus et Wiborgh cum terris, prouinciis ac omnibus aliis suis pertinenciis tenenda et regenda (FMU 470). Another source from 1370 uses terris, prouniciis et parrochiis de Finlandia. What is interesting in this King Albkert’s ratification of reconciliation is that it seems to speak of the lands, provinces and parishes of Finland as a four-tier administrative system, where provinces are subordinate to the three castles (REA 196). 54 the key outcome of Bo Jonsson’s time was that administration and justice became more uniform in Österland, albeit under the control of one man (Suvanto 2004a; for critique Jussila 2007). The fact that Bo did not testament his territories to the King of Sweden but to nobility that did not support Albrekt of Mecklenburgh paved the way to the Kalmar Union conjured by Queen Margaret. The Danish Queen forbade the building of any new castles or fortresses and hence the administration areas already in place dominated the regional organization of Finland well into the late fifteenth century. The Grand duchy of Moscow that took over Novgorod (Jacoby 1973 [1969]: 114), the union between Poland and Lithuania and the Kalmar Union together with merchants in Amsterdam weakened the Hanseatic League. As trade was increasingly in the hands of the Union and as Finland was controlled from Copenhagen and not directly in the control of the Swedish crown, Finland had become a more affluent territory (Meinander 2006). A new fortress became more important for the protection of the frontier as settlers from the south side of the Orešek/Nöteborg border zone increasingly populated the northern side as slash cultivators, trappers and fishers. The mediaeval territories were very much spaces controlled by their central castle or manor and the actual border lines were hard to acknowledge. For instance, the border between Savilahti and Lappvesi parishes was only agreed in 1415, simultaneously with the border between Tavastia and Satakunta (REA 352). Savilahti appears as a Karelian district from the fourteenth century onwards. As a parish, it perplexingly is sometimes listed alongside Tavastia, Karelia or Satakunta as well as an area whose inhabitants should abide to pay tithes or taxes to the crown.28 Due to the settlers and colonization of the Saimaa watercourse, Savilax turned into ‘greater’ Savilax. Paasi (1986b: 57) argues that after the construction of the Olof Castle in 1475 Savo(lax) began to make sense as a region. Relating to the fact that the administration was poorly organized and unaware of the vastness of Finland, the first indication of Savo as a province is from 1504 when the royal council stated that the parishes in Finland, especially in “Sawlax oc Karelen”, are too big to be effectively maintained (REA 694). From this acknowledgement, there would be a long way to an established province. Olaus Magnus, described in the 1550s that the new castle situated in Karelian land (Magni 1555; see also Miekkavaara 2008: 45). Built as a frontier castle, Nyslott was intended to secure Swedish taxation and settlement in an area that both the Swedes and the Russians of the Grand duchy of Moscow believed to be under their control after the Treaty of Orešek/ Nöteborg. Skirmishes along the border and especially in the Karelian Isthmus lasted the entire sixteenth century and only in 1595 the parties were able to reach a treaty, which eventually gave Sweden the right to claim territories from around Nyslott pushing the territory of the Kingdom northward. 28 There are two sets of documents from 1329 and 1330 that address the parrochiam Sauilax inhabitantibus alongside Karelia, Tavastia and in 1329 alongside the inhabitants of Salo and Kemi in Østernorlandia (REA 50–53, 60). The next records from Sauilax from 1337 and 1370 (REA 90, 211) further indicate that the Swedish administration was not well organized in the area. 55 3.2.3 House of Vasa and the use of provinces The Kalmar Union became to an end in the 1520s when Sweden detached from the Union after the Danish King had executed most of Swedish high nobility. The young Gustav Vasa, who after teaming up with the merchants of Lübeck and aggregating the Dalecarlia yeomen against the Danes, rose to the throne in a few years. Following European trends of the monetary economy and the fact that the Kingdom was heavily indebted to the merchants of Lübeck (Karonen 2008), Gustav enlarged the administrative profession, improved road connections, created a system of yeomen cavalry and curtailed the importance of high nobility. Still, the young King’s ideology placed importance in sea power (Meinander 2006). From a regional perspective, four of Gustav Vasa’s establishments were integral to later development. First, the castle counties or hövdingedöme were separated into smaller bailiff districts that were accountable to the King directly. Vasa feared that too independent castle administration would make the already vast Kingdom difficult to rule. In order to strengthen control, he used his connections with the German merchants and employed several administrators to bailiwicks, who did not demand fiefs as a bursary and did not, like nobility, organize around their families to threaten autocracy (Karonen 2008: 82–83; Hallenberg 2013). Second, as an effect of the dissolution of the union, Vasa was practically unable to reinstate archbishops who had been loyal to the Danes. Rather, the supporters of Lutheranism that had backed him to become a King influenced his religious views to the point that, in 1527, he appointed the archbishops himself. The reformation turned the Church into a state church that confiscated the possessions of the Church, gave priests the possibility to marry and insisted that the connection with God should be personal and therefore it expedited the translations of the Bible (Larsson 2002). Third, in an attempt to make a Vasa dominion and have greater control of the different parts of the realm, he created duchies for his progeny, which eventually lead to the cruel disputes of succession rights and foreign-policy schisms between his successor Eric XIV and his half-brother John the Duke of Finland. Fourth, Gustav Vasa also founded Helsingfors in 1550 hoping that a market town opposite to Reval would progress trade and act as a competitor. Merchants moved to Helsingfors rather reluctantly and at first the marketplace was no match to Reval, Åbo or Viborg (Vahtola 2003). 3.2.3.1 Bailiwicks The Atlas of Finnish History, compiled by Eino Jutikkala (1949a), presents the boundaries of historical administrative units. One of the peculiarities is the presentation of castle counties from the 1540s but counties in 1634, which produces a discontinuity in the evolution of Finnish regions. This silence in the period between the bailiwick districts (voutikunta) and Axel Oxenstierna’s 1634 Form of Government that created a county administration of 56 23 landhöfdingen or counties, has given room to imagining that the ‘historical provinces’ were at some point administrative units. The bailiwick system, where the regions were responsible directly to the King, was influenced by practices taught at German universities. The novelty of this system was the jordebok accounting system that every bailiff submitted to the royal chambers. At first, it relied heavily on the castle counties since until 1546 the ten bailiffs were assigned to the established castles and manors. Only in the 1550s did the number of bailiffs start to rise and their territories decrease. Interested in creating a yeoman cavalry, enhancing state agriculture through manor bailiwicks, and creating a stricter administration (Kiuasmaa 1962; Karonen 2008), the realm prepared to paint an even clearer picture of the incomes of its territories that had already confiscated most of the possessions of the Church. One of the benchmarks of this control was Jakob Teitt’s Register of Grievances against the nobility in Finland from 1555 to 1556 (Grotenfelt 1894). By the mid-1550s, the number of bailiwicks more than doubled and understandably taxation on peasants hardened. After Gustav had declared the modern North Savo as a wilderness and as a right of God and the King, he wrote in 1550 that the settlers “would be on hand to resist the Russians should these desire to commit violence in this realm” (Jutikkala and Pirinen 2003: 106). In fact, the expansive geopolitics and colonization of territories northeast of the old boundary zone was explained by Olaus Magni (1555: 451), the last catholic archbishop, on the basis of fertility and rapid population growth. The use of such euphemisms tells of a need for a tighter administration to an area subject to contradictory interpretations over the Orešek/Nöteborg Treaty that had inflicted the Russian War in 1555–1557. Kyösti Kiuasmaa (1962) describes 24 jurisdictional districts in Finland between 1560 and 1600, but at times there were only 17 bailiwicks. The fluctuating number of the bailiwicks has imposed a problem for historians wanting to see continuity in regional divisions where one only finds a highly networked and centralized administrative structure (see also Häkli 2008). One paradox was created by Johan Axel Almquist (1919) who categorized the bailiff record of 1523 to 1630 along the historical provinces, even though such ceremonial provinces were de facto created in 1560. 3.2.3.2 Early literary use of the Finnish version of province Reformation was of key importance for the Finnish language. While reformation effectively eradicated the majority of Latin literature to the point reformation could be termed iconoclasm, it created the intellectual room to translate some key ecclesiastical and legislative literature. Mikael Agricola created the Abckiria in 1543 for the basis and as a summary for priests. Even though he was born in Pernå in Nyland and studied in Viborg, like Jakob Teitt, the language that he used was mainly of Finland Proper with a curiously guarded and diffident tone. Agricola was responsible for translating the New Testament into Finnish after Latin, Greek, German and Swedish texts. His account on regions in relation to later interpretations is interesting at least. As Daniel Juslenius 57 (1968 [1745]) noted, Agricola was the first to use the word maakunta or province in its various spellings. Agricola uses the term in three ways – a region of the Church of Rome, Finland as a province of the Swedish Kingdom and a linguistic territory within the peoples of Finland – that make it evident that the term is not constrained to any specific scale. In the opening speech of the New Testament, he refers to his Christian readers as “Somalainen, Hemelainé / Carialainen” (Agricola 1548: 15) and refers to the Tavastian and Karelian pagan gods with a tone of admonition in Dauidin Psaltari (Agricola 1551: 14; see also Siikala 2012). Following Jacob Ziegler, Agricola divided Finland into seven castle counties (Päruchtinan Länein): 1) south and north Finland, 2) top and bottom Satakunta, 3) Tavastia, 4) Karelia, 5) Nyland, 6) Raaseborg, 7) Österbotten (Agricola 1548: 19).29 While the castle counties have been later dubbed as the historical provinces, the linguistic version of the use of maakunta does not justify the claim (cf. Tiitta 1994: 24). The two occasions he uses of the term maakunta within Finland are the most complicated ones as it seems to refer to both the three ‘nations’ within the bishopric and to dialects and languages within them. The coining of the term ‘province’ with the bishopric, however, turned out to be rather short-lived as the Bishopric of Viborg was established for the first time in 1555. Unlike in Estonia, Finland had an authoritative book for the development of a national written language after Agricola. The use of the term maakunta in sixteenth- century Finnish texts predominantly refers to Finland as a whole that appeared as a region whose people were informed and administrated with their own language. In juridical books, for example in the translation of 1442 King Christopher’s Country Law (Setälä and Nyholm 1905), kihlakunta disenfranchised provinces as the regions of justice although common law and practices in ‘tribal’ regions had been commonplace in the Kingdom. 3.2.3.3 Coat of arms as emblems of the realm In relation to provinces, the funeral of Gustav Vasa in 1560 had perhaps the most lasting effect as this is the moment that an assemblage of historical provinces can be counted to have been generated. Gustav Vasa had acquired the control of almost the entire Kingdom and had pushed its eastern border towards north-east. Torbjörn Eng (2008: 77–78) describes that “the creation of coats of arms was an additional way to illustrate the construction of an empire as the emblems mediated an image of the composition of the state by its rulers both internally and externally.” Following the trend in West European royal courts, Erik XIV had planned or gathered the coat of arms for 24 duchies and counties30 to demonstrate the power of the realm. The coat of arms of the Duchy of Finland designed for Duke John, were accompanied in Gustav Vasa’s funeral procession with the coat of arms of the duchies of South and North Finland, Tavastia, Karelia and 29 In Finnish, Etele ia pohia Some, Satacundia ylemeinen ia alamaine, Hemen maa, Carelia, Wsimaa, Rasburi, Pohiamaa/ ilman Calandi etc. I understand that Agricola added the “ilman Calandi etc.” to make sure that Pohiamaa (Ostrobothnia) is not mixed up with pohia Some (North Finland). 30 County in this context refers to kreivikunta, not to the common administrative use lääni. 58 counties Ostrobothnia and Savo. Due to war debts, the actual sarcophagus of the late King took 31 years to finish. It nonetheless became a monument of the Swedish realm, its 11 duchies and the Grand Duchy of Finland (Ahrenberg 1901; see also Hildebrand 1905; Rancken 1949). Although the borders of South and North Finland do not coincide with the current province boundaries, the coats of arms were transformed into the emblems of Finland Proper and Satakunta in the nineteenth century. Åland became a county with an emblem in 1569, first knowledge of Nyland’s coat of arms is from 1599 and Lapland’s coat of arms appears on a 1606 coin (Rancken 1949). The 20 mark silver coin from 1606 is interesting in the sense that it is the first time all the Swedish regional coats of arms were presented (Tingström 1963). The style of these emblems changed in maps, castle signees, monuments, portraits, Chronicles and other books.31 The late nineteenth-century standardization of the coat of arms (Bomansson 1889), however, omitted one coat of arms that had been designed in the 1580s. With the help of the Languedoc mercenary Pontus de la Gardie, John III had taken control of Kexholm, whose coat of arms portraying a burning white castle appeared at the late King’s funeral in 1594 (Rancken 1949), a year before the Duchy was handed back to Russia in the Treaty of Teusina. A twentieth-century truism holds that when the, län/lääni, were established, the provinces ceased to exist as administrative spaces. But the provinces, whose coat of arms were created in the early 1560s, were never intended to form a feudal structure that could be compared to other European realms (Eng 2008: 81). The heraldic duchies and counties were established as signs of the central power and the house of Vasa, not as independent emblems of provinces that could send their representatives to a king’s election as the tradition had been especially in the thirteenth century. In relation to the borders and names, the synchronized symbolic provinces cannot be compared with the castle counties or the bailiwicks with the exception of Åland. 3.2.3.4 Cartographic excursions In order to understand the impact of the provinces created in the late sixteenth century it is fruitful to look at how the realm was described and mapped. Cartographers in the sixteenth century had increased knowledge about the northern areas. The map of Schondia, published by Jacob Ziegler in 1532, was the first map to describe Finland in a north-south direction. While the map describes only Finlandia, Pevnthe (Lake Päijänne), Ostrobothnia, Laponia and the largest fortifications and cities along the coast, Agricola (1548: 18; see also Tiitta 1994: 24) refers to Ziegler’s knowledge of the castle counties. The first major attempt to chart the northern regions was Olaus Magnus’s Carta Gothica, later termed as Carta Marina. Commissioned by the Pope, it was the first map to describe Scandinavia in 31 For example, the Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna – an illustrated book series edited by Erik Dahlberg. The collection was the portable monument of the era of Swedish Greatness and Dahlberg started to collect engravings of it in 1660 but the volumes were finished only in 1716. 59 its proper scale. In the 1539 completed map, Olaus Magnus wanted to show the vastness of northern Europe, that after Reformation was no more controlled and taxed by the Catholic Church (Ehrensvärd 2006; Miekkavaara 2008). He presents Finlandia, Tavastia, Carelia, Botnia Orientalis, Lappia Orientalis and Scricfinia as larger lands and Alandia, Sudfïnia, Noreïnia (sic.) and Satacvndia as minor territorial elements of Finlandia. The Carta Gothica, its descriptions and the 1555 published Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus increased knowledge of Scandinavia, rectified some misconceptions but created some new ones. For instance, Lake Saimaa is presented as Lago Negro with towns such as Saia and Maha located on its shores. The numerous pictorial elements Olaus Magni included on the map, helped to interpret customs, traditions, and historical events of Scandinavia. The shape of the map tells a lot of Swedish perceptions towards Finland. The funnel- style form with a network of open-ended river systems shows both that the interests of cartographers were directed to the coastal areas and navigable rivers and that the inland areas were inadequately known. Produced in Rome and Venice, the map was comparably accurate, even though Olaus had visited only the coasts of Northbothnia and had no first- hand measurements as he was living as an archbishop in exile. In the sixteenth century, Sebastian Munster, Gerard de Jode, Giacomo Castaldi, Gerardus Mercator, Abraham Ortelius and Willem Barents, for instance, relied heavily on the Carta Gothica in order to improve their wider scale maps or to make their own, more simple versions of northern Europe. Against the knowledge that none of the previously mentioned cartographers ever actually visited Finland, outside of Tornio, it is hard to understand why the sixteenth century maps are given such importance among Finnish geographers and historians (Harle and Moisio 2000; Häkli 2002; Vahtola 2003; see however, Häkli 2008; Miekkavaara 2008). Even though Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia – that copied Carta Cothica – was probably shadowed in popularity in Lutheran Europe only by the Bible, its cartographical influence was rather short-lived. With progress made in navigation charts and the increased emphasis on the eastern half of the Swedish realm, accurate maps became an issue for effective administration and taxation. One of the most underrated cartographers, in Finland, Andreas Bureus made the first scientific measurements of the Kingdom, started land surveying and demarcated the Kexholm-Russia border in 1619. In 1611, Andreas Bureus had finished the first exact description of Lapland that was based on rigid latitude and longitude measurements and decorated with the provincial coat of arms of Lapland and Ostrobothnia (Pekkanen 1985). The much needed map in peace treaties concerning the northern regions paved the way for the 1626 published Orbis Arctoi Imprimisque Regni Sueciæ Descriptio, which was a huge advancement for Nordic cartography.32 Three features in Bureus’ map and description (1631) are of interest. First, he was the first non- Finn to describe the Finnish language. Sebastian Munster’s Cosmography included the Lord’s Prayer in Finnish, but Bureus made notes of the spoken alphabet, the tendency for using 32 Oddly, Häkli (2002: 75) associates the Orbis Arctoi with the sixteenth century maps that portray Finland “inaccurately in today’s standards” and ocates land surveys to the eighteenth century (Häkli 1998: 135). 60 the one-size-fits-all se for men, women and animals alike, and the use of grammatical cases.33 Second, Bureus’ map is the first map of Scandinavia where everything is in place. Even though the shapes of Finland and Sweden seem uncoordinated, shorelines, lakes and rivers are precise and cities and the names of provinces are exactly how they were used. Third, Bureus included all ten coats of arms of Finnish provinces and the standing lion figure for the Grand Duchy. Overall, the placement of the 30 coat of arms around the King and Queen in the cartouche can be read as a manifestation of the Kingdom’s power over the heraldic territories. Jurisdictional regions or bailiwicks are not marked differently from other localities, except Satakunda, Ieskis (=Jääski) and Europæ (=Äyräpää), and Uma, Lula, Pitha and Torne Lappmark and the only fully outlined province is Kexholm. The large map was not printed in large quantities and only a handful of copies are known today. As most of the Swedish outward trade was in the hands of Dutch merchants, it is no surprise that several Dutch cartographers started to reproduce, rescale and amend Bureus’ map (Ehrensvärd 2006: 136). The versions of Henricus Hondius (Fredrikson 1993: 65), Willem, Joan (Vahtola 2003: 352–353) and Cornelius Blaue, Hugo Allard, Fredrick de Wit, Justus Dankerts and the French Nicolas, Adrien and Guillaume Sanson and the Swiss Matthäus Merian among others produced the cartographical image of Scandinavia. In fact, the impact of the Arctoi Orbis was so imperial that versions of the map with the provinces of the 1620s were made well into the late eighteenth century. Even though Carl Grippenhjelm had already in 1688 made a county map of the realm, it took over a hundred years for Finland to be established as consisting of counties in non-Swedish maps. To the eye of the foreigner, Finland consisted of eight to ten provinces. The dynasty Gustav Vasa established led to the disputes of succession rights, clashed versions of Christianity and led to disharmonious alliances with other realms. Unlike in Poland, where electing kings contributed to rivalries between nobility, the autocracy of the Vasa period coupled with internal tranquillity were the prime reasons for the expansion. The organization of administration, universities, military and markets, however, were not fixed to the provincial symbols forged by Eerik XIV as state power controlled regionalism. To understand this, we need to look at the institutions generated in the latter Vasa period and how the ideas of Enlightenment influenced territoriality in Finland. 3.2.4 Provincial landmarks in religion, education and military During the seventeenth century, provinces and their coat of arms became de facto symbols of the Swedish realm, regardless of the new county administration that divided Finland under five governors. The 1634 Form of Government (Hildebrand 1891), given under the regency of Axel Oxenstierna, was the first constitution of Sweden and remained in use until 1693. While many Finnish scholars (e.g., Jutikkala 1949b) see the constitutional change as the document that created counties (Lä(h)n, Lääni), the The first grammatical books were published in the mid-seventeenth century by Aeschillus Petraeus and 33 Michael Wexionus (see Lauerma 2012). 61 document itself speaks of territories placed under a governor (landhöfding) stationed in a certain city or town. The transition from castle counties (slottslän) and bailiwicks to a territorial and administrative system of counties was thus not radical, especially as the term län had been in use already in the early sixteenth century and before.34 Of 23 governor positions twelve were appointed in Swedish and five in Finnish towns (cf. Karonen 2008: 192). South and North Finland were governed from Åbo, Carelia as the the counties of Viborg, Nyslott and Kymmenegård from Viborgs stad, Tavasteland and Nyland from Tavastehus, Österbotten from Ulaborg and the county of Kexholm from Kexholm. One reason why there were provinces or lands in the west and counties in the east must have been a desire to avoid mixing the ‘Swedish’ Karelia with the 1617 annexed Kexholm or Russian Karelia. By naming the counties after their administrative town, Karelia could be used to name a larger area than what was gained in 1323, especially as according to the Form, the Åbo Court of Appeal was given the Grand Duchy of Finland and both Karelias as its area. The territorial divide, however, went through several adaptations between 1635 and 1650, as the number of the counties varied between five and nine. Wasa, Björneborg, Helsingfors and Nyslott were designed as new administrative towns to divide the first four of the previously mentioned regions. Petri Karonen (2008: 192–193) explains their brevity as a method of establishing new effective accounting and administration and once the new administration was created the resources were put to service in other branches of state administration. The regional administration returned to a system of five governors controlling districts and counties. The Bible was translated into Finnish in 1642. The comparably large print, 1200 copies, was distributed widely in the realm and it became, along with Agricola’s New Testament, the guideline for literary language. Henrik Meinander (2006) among others claims that the Lutheran Church created a uniform culture especially as the Bible provided an authoritative source for sermons and the church was a medium of control over the public. The first Finnish Bible included several illustrated title pages and one of them depicted the 16-year-old Queen Christina and 29 provincial coats of arms. The tradition of presenting these emblems that had started from Gustav Vasa’s funeral in a way found its culmination in the new Bible since none of the later editions of 1683, 1776, 1938 or the 1618 reprint of Gustav Vasa’s Bible used provincial symbols. The administration of the Lutheran Church had been divided between Åbo and Viborg. The first was the main church in the Grand Duchy and the latter an important bridgehead in attempts to convert the Karelian Orthodox. While the number of bishoprics rose, the state and church administration corresponded only between 1959 and 1997. The most important 34 Mikael Agricola’s Register of the revenues of Åbo Cathedral and priests for 1541 and 1542 is the oldest statistical account of incomes in Finland (Lagus 1839; Agricola 2007 [1542]). It provides a good overview into the regional system in Finland and of the terms used. In the document, Agricola divides Finland into Norfinland, Södfinland, Nedre här i Satagund, Öffre här i Satagund, Nedre här i Tavasteland, Öffre här i Tavasteland, Karellen, Nÿland, Oland and Norbotn. In addition, Agricola uses the administrative term Lan of Abo and Raßborge and Kwmo gord and describes the parishes of 18 different deaneries. The term län is older. For example, Knight Thord Bonde wrote in 1403 from Viborg Castle: Østerlanden liggende i Karelen i Swerikes righe, met the lææn, som ther ligge, aff min natheghe herre Konung Eric, Konunge i Swerike, Danmark oc Norghe. (SVD: 286). 62 ecclesiastical spatial organization was the churches themselves. The parishes, their chapels and earlier parent parishes became the basis of self-identity rather early (Vainikka 2013) and they were the established spatial organization on which the 1865 municipal decree was based. Thus, while the provinces were significant for the clergy when the first whole Bible was published, the performativity of the religion within local administration became a much stronger spatial organization. Since the inception of the Cathedral schools in Åbo in the late thirteenth century and Viborg after the bishopric divide, education in Finland had been tied to bishop’s chairs and concentrated on Christian values. As an outcome of reformation, the hampered schooling system did not provide enough educated students for the realm that relied on administration (Rikkinen 1980). In addition, for the new social group, the sons of priests, seeking education from the universities of Uppsala and Central Europe, was not always an option. Matti Klinge et al. (1987) note that attempts to centralize power could only work if education and universities, in particular, were brought to the lands that were subjected to centralized rule. Built on a gymnasium founded ten years earlier, The Regia Academia Aboensis started from 1640 to educate clergy, civil servants, physicians and officers especially for the services of the eastern half of the realm. The teaching emphasized a status quo with traditions and strictly hierarchical order (Karonen 2008: 286). While education was divided into the faculties of Philosophy, Theology, Law and Medicine, the students of the Academia were distributed in nations after a European university tradition. Some scholars have argued that the university nations were the basis for or could be compared with provinces, but their organization must be understood as a typical distance-decay process. In 1643, the vice-chancellor imposed inspectors for students along a provincial divide and Finnish students were placed under three inspectors, who monitored the students from 1) Aboensium, 2) Australium et Borealium or 3) Alandensium, Nylandorum, Ostrobotniensium (Lagus 1889: XI).35 Klinge et al. (1987: 308–309) counts that under five per cent of the students in the Academia Aboensis came from the Viborg bishopric in the 1640s, probably because the Viborg gymnasium provided some clergy and servants for the eastern part of the country. In 1653, inspectors acknowledged the nations of Tavastia, Viborg, Satakunta and Savolax. One reason for the rearrangement and additions of the nations must have been Michael Wexonious’ (1650) dissertation where he, after Bureus, described the regional system of the realm, noting, for instance, the nation of Finland had transformed into smaller regions.36 Students were added to nations according to their birthplace or the location of earlier 35 Vilhelm Lagus recreated the original register for the Academy of which most was lost in the fire of Åbo in 1828. 36 Interestingly, Wexonius speaks of the antiquan Fennis and how they have formed new regions: Fennorum nations, quibus nunc Tavvesti, Savvolaxi, Careli & Æstihij alij. (Wexionius 1650: Lib. II, Cap. VI). At the same time, the provinces were for Wexonius formed of jurisdictional districts (kihlakunta) and he uses reasonable space to illustrate which district and metropolis/city/town belongs to which province (Lib I, Cap XXIXXVIII). Thus, for Wexionius Finland was a territorial entity transformed into a set of provinces and whose localities and districts were worth listing. This line of thought is evident in H.G. Porthan’s idea of an undivided prehistoric Finland. 63 education or their parents’ origin, which partly explains why the students from Savolax were listed in the territorially large Wiborgensis nation. Already in 1655 the divide changed again, Abo and Austral were joined, Boreal, Satagundan and Ostrobothnia were already separated, Tavastia was combined with Aland and Nyland, Carelia, Ingria and other Eastern regions counted for the sixth nation. During the seventeenth century, the nations were imposed regardless of the students’ own organization and regardless of any sense of continuance. When the Academia Aboensis reopened in 1723 after the Great Northern War, an inspector was named to only those nations that functioned permanently, for instance, collected their own registers. Thus, nations, who self-organized with the names that they themselves used, must be listed as 1) Aboensis, 2) Australes, 3) Boreales, 4) Nylandicæ, 5) Ostrobothniensis, 6) Satacundenses, 7) Smolandicæ, 8) Sveagoticæ, 9) Tavastenses, 10) Viburgensis (Lagus 1889: xvii-xxxi; cf. Klinge et al. 1987: 296). While Klinge et al. (1987: 503) and many others have dubbed the nations with the provinces,37 such linkage places too much emphasis on the southwestern student organizations, whose students were overrepresented compared with the growing population numbers in eastern and northern Finland. Especially the population of the Kexholm province/county was underrepresented. On the other hand, the names of the nations were not that dissimilar to the regional terms already in use during the fourteenth century. When the university was transplanted to Helsingfors, the nation or afdelning/osakunta divide started to make sense as a national regional divide, especially as the student nations were the prime societies where the ideas for the Finnish nation were forged. The third, and most neglected, source of emerging provincialism was the military. The colonization policies that sought to establish more taxable subjects northeast of the old border zone increased geopolitical struggles. The end of the sixteenth century marked the most troublesome time for peace as conflicts were settled in the Karelian Isthmus, Åbo Castle, Northern Ostrobothnia, Southern Ostrobothnia and Tavastia, in the Baltic Sea, Scania, Ingria. In 1595 and 1617, the territory of the Swedish realm expanded to the east and for a while Gustav Vasa’s vision of the Baltic Seas as an internal sea seemed to crystallize (Meinander 2006; Karonen 2008). First, the areas of Savo, Kainuu and parts of Lapland were annexed to the realm and then the county of Kexholm, Ingria and parts of Estonia were included in the realm. During this time, most of Finland’s ‘mount estates’ of yeomen cavalry were established to supplement the mercenary forces controlled directly by the king (Hallenberg 2013). Already in the sixteenth century, the infantry had been organized into groups of 500 men that followed a flag or fana. The Fänika’s were transformed into companies or combined into regiments in the early seventeenth century 37 The Finnish literature of the seventeenth century is rather limited. The 1670 translation of Erasmus’ De civilitate morum puerilium offers a good insight on how the regional terms were used. Erasmus (1539) argues that different habits and manners were acceptable in different nationes or regionis and uses Græci, Sardonios, Germanes, Iberorum, Italos, Britannos and Galli as examples. The unknown translators use two terms of nationes and regionis rather interchangeably, i.e. ma(a)npaica (lit. land-place) and ma(a)cunda (Erasmus 1670). What is common, however, in the use of these territorial terms is that they seem to refer to certain dispositions (Bourdieu 1977 [1972]) and accepted behaviour, mores, that characterize a territory (Crang 1998: 162; see also Bialasiewicz 2003). 64 (Larsson 1967). In 1634, the Form of Government divided the realm into eight cavalry brigades and twenty infantry regiments. Three cavalry brigades in Finland included 1) Åbo county including both Satagundas, 2) Tavasteland and Nyland, and 3) Carelia, i.e. Viborgs and Nyslotts county. Six Finnish infantry regiments were divided into 1) Åbo county, 2) both Satagundas, 3) Tavasteland, 4) Nyland, 5) Carelia (including Savolax) and 6) Österbotten. The time of greatness for Sweden in the seventeenth century owed much to its well-organized military, sea power in the Baltic Sea, and emphasis on education. The doctrine of pushing the border to Estonia, to the marshes of Ingria, the vastness of Ladoga and the wilderness of Kexholm, worked until Peter of Russia decided to establish St. Petersburg on the eastern point of the Gulf of Finland. This change in the power balance in the Baltics eventually had a major influence on how administration was organized. 3.2.5 Geopolitical realities, natural boundaries and the romanticized provinces The estrangement from a strategic alliance with France after the 1670s and the increasing interest of Dutch and English merchant navies in the Baltic trade and harsh winters in the late seventeenth century were the prologue to the end of the era of greatness for Sweden (Karonen 2008). The autocratic realm under Carl XI (1680–1697) was equipped with a massive army and fleet, a well-organized administration and reduced nobility. The self-esteem of the realm gave room for creating myths and glorifying the past of the ‘countries’ in the Kingdom by the likes of Olaus Rudbeck and Juslenius (Meinander 2006). The army designed for defence was, duly, put to test from several directions in 1700, but the confident young King Carl XII tried to solve the disputes by counter invasions. At the same time, Peter I of Russia had started to modernize administration, military and trade and established St Petersburg on the eastern sound of the Gulf of Finland in 1703. Securing Poland in 1706, Carl XII marched his forces against Moscow, but the scorched earth policy with harsh winters furthered the Swedish army’s loss in the Battle of Poltava in 1709 (Vahtola 2003; Karonen 2008). The King’s retreat and stay in Istanbul in order to persuade the Ottomans against Russia left Finland open to a long occupation that divided the country into two administrative areas with divergent policies against the people (Karonen 2008). With the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, the Swedish dominance of the Baltic Sea was gone. Attempting to retake Viborg and Kexholm, the Swedish Hat party waged an ill-fated revenge war against Russia and in the 1743 Treaty of Åbo lost the southern parts of the Kymmenegårds and Nyslotts County. The shifting state border had two outcomes. First, the county borders had to be redrawn. Northern Kexholm or modern North Karelia was united with Kymmenegårds and Nyslotts County, whose governor’s seat moved within a short period of time from Villmanstrand to Degerby/ Lovisa to Heinola. Second, the term ‘the old Finland’ emerged alongside Finland. Whereas the old Finland kept most of its customs, the increased contact with Russian migrants, 65 Cossaks and nobility and German merchants, as opposed to the Swedish aristocracy, led into cultural differences and variations in social structure perceptible to the sharp-eyed foreigner (Jones 1827: 273; Elliott 1832: 256–258). Redrawing the eastern counties was not the only change in the regional or social structure of the eighteenth century. The church authority started to grumble as the Lutheran Church’s practice could not explain why the age of Russian occupation lasted so long. Pietism and belief as an individual endeavour gained purchase but also group benefits over the good of the realm (Karonen 2008: 336). Another catalyst for liberalism was the thoughts endeavoured by John Locke alongside the Glorious Revolution in 1688 England. With ideas sweeping across Europe, the Enlightenment philosophers emphasized the Stoic ius naturae where general, universal norms and values were more binding than the culturally situated practices (Rapport 2012). Confident in human rationality over dogmas, these philosophies found their pinnacle in Immanuel Kant’s three kinds of rights; republican, international and cosmopolitan. Curiously, while Kant heralded a cosmopolitan touch on the relationships between all humans, he in a Montesquean tradition sought to separate the state from the individual. The time of the Enlightenment was in many ways a time of moving forward. The Renaissance era started to connect European thought through the use of Graeco-Roman legacies, but only in the eighteenth century the notion of Europe surpassed the imaginaries of ancient civilizations (Delanty 2009). In many respects, this plays as an analogy to the imagination of regional constructs. Provincialism started to lose its character when the political reality shifted to state administration and started to construct a more unified idea of culture. Nevertheless, an early nationalist H.G. Porthan describes that Finland seemed to be formed of two different parts, in binas quasi nations. The differences of the western and coastal areas in relation to those of the eastern inland areas were apparent (Manninen 2000: 240). In his 1779 German description of Finland, H.G. Porthan hardly touches on the idea of provinces. In a rather dogmatic way, he describes the four Lehen (counties) of Finland, their statistics, administration, agriculture, towns, trade and transport. Porthan (1779) addresses provinces only when he describes the religions of Karelia and the bilingual names of some Länder, i.e. Hämenmaa, Pohjanmaa, Kainunmaa, Savolaaxi/Savonmaa, Karjalanmaa. Liberalism favoured the responsibility of a person and personal ownership for economic prosperity. State administration was concurrently reformed to make the most of the realm’s resources. The overall reform of legislation in 1734 and the statistical authority founded in 1749 unified state practices leading to more informed economic policies. European liberalism found its strongest echo in Finland in the writings of Ostrobothnian Anders Chydenius, who in the latter part of the eighteenth century pushed for the freedom of trade, religion and press and the colonization of Lapland (Manninen 2000; Meinander 2006). While Chydenius had a major impact on nineteenth-century economic reforms, the idea of natural law would not refer to power realities in many of the kingdoms 66 in Europe. Ius naturae helped to spark the French revolution but as Norman Pounds (1954: 52) explains: “it was too vague, too philosophical, too idealistic, and susceptible of too great a variety of interpretations to carry over into a sphere of diplomacy and politics”. In fact, Pounds (1951) shows, the way the French state was imagined in the late eighteenth century borrowed from the solidarity of natural law, but the state was imagined through limites naturelles, the frontiers or boundaries of ‘nature’s design’ that were imagined defining the organic state and its inhabitants (Fall 2010). Where natural law and liberalism enabled individuals to seek wealth that ultimately would lead to social mobility, the natural boundaries were one of the ‘new’ social bonds that maintained compassion and solidarity within locales (Manninen 2000: 13). The idea of natural boundaries had been utilized already by ancient Roman cartographers and it formed along linguistic, folklore and ecological factors a key justification for Philip Johan von Strahlenberg (1730) as the northern boundary of Europe. In 1775, King Gustav III, after a short visit in Finland, gave a ‘royal proclamation’ to establish the counties of Wasa and Kuopio and to rearrange the county borders along lakes, waterways or watersheds, so that for instance the boundary between the county of Tavastia and Nyland against Kymmenegård cut through Lake Päijänne and several parishes including what later became the city of Lahti. While Gustav III reinstated autocracy, he freed trade gradually, made social reforms, established the cities of Kuopio and Tampere, expanded freedom of speech, limited religious freedoms and the right to produce alcohol (Karonen 2008). Nevertheless, the county border reform did not promote economic prosperity as it cut commercial and infrastructural interests (Heinonen 1997; Vainikka 2013). The time of reason and utility did not erase provinces. The term maakunta as a region of Finland started to root in the late eighteenth century. For example, Antti Lizelius in his 1775 established newspaper Suomenkieliset Tietosanomat used maakunta for duchies and counties. Leaning heavily on Tuneld’s (1762) geography, Lizelius (1776) lists seven provinces of Finland: 1) Östernbotn/Pohjan-Maa, 2) Finland/Suomi niminomattain,38 3) Luoto Ålanti, 4) Tawastland/Hämen-Maa, 5) Sawolax/Sawon-Maa, 6) Nyland/Uusi- Maa, 7) Kymmenegårdin Maakunta/Karjalan-Maa. Interestingly, in his first edition of the Geographien öfver Swerige Tuneld (1741) counted nine provinces, as there was no need to merge Karelia and Kexholm before the ‘Old Finland’ was lost in 1743.39 Allan Tiitta (1994) explains that Porthan was displeased with Tuneld’s version of Finnish geography and that when he finally got the chance to revise the text for the seventh edition, Porthan (1795) included a heavily natural geographic approach that explained provinces through their watershed and catchment areas. While Porthan was known as a collector and a critic of historical sources (Klinge 1998: 184), he uses an anachronistic approach when illustrating how the conquest of Finland was not directed to the three ‘lands’ but 38 Tuneld used för sig sjelf and Porthan Egentliga. Westerlund (2001) dates the Finnish term Varsinais-Suomi to the 1840s. The term Finlandia stricte sic dicta is from the sixteenth century. The need for the term Varsinais relates to the reconstruction of the province of Satakunta, separate from North Finland. 39 Tuneld (1741: 327) sets the annexation of Kexholm in parallel to the three other conquests and emphasizes an idea of one time Christianization. 67 also to Nyland, Österbotten and Sawolax. Porthan thus explained past events with his contemporary geographical structures. The provinces became the social organizations through which the realm was understood and their marriage with the idea of the natural border gave them a substance of designed, given and, in a somewhat secularizing society, more eternal category. In the 1809 Treaty of Fredrikshamn, where Sweden waived its right to the Finnish counties and delivered the inhabitants of the “aforementioned counties, provinces, islands and areas” 40 from their oath to the king, spoke of Finland as a whole only in terms of its territory and its inhabitants’ legal responsibilities towards Sweden and vice versa. The Finnish war that annexed the Finnish counties to Russia was fought for the British embargo demanded by Napoleon. The Swedish geopolitical visions were attached to Norway and a confrontation with Denmark was given more consideration than defending Finland (Meinander 2006). As a result of the treaty, the Western boundary of Finland was reconfigured when Kemi and Tornio Laplands were annexed to the rest of the territory. With autonomy, sar Alexander elevated Finland “among nations” in the Diet of Porvoo 1809 and in a certain sense “established [Finland] as a state territory” (Häkli 2008: 11). While, states are not born when their control is transplanted from one realm to another with previous administrative practices left untampered, the most integral issue is that Finland was no more compared with the three other lands of Sweden – Götaland, Svealand and Norrland – rather formed its own, unparalleled and unique territory within the Russian Empire. The Grand Duchy kept its former Swedish laws, its territorial system administered mainly by higher estates, formed a semi-independent economy and its army remained largely separate. The old Finland in the southeast was reunited with the rest of the Grand Duchy and the Government Council, hence the capital, was moved to Helsingfors in 1812. Sweden, equipped with one of Napoleon’s Marshals as a King, annexed Norway through a personal union and no longer took interest in Finland. The reason Finland kept previous social infrastructures can be explained by tsar Alexander’s disinterest in Finland, the fear of a similar revolt that plagued Poland (Jutikkala and Pirinen 2003: 299) but also with the weakness of the Russian administrative structure critiqued for example by historian Nikolai Karamzin (Jacoby 1973 [1969]: 116). The county system in Finland was finally revised in 1831 when the counties of Nyland and St Michel were formed. The new capital required an efficient county administration around it and the reconstructed county annexed parts of the Kymmenegård County. The county of St Michel was founded from the remaining parts of Kymmenegård County added with small parts of Häme and the Savo-Karelia County with a plan to centre the Governor’s seat on a small parish at the crossroads of five roads. If changes in state territory are not considered, this structure lasted as the county divide until 1960. The annexation to Russia was a chance to cut the relationship with a Swedish past: partly it did. Romanticism that started to take the hold of Europe insisted on a look back on the histories of nations and as a result of the Napoleonic wars scholars were interested 40 Original in French sur les dits Gouvernemens, Provinces, Iles et Territoires (see Havu and Klippi 2006 : 92). 68 in creating a sense of belonging that would surpass simple economic reasoning. Elias Lönnrot and other ethnologist collected old Finnish folklore, songs, poems and vernacular traditions. Most of this collection work was done in modern North Karelia and in Russian Karelia. Lönnrot strengthened the idea of a single nation when he published the Kalevala as the poems of Karelia from the ‘ancient times’ of the Finnish nation (Lönnrot 1835). The amount of folklore and ethnological material collected during the nineteenth century could not be handled as one register so the collection, the Finnish Nations’ Old Poems, was later divided along eight ‘historical’ provinces. In the 1830s, Adolf Ivar Arwidsson authored the first geography books intended solely for a Finnish audience. Arwidsson (1832) continued the seven provinces tradition of Tuneld and Porthan and stressed that such divide had been used ‘of old’.41 During the 1840s, Finnish cultured elite started to draft up the book, Finland framstäldt i teckningar, to show the public and especially Russian authorities the landscapes and regional structure of Finland. Influenced by Dahlberg’s Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna and Mellini’s Sverige framstäldt i teckningar (Tiitta 1994: 76) the book changed the way Finns both understood and saw their territory. The text of the 1852-completed book, including 120 landscape paintings, was written mainly by Topelius, a famed poet, journalist and all-round literary inspirer (Mead 1968; Tiitta 1994).42 While it might now seem obvious that the landscape paintings and the accompanying texts would be organized after a provincial divide, for Topelius the choice was perhaps not that self-evident. Topelius (1845–1852: 62) acknowledged the names of the provinces “lacked any practical meaning”, and by the act of “privileging the moment” (Dodgshon 2008b: 308), stabilized the provinces through their imagined history and perceived “traditional characters”. Unlike Wexiounius, Tuneld and Porthan, Topelius divorced Satakunta from Finland Proper and ceased the division into South and North Finland. Topelius also regarded Lapland as a region shared by four nations not as a solely Finnish province. Still the Topelian eight provinces ideology that emerged from the ‘book of landscapes’ is not an invented tradition (Hobsbawm 1983) but rather a synchronized tradition. The territorial categories, symbols and partly the descriptions of regional human nature all existed before Topelius, but not necessarily simultaneously or in the same scalar system. The nineteenth-century provinces were historical only in the minds of the people of the 1850s. They created a rather lasting legacy for later generations. Starting the history of Finnish provinces from the nineteenth century, in itself, canonizes the ‘historical’ provinces and 41 “Finland har af ålder varit deladt i 7 landskap: A. Österbotten; B. Det Egentliga Finland eller Åbo Län, med Satakunda; C. Åland, jemte omgifvande öar; D. Tavastland; E. Nyland: F Savolax; G. Karelen” (Arwidsson 1832: 94). 42 Among other things, Topelius was fond of astronomy, and in the novel Välskärin kertomukset he dates a ‘big star conjunction’ exactly 500 years before his own birth in 14.1.1818 (Klinge 1998: 16). Out of coincidence, or not, the number of the provinces match those of planets of the time. When Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta were declassified as planets in 1845 and when Neptune was discovered in 1846, Topelius was still drafting his texts. Unlike Hegel, Topelius understood that Providence led history onwards much the same way as the position of astrological planets determined the faiths of individuals. 69 allows Topelius to invent provinces altogether, or in terms of Deleuze (1994 [1968]: 1) transforms the original into a celebration of its own future. In the same decade, the natural boundaries ideology in relation to provinces came into its full bloom. The Savo-Karjalainen osakunta at the Imperial Alexander University in Finland published three volumes of Lukemisia Suomen kansan hyödyksi (1845–1847) with an impressive account on Finnish geography. The volumes, approved by Gabriel Rein, included as appendixes the first Finnish map of Finland, a map of Europe, the hemisphere and the solar system. While the language in the maps is in itself significant (Paasi 1996: 86, 141), the map of Finland43 for the first time rearranged the province borders within Viborg County, or the territory lost in 1743, along more ‘natural’ divides, i.e. the Salpausselkä. The volumes themselves are extremely silent of this cartographic realignment, but it becomes clear against the additions Arwidsson (1827: 185) made to the translation of Friedrich Rühs Finnland und seine Bewohner and the writings of Abraham Cronholm (1835: 365) that the repositioning was done to follow a belief that the origin of the term Savo comes from the word savolotschie. These writers believed that the Savolotschie Chud – mentioned in the Russian Chronicles – was a Karelian term denoting people and an area behind a portage. While the Chronicles make perfectly clear that the term refers to the area on both sides of the Northern Dvina that flows to the White Sea, the Germanic orthographic translation of the Russian words za volok (=behind a portage) that disregarded the voiced –k (Saarikivi 2006: 7) did not stop imaginaries seeing the first Salpausselkä as a such portage and as a boundary. Castren (1845), Kellgren et al. (1845: 96–97) and apparently Arwidsson himself discredited this terminological disillusion. The first Finnish language map, Topelius’ partial acceptance of the Savolotschie theory (Topelius 1845–1852: 29), and the prevalent belief that natural catchment valleys create more or less homogeneous groups of people created a buffer zone between Tavastia and Karelia and transformed a major part of the first Salpausselkä into provincial boundaries. It has to be said that Jutikkala (1949b) seemed to be unaware of these developments when he addressed the differences between the castle counties of the 1540s and the nineteenth century ideas of provinces by pondering that “whoever is guilty of these canonized mistakes is unknown”. The reine Geographie movement, that in the early nineteenth century formulated regions from natural characteristics added with a ‘vision from above’ mentality of valley systems that Topelius advocated (Tiitta 1994; Klinge 1998: 350), led to these redefinitions. Loyalty during the Crimean War in (1853–1856) that extended to the Baltics and the need for economic restructuring led to recommissioning the Diet in 1863 and to publicly debated politics. Acknowledging the importance of administration, Alexander II allowed societal improvements that opened up trade, strove industrialization, improved rural education and transport infrastructures and raised the salaries of civil servants. With a new municipal system separated from the church administration, own currency, a 43 August Wilhelm Eklund’s posthumously published Karta öfver stor furstendömet Finland lists nine provinces and eight counties. The map is dated to 1840 and as the first proper map since Hermelin’s county maps (Fredrikson 1993: 107) it served as planning instruments in several boundary realignment plans. 70 nationally stationed army and increasing support for the Finnish language, Finland started to look and feel like a civil society and a separate country. Railways, industrialization but also famines enabled and pushed social and spatial mobility. Nationalism took the form of a belief in the ‘state’ (Meinander 2006). For nationalism, it counted what kind of legacies one followed. The Fennoman movement believed in Snellmannian/Hegelian national awakening (Tommila and Pohls 1989), whereas the liberals taking an indifferent position toward the fervent language dispute underlined the historical connections with Sweden. Culturally, the late nineteenth century was the time when the cultural basis of the nation was imagined through the minds of artists. In addition, it was the time when provincialism flourished. The ‘historical provinces’ were created and developed as auxiliary to nation-building providing a national imaginary of an assemblage of provinces, which together formed the nation (Vainikka 2012, 2014a). The canonization of the provinces, by composing provincial songs, for instance, was a way to make the territories of Finland equal, so that each province would have its own ‘story’ that would be as important as the other. This was the main message in Topelius’ Boken om wårt land/Maamme kirja (Topelius 1879) used extensively for school education from the 1870s onwards. Also the book Finland i 19de seklet/Suomi 19:nnellä vuosisadalla (Mechelin et al. 1893), intended to showcase the nation for international audiences as it was published also in English, French, German and Russian in 1894. It supported heavily the idea of the country made of historical provinces, much like the Dutch cartographers had done after Bureus. Politically, Finland was put to test in the early twentieth century. As a result of intense russification policies, Finland became the most democratized country in Europe in 1906 and an independent state in 1917. 3.2.5.1 Lasting legacies in the spaces of power The historical provinces have different meanings for different generations (Vainikka 2012). The provincial mentalities gradually became a self-fulfilling discourse, where a discourse constructed on the basis of a few examples was adopted in school geography books for the first part of the twentieth century. The attitudes and prejudices worked as a short- hand for encounters in a rapidly industrializing, democratizing and integrating country. Suffice to say, it mattered little whether there were any truth in these ‘tribal descriptions’, people believed in them and started to perform provincial identity discourses in ways that they thought had some basis on reality, even if the descriptions were more of stereotypic stories people told each other much like horoscopes (Malmberg and Vanhatalo 1985). Aside from their importance as ‘mentefacts’, the historical provinces have persisted as the symbols of a ‘regional nation’ in some high-profile places. Two important monuments of provincialism lie at the heart of Helsinki but have a totally different story to tell: the Eduskunta building and the Monument of Alexander II. First, the 1931-finished Eduskunta building is a national monument on its own right 71 describing the values and political aims of the era. The Parliament Chamber is perhaps the most emblematic. The round chamber, Dalbergia representative tables are facing the speaker stand and ministerial box but also to the golden statues of Wäinö Aaltonen’s Work and Future. While these elements are often those that are visible in broadcasts and media, the members of the parliament find the coat of arms of the historical provinces in the top frieze designed by Gunnar Finne. The fact that the frieze lacks any symbol of the state itself, other than a date of independence inscribed in Latin, is reminiscent of the 1930 need to mediate between the language schism and the strengthening of an image of a new political force (Hakala-Zilliacus 2002: 175). Another place that represents the historical provinces, is the meeting room of the government that accommodates the prime minister’s chair with the historical provinces described in the inside back. Designed by Arttu Brummer and Göran Hongell, the chair is one of the most prestigious emblems of power in the Eduskunta building, and must be understood as an allegory of provincial coming-together that the politically most powerful seat of Finland represents.44 On the chair itself, Uusimaa as the home of the parliament is elevated between Finland Proper and Karelia on the top and the western provinces are placed on the right and eastern provinces on the left side (Hakala-Zilliacus 2002: 252). The second is the statue of Tsar Alexander II that centres Senate Square encircled by the Helsinki Cathedral, Helsinki University main building that housed Finland’s first Geography Department and the Government Palace, and is one of the most photographed tourist spots in Finland (see Figure 3). Designed by Johannes Takanen and Walter Runeberg, the pedestal of the statue depicts ten historical provinces. As Johannes Takanen died in Rome shortly after his bid had been elected as the winner (Topelius 1894; Suvikumpu 2009), finishing the monument rested on the shoulders of the runner-up Walter Runeberg, son of the national poet. Walter Runeberg created some the most visible national monuments, but the fact that he decided to include the coat of arms of Käkisalmi, is completely opposite to the Karelianism and historical provinces reading of the nineteenth century and pays more homage to the legacies Gustav Vasa set forth. 3.2.6 Civil society regionalism, regional politics and the competitive region Civil society regionalism started to live its own life. The emerging nationalism of the late nineteenth century and the foundation of three main social movements, including the Finnish Lifelong Learning Foundation (kansanvalistusseura), Youth Societies (nuorisoseura) and Temperance movements (raittiusseura) flourished and by the 1890s had created some regional district associations (Stenfors 2007). In the time of oppression, these movements proved to be important channels for civil participation. They were also the precursors for the civil enlightenment and parochial and regional cultural life that led to 44 Coincidentally for the research setting, there is a painting by Juho Rissanen behind the Coat of Arms - chair depicting harbour life in Celtic Brittany in 1913. 72 the establishment of Provincial Federations, maakuntaliitto, that were organized rather spontaneously and following more functional ideas of space from 1927 onwards (Häkli 1998; Vainikka 2013). The first of these regional organizations was founded in Finland Proper (or Southwest Finland) the last in Päijät-Häme in 1968. As the cultural associations of municipalities, these organizations allowed participation in more than one federation, making the provincial borders rather fuzzy. After Finnish independence, the League of Nations suggested that autonomy would be granted for Åland. Parliamentary committees had planned for local government regions since the 1920s. These would have had placed emphasis on regional planning and administration thereof based on infrastructural and economic divides leaving only the cities of over 20 000 inhabitants outside of such system (Häkli 1994). However, with the strong county (lääni) system already in place, civil society regionalism failed to interest state politics and parliamentary agendas. The county of Lapland was established in 1938 and the counties of Keski-Suomi and North Karelia in 1960. Functionalist ideas of state planning re-entered the agenda in the 1960s, when Regional Planning Authorities were appointed, whose territories cut through county boundaries and influenced a mismatch between state and local government regionalism. This was only partially amended in the 1990s when the 19-region-strong Regional Council, maakunnan liitto, system was developed to correspond with the EU’s regional policy agenda as part of Finland’s entry into the Union. While for the first part of the twentieth century economic development and the industrialization of the country had a centre-periphery composition with economic power residing in Turku, Helsinki and Viipuri and in some industrial towns (Moisio 2012), stronger social divides ran through class. The wounds of the civil war of 1918 characterized much of the political climate of the 1920s to 1930s and were partially mended in the Second World War, where Finland lost around ten per cent of its territory and had to resettle twice those Karelians that had lost their homes and land (Paasi 1996; Raivo 2002; Kuusisto-Arponen 2009). The Karelian population enriched cultural and political lives in their new localities but forced both the born-and-bred and the evacuees to rethink their identities (Hyytiäinen 2005). The new state border with the loss of Viipuri shifted the economic focus more to the west. Regional politics from the 1960s to the 1980s centred on providing the means to make a living throughout the country, especially the economically lagging eastern and northern Finland, and an order-orientated regional planning. The second used positivist models to justify the creation of regional centres responsible for and growing from their surrounding areas (Palomäki 1968; Moisio 2012). From the 1980s onwards ideas of deregulation, privatization and deregulations started to take hold of state planning. While the number of counties had grown in the 1960s and with an ‘earmarked’ law to establish two more, the state administrative regions captured the imaginations of regionalism in civil society. As for regional centres, Kauko Mikkonen (2000) argued that the need for acquiring new forms of services in hope of rising in the national hierarchy created unnecessary structures unfit for international competition. 73 By implication, municipalities had become overloaded with statutory tasks (Andersson and Sjöblom 2013). Competitiveness policies that have characterized much of regional planning in the past twenty years have (re)-emphasized national metropolises, led by strong universities and taking up the, real and imagined, challenges of globalization. While some scholars have highlighted from five to seven city-regions as the most competitive economic agents (Moisio 2012), it is reasonable to ask: Is the current discourse of neoliberal state- space an intermediate between a global-city competitiveness dogma and regional politics of a welfare state? 3.3 Regional traces in England and county ideas in the South West Modern historical scholarship, still, invests in legitimating nations-states (Tomaney 2007). The territorial imagination of England, arguably, owes much to the visions of Alfred the Great and his successors (Reuter 2006). The administrative unity of England was, however, attributed to King Alfred in the Late Middle Ages. The hegemony of Wessex over the ‘heptarchy’, alliances against the Danish threat with other kingdoms, such as Mercia, and the efforts to harmonize jurisdiction were important elements for the organization of power in the ninth century, but as David Pratt (2007) explains only in the sixteenth century did the political need for a ‘founder’ became more evident. The age of the transition created a need to construct an image of unity for the nationalized church and to the Kingdom that went beyond what Pratt, for instance, terms the ‘Norman Yoke’. The biographical Life of King Alfred compiled by Bishop Asser in 893 is a useful description of the world around Wessex (Valtonen 2008) or a West Saxon worldview. In the late nineteenth century, in the heydays of nationalism, English historians, nevertheless, used it as an example of an ‘institutional continuity’ and a substratum of antecedent liberty (Brundage and Cosgrove 2007). Later generations used King Alfred as a symbol of their political endeavours and as an emblem of a British society, versed in foreign countries, excelling in poetry but lacking confidence in the kitchen. The interpretations of the legacy of Alfred thus generated new sets of legacies loaded with political ideologies and trends of their times. While the success of Alfred’s rule can be credited to him and his court, the endurance of the late ninth century political organization owes much to the tradition of Charlemagne’s administration. But there is history for the British Isles before the Anglo- Saxon order, one that at the same time challenges and confirms the Celtic-English divide that still organizes the identity narratives of individuals (Jones 1999; Harvey et al. 2002; Mols and Haslam 2008; Vainikka 2014a). Before the Romans conquered much of what they termed Britannia, the Isles were dominated by British/Celtic45 tribes. As part of the Gallic wars, Julius Caesar described 45 The term Celtic in reference to British originates from the writings of Paul-Yves Pezron and Edward Lhuyd in 1706 and 1707 (James 1999). 74 his reconnaissance campaigns to Britain, mainly Kent, in 55 and 54 BC. Understanding the maritime connections to the continent, Caesar saw that the people born in Britannia were very much like Gauls. In reference to South West England, what is perhaps most interesting is the mention of plumbum album, (Caesar 1993 [54BC]: 5.12.5) or tin, rare metal used for bronze. Tin and gold excavated from Cornwall was used in the central parts of Germany already during the Bronze Age (Ehser et al. 2011), and Caesar’s description only confirms that trade of metals was acknowledged by the Romans (Knight and Harrison 2013). Changing power relations between tribes that had diplomatic relations with Romans and those that did not, the relative wealth of the Isles that were refuging rebelling Gauls, led to full-scale invasion started by Emperor Claudius in AD 43. Only after Agricola, the father-in-law of Tacitus, had secured victory over Caledonian tribes in AD 83 did the military expedition end. In the following decades, Ptolemy gathered the geographical knowledge of his time in Geographica and illustrates that Britannia consisted of around twenty different tribes. Romans treated their acquired land as one province until Severus Septimus, in the early third century, divided Roman Britain into Britannia Superior and Inferior, controlled respectively from present-day London and York (Southern 2001). In AD 293 both of these were further divided. In relation to South West England, the Roman era started to carve out a peculiar divide. The Fosse Way that extended from the outskirts of Isca Dumnorium, the present-day Exeter, to Lincoln operated as a military frontier road. While Exeter became an important Roman town and the administrative centre for the Dumnonii tribe, evidence of a Roman settlement west of Exeter is rather limited. Some forts and fortlets, mines, milestones and a Roman villa have been found in Cornwall so that the archaeological evidence implies that the Romans had no political interest in much of the Dumnonia civitas. In addition, the inhabitants of the region that currently comprises Cornwall, Devon and parts of Somerset were more culturally connected to Wales and Britany (Cunliffe 2005). The Romans left Britain for good in 410. Germanic expansion had weakened the Empire and the prosperity the Roman administration had accumulated into Britain created interest across its Roman frontiers.46 While Christianity had already started to take hold during the third century, the gradual in-migration of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians brought new versions of paganism to explain the afterlife (Darby 1976; Dunn 2009). Much of Dumnonia is claimed to have been converted by a Welsh prince, Petroc, in the early sixth century, while a Benedictine monk Augustine, based in Kent,47 was later canonized for the conversion of Anglo-Saxon territories at the turn of the seventh century. It took a span of fifty years before Christianity was endorsed by Anglo- Saxon courts. As the monk Bede (1968 [731]) records in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, the early years of the English Church were defined by a struggle of authority 46 The struggle within the power vacuum between Britons and Anglo-Saxons gave rise to the Arthurian legends romanticized especially by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. 47 Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 597. Analogous to the Roman practice where the south and the north had importance, York was granted a metropolitan status within the Church in 736. 75 between the Anglo-Saxons themselves and between core ecclesiastical practices between Anglo-Saxon and British-Celtic bishoprics. The Anglo-Saxons were separated into several kingdoms that, at times, recognized the broader rule, or brethwalda, of one king. The territorial structure prior to the campaigns of Alfred and especially Æthelstan that sought to consolidate England, has been termed as ‘heptarchy’ since the sixteenth century. While some authors point out that this ‘rule of seven’, an era from 500 to 850, was the pinnacle of English regionalism (Darby 1976; Lyon 1984; Jones and MacLeod 2004), such argument unwarrantedly reifies England as a politically coherent territory, which, conversely, was ravelled with disputes and changing power geometries. The Kingdom of Dumnonia is often counted or presented alongside Wessex, but as H. C. Darby (1976) shows the expanding Saxon population and the Britons in present-day Devon and Cornwall fought fiercely for their footholds during the eighth and ninth centuries. Ultimately Wessex emerged as the strongest Kingdom in all of Britain after Dane invasions had weakened most notably the Kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria. The era of the ‘heptarchy’ is important for the cultural reproduction of Englishness especially when it takes clues from Anglo-Saxon poetry.48 Providing enticing plot-twists and animating semi-historical imaginations of mediaeval social relations, historical writers such as Thomas Hardy, Bernard Cornwell and Basil Bunting have romanticized the founding eras of the English nation but also the ‘provincialism’ that characterizes different counties or other territorial articulations. Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, has been idealized as the starting point of England as a country. In the mid-ninth century, Norse and Dane fleets changed their practices of raiding into attempts to conquer and colonize particularly Northern Britain. From the capturing of Eoforwic (=York) in 866 to the battle of Brunanburh in 937 England was divided into the territories of Wessex, Mercia and Danelaw. Later generations have attributed Alfred’s grandson Æthelstan as the first King of England for his victory over the ‘Northmen’ and for establishing authority over much of Britain (Foot 2011). Much of the fame of Æthelstan is indeed posthumous since William of Malmesbury nearly two hundred years later seems to be the first chronicler to write down the importance of Æthelstan. In terms of South West England, there is one passage in the Gesta regum Anglorum (Deeds of the English kings) that is worth further reflection. Accounting for the subordination of the Welsh Kings in the early 930s, William of Malmesbury states that Æthelstan turned to Cornwall and ordered the boundary between his realm and that of West Britons to the river Tamar, likened to the river Wye that separated the Welsh and the English. Inde digressus, in Occidentales Britones se convertit, qui Cornewalenses vocantur; qui, in occidente Britanniæ siti, cornu Galliæ ex obliquo respiciunt. Illos quoque impigre adorsus, ab Excestra, quam Notably the Junius Manuscript, the Exeter Book, Vercelli Book and the Nowell Codex – the four major 48 Anglo-Saxon literature codices. 76 ad id temporis æquo cum Anglis jure inhabitarant, cedere compulit; terminum provinciæ suæ citra Tambram fluvium constituens, sicut Aquilonalibus Britannis amnem Waiam limitem posuerat. (Hardy 1840: 214) The term terminum provinciæ is perhaps of greatest interest here since it seems to indicate that the differing legal or ecclesiastical system of West Britons was acknowledged on their side of the river. At the same time, Æthelstan reinstated the Cornish bishopric in St Germans. More importantly, Exeter became an important fort for the English under the direct control of the Kingdom. Between 980 and 1066, much of England was subject to struggle over the crown. The consolidated England with its variegated population was under the control of English and Norse kings, King Cnut, for instance, establishing himself as the King of both England and Denmark. In 1066, the battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings, the first between the English army and the Norwegians and the latter between the battered English Army and that of the William of Normandy, changed the course for Britain. William developed the county system, placed French-born aristocracies in powerful positions, changed the administrative language from old English to Latin, redeveloped the church and assigned the census-type Domesday Book (Thomas 2008). Arguably, England became more associated with France than Scandinavia, especially since the significant emigration of English. The Anglo-Saxon shires that had been used to raise taxes and even control movement (Lyon 1984: 54), controlled by a central town, were transformed into counties throughout the country. While English historians often underline that most counties are descendants of the Anglo-Saxon divisions, scir or shire (Darby 1976), only the Norman administrative system brought a somewhat comparable and hierarchical system of territories to England. In short, during William’s rule and through the Domesday Book, counties became a de facto regional division for England. These counties remained to some respect unaltered until 1974. The regional system of England in most parts of the country stagnated in these settings, although their functions have changed considerably. The major changes in the composition of counties and shires were the establishment of county corporates around some boroughs between 1130 and 1551 and the establishment of new counties in North England in the twelfth century. If we do not count the Cromwellian rule of ten Major Generals between 1655 and 1667, then the next considerable change concerning the counties was the establishment of county councils in 1889 under the Local Government Act of 1888. The establishment of administrative counties for the purpose of local government used some historic subdivisions, but also joined the borough counties into their encircling counties for their non-administrative purposes. At the same time, the Local Government Act of 1972 abolished the administrative counties and county boroughs. With the establishment of metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties, the aim was to provide larger cities a more viable boundary while respecting historical boundaries between cities. During the act, some counties such as Rutland and Herefordshire, disappeared, and some 77 new ones emerged such as Avon and Humberside. Some of these changes were revoked in the 1990s. During the 1990s, the British government created the concept a geographic or a ceremonial county to highlight the distinction between what are generally thought of as the historic counties and the administrative counties. The ceremonial counties act as areas of Lord Lieutenants, who act as representatives of the Crown. Some ceremonial counties, like Cornwall, coincide with the administrative counties, but the ceremonial counties themselves, like presented in Appendix 5, do not have administrative functions other than for statistics. In addition to boundary changes related to county boroughs or creating new counties, the reordering and amalgamation of exclaves and other anomalies, have altered the ancient counties. For example, in 1844 the boundary between Devon and Cornwall changed from between Kingsand and Cawsand in the Rame-Maker peninsula near Plymouth to the bay of the river Tamar. Thus, the border between Cornwall and Devon has not always been in the same place. The English regional question is like an ‘elephant in the room’. While everyone realizes that there are differences between different localities in England, there are few who wish to discuss those ideas analytically. Peter Taylor (1991) even stated that England suffers from a ‘territorial enigma’ making it easy to state that England does not really have a stable regional level and that England lacks a regional history. Historian Charles Phythian-Adams (1993: 23) suggests “that there are many mysteries still to be uncovered in our continuing exploration of the lost cultural and societal pasts of provincial England”. Relating to the discussion about Topelius and natural regions, what Phythian-Adams suggested was a return to ‘cultural provinces’ or supra-county entities based on valleys, watersheds and river basins as containers for human activity. While some physical geographers have also pondered that the scales of ecological units and the scales of administrative units do not match (Hauck et al. 2013), going back to natural regions is not progressive since they do not have anything to do with how people have learned to identify themselves even though the natural regions might endure the political ones. Historians have adopted perhaps a vaguer conceptualization of the region. Edward Royle maintains that the region historically “is not a fixed concept, but a feeling, a sentimental attachment to territory shared by like-minded people” not administrative but a term of convenience (Royle 1998: 4). While Royle admits that counties have often been a natural unit of regional studies, he at the same time supports a vision that administrative regions do not frame histories. Conceptualizations such as “larger perhaps than the borough smaller perhaps than the county or nation” begs to question can the region be anything that already exists. Yet, regionalism or provincialism survives (Tomaney 2007, 2013). As a way to locate the urban in the more rural landscape (Rycroft and Jenness 2012) or as a way to understand how the practices adopted in urban centres radiate to the surrounding areas and how local distinctiveness drives the urban ‘scene’ (Neate 2012). For practical reasons, a state regional system alongside the counties started to develop around the 1930s in England. The ‘standard regions’ were planned in the 1940s to administer a pre-Fordist economy characterized by traditional industries (MacLeod 78 and Jones 2001). While different plans for regional bodies were made from statistical frameworks to devolved agencies or councils, regions as the elements of development and economic planning did not form a lasting policy until the 1990s. The inception of Regional Development Agencies in the late 1990s generated a regional divide for England until the general election of 2010. While these RDA regions colonized effectively the use of the term ‘region’ (alongside the city-region) and created enthusiastic accounts on the new, European regional paradigm and called for accountability for the development funds they were distributing, the social and cultural aspects and the problematization of the role of civil society was in many cases suspended. What became clear was that the “historically established cultures of social interaction” as Mike Raco (2006: 332) maintained “do not always sit comfortably alongside the spatial boundaries of government established by modern states.” In many cases the regions did not fit to the established ideas of identification with ‘territorial articulations’ (Deacon 2004; Thomas et al. 2013) and remained rather outside everyday lives. The RDAs were established to coordinate economic development, transport and land-use planning and as units in the redistribution of structural funds from the European Union. Nevertheless, they did not provide a solution to the ‘English Question’ of having no devolved national or regional power other than the central government (Jones 2004; Blackman and Ormston 2005), especially since the “reluctance to undertake fundamental reforms” on a national scale (Harrison 2012b). It is not reasonable to plough through English history with the same rigour as in the previous chapter concerning Finland. However, there are issues in the history of South West England or West Country that are fruitful to examine. As earlier indicated, both Devon and Cornwall have strong traditions in mining, agriculture and seafaring. The Stannary Parliaments in both counties, as a form of social justice among tin miners from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth century, are used in Cornwall as a sign of former autonomy and as a medium for claiming home rule. The material traces of the now diminished mining industries can be seen in the landscapes. The iconic engine houses are reminiscent of the past along with mining-related phrases and recognition as part of the UNESCO world heritage (Philo 1998; Laviolette 2003; Knight and Harrison 2013). The romanticized image of the home of King Arthur and Tintagel is only one example to highlight the Brythonic originality of Cornwall. The cultural resilience against Saxon practices eventually projected Cornish from a dialect to a language. Even though the formerly termed West Wales had maritime connections to Wales, Ireland and Brittany, being part of England isolated the language practice enough, eventually leading to the death of the language with the last monoglots gone by eighteenth century (Edwards 1985). Actually until the Prayer Book rebellion in 1549, Cornwall’s maritime connections with Brittany were more intense than to the rest of the Kingdom. The Prayer Book rebellion, instigated by the priests against homogenizing ecclesiastical practices within England included some Celtic Catholic parts of Devon also. This rebellion was used especially in the late twentieth century “to re-root the Cornish in their own historic space” with a vision of the conservative religious rebellion as a national uprising (Deacon 2007). Another 79 insurgent event that has more frequently been used as an example of ‘otherness’ is the St Keverne march ending up in Blackheath in 1497. Cornwall has a unique place among English counties and it is the only county in the Celtic League cultural interest group. Its cultural distinctiveness with the rest of England has led to a popular view of Cornwall as a Celtic nation (Hale 2001; Sandford 2006; Deacon and Schwartz 2007) or at least a ‘Celtic region’ (Jones and MacLeod 2004). A wide array of folklore and cultural practices differentiate the region from the rest of England. Tourism has become the corner stone for the economy of the region, but with it, the problem of seasonality and the question of the right to represent and manage Cornish history and heritage have only intensified the ethno-nationalist movements against cultural Anglicization and the need for historical conjunctures. The reliance of Cornish identity on mining connects even the Cornish diaspora (Deacon and Schwartz 2007) but what intrigues visitors and seasonal residents are the landscapes of West Country (Howard and Pinder 2003). The intensive cultural reproduction of Cornwall has successfully been used as a political instrument in the European Union to gain political and cultural recognition and in networking to other minority language regions. Cornwall’s unlikeness has been explained both as an indigenous and as an exogenous process but also in terms of constantly situating on the periphery. On one hand, Cornwall is a cultural entity, which is signified by the frequent use of the St Piran flag, the efforts to revive the once extinct Cornish language, the ethno-nationalist movement (Mebyon Kernow) that seeks Cornish ‘home rule’ (Jones and MacLeod 2004; Horton and Kraftl 2014: 162) and by the salient county border against Devon. On the other hand, Cornwall is a territory that the national discourse has ‘othered’ as Cornwall is often seen as a romantic periphery, locating on the Celtic fringe and marketed as an exotic, mythical, escapist place within the country (Crouch and Toogood 1999; Hale 2001).49 Without similar near-ethnocultural status as Cornwall, research on Devon has been more silent. The county represents much more English landscapes and values (Hoskins 1985). The motto of the central city, Semper fidelis, adopted in the Elizabethan era reminds that Exeter made a pact with the ruling elite during the Norman conquest of being loyal to the crown and the fact that at the time of the Domesday Book the city was owned by the king (Hoskins 1959). While the economic histories are rather similar with livelihoods coming from mining, fishing or agriculture or revolving around the phrase ‘pirates and drovers’ as suggested by one focus group participant, Devon has always been more affluent. Old rivalries and polar traditions speak of the differences between the counties (Whitlock 1977; Meethan 1998). The rural landscapes represent the timeless old-world villages, quintessentially and symbolic of English that in guidebook imagery are envisioned 49 Payton and Thornton (1995) among others note that the Great Western Railway did its part promoting leisure trips to the ‘exotic’ Cornwall in the late nineteenth century. In Finland, a similar process took place when at the same time travel times to northern Karelia and the doorsteps of Kalevalan heritage became more feasible. Ironically, the artists and composers that sought to capture the ‘lost national character’ were followed by industries that altered the nature they were trying to encapsulate. 80 as dreamlike, escapist territory. In short, Devon is like Cornwall “the summer playground for the metropolitan south east” (Meethan 1998: 586) but without the strong near-ethnic minorities that remind others of their difference from the English. County identities are witnessing restoration in some parts of England. The adaptation of several county flags, some taking note of Cornwall’s flag, has created new symbolic meanings for counties (Vainikka 2014a). The white-and-black cross on a green background adopted in 2006 for Devon is one example of how county identities are facilitated. Use of the flag naturalizes or demystifies the uniqueness of the Cornish St Piran’s flag that has been in public use only for some decades. 81 Figure 4. On research location before a focus group in Falmouth, Cornwall. (Photo by the author, 5/2010). 4 Methodological strategies and research materials 4.1 Capturing perceptions on things that change …le géographe est trop important pour flâner Nous écrivons des choses éternelles… Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943) Philosophy and history both provide support for theorizing space, time, identity and regions, but they do not teach one how to walk in the empirical world. Identity especially poses challenges for research since every individual has his or her story to tell. The quote above by de Saint-Exupéry from his renowned book Le Petit Prince describes the changes in geography over the past seventy or so years. Geographers have already charted spaces which ‘seem’ eternal50 and shifted their gaze to processes against which the eternal is constituted - to variances, differences and transformation (Dittmer 2010). Identity is in-between discourses of continuity that seem to solidify meanings and fluidity that contributes to incompleteness. Allowing the integration of new meanings into an understanding of Self and the flux of permanence and change, identification often works through the mediums of landscape and community, symbols, meanings and experiences. My methodological argument then is against the complacency of the geographer that the Little Prince encountered. Identity practices cannot be fully understood through ‘armchair geographies’, rather geographers should research the spatialities of identity in situations that enable interaction in spaces individuals regard important in the everyday life (Anderson et al. 2010). As the previous section showed the way we read history is attributable to the ideologies of the present. Likewise, the knowledge geographers produce is always from somewhere, from a positioned vantage point that Donna Haraway (1991) terms ‘situated knowledge’ and Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) ‘positioned truths’. In admitting the impossibility of generating objective and a bias-free science (Rose 1997; Nelson 1999; Galison and Daston 2007), some authors have heralded the idea of autobiographies or using the body or emotions as research instruments (Longhurst et al. 2008; Bennett 2009b; Vanolo 2014). While such methodologies provide one solution for the self-other contrast between research and its subjects, they raise a concern whether such endeavours are needed if we accept that difference is the norm. Relatedly, Abu-Lughod (1991: 141) critiques Bourdieu’s field methods and argues “the outsider Self never simply stands outside”. The outsider Self is profiled by the participants of the research. Yet, every research is conditioned by the ‘privileged position’ of the researcher, who controls the questions and themes asked, moderates the flow of the discussion, interprets the material and decides how it is 50 For an indication of such debate, see Tomaney’s (2013) critique towards Massey (2005). 83 presented (McLafferty 1995: 437), but also by the participants who create their image of the research, its objectives and trustworthiness. Not only is there a need to be reflexive about our situatedness in relation to our research methods (Rose 1997; Walkerdine et al. 2002; Bailey et al. 2009), there is also a need to reflect how the research situation presents itself to the eyes of the participants (Hopkins 2007; Jakobsen 2012). The difficulty of understanding identification and belonging has troubled many scholars, especially since belonging to a community or landscape is an emotional, individual and intimate issue for many. In contrast to short surveys, allowing people to discuss their identification can be empowering. “Was it easy? No, no to be honest, I’ve never thought of that sort of thing before. It’s something totally new to me, sort of trying to put myself into a little box, you know, where do you fit and everything like that, no.” Patrick, 66, member of an Old Cornwall Society This quote from the research material is a reflection on a more traditional and systematic ‘grading’ of different spatial scales after a discussion. It highlights, like Antonsich (2010b) has noted that feelings of being ‘at home’ are constructed reflexively and based on former experiences – not of given categories or imposed factors. Pinning down belonging to one locale has become more and more troublesome, since places where people are born and where they learned to speak have changed. With great probability, such transformed spaces are not the same spaces where people have settled in if they have settled at all. Transforming and mobile contexts are often romanticized imaginaries of their roots or nostalgia over the local histories of their current environment (Böök 2004; Bennett 2009a). Belonging and identification with space is thus not a straightforward economic, political or legal issue, it relates to meaningful times and places and connections one has established. Thus, in order to understand identification we have to make a distinction between the given labels or ‘categories of analysis’ (Brubaker and Cooper 2000) through which space is collectively structured and the accumulating spatial experiences or ‘places’ (Paasi 1996) and beliefs through which people articulate their identities or project their belonging. Space can become a medium that enables people to perform their identities (Secor 2004; Savage et al. 2005), a label for a sense of community which can become a nostalgic emblem for communal roots with social practices of its own (Prytherch 2009; Sidaway 2009; Jokela and Linkola 2013) or a community brand that some agents use for politicizing rights and development (Jones 2004; Staeheli 2008). When geographers study issues of identification and belonging, there is a danger of overemphasizing space as an object of identification and its history over the actual stories of people. Tomaney (2014) discounts, perhaps too enthusiastically, the detachment of communal roots among the mobile middle class. When people “attach their own biographies to their ‘chosen’ residential locations” (Savage et al. 2005: 29), it does not make the identities of these people any less meaningful. As geographers, we have to admit 84 that everyone does not place as much importance in histories and textures of locales, but also that for some belonging can become a struggle against dominant discourses (Nelson and Hiemstra 2008). I understand identification with space as a socially mediated process. People can entitle themselves to space, its landscapes and its histories but often feel an obligation of saving a more ‘real’ identity to the people they image having longer histories (Vainikka 2012, 2014a, 2014b). Secor (2004) has also written about how people can make their own claims to different spaces while realizing that different social discourses might exclude them from not being part of what they see as the hegemonic community. Understanding how this narrative self-legitimization works around other people was one reason for the focus-group method. Bruno Latour (2002: 119) maintains “the small always holds the key to understanding of the large”. For Latour in the spirit of Tardean sociology, the ‘small’ is not an isolated individual facing an interviewer rather an individual in connection with others. The methodological choice for this research was to respect the idea that identity narratives are best studied in contexts where the participants are accountable to their peers, feel confident talking about their identities and are immersed in a context that reflects their interests. With focus groups, the unit of analysis is the group or the interchanges between the participants. The method I use underlines how identities are narrated, re-formulated and shared in basically everyday surroundings with people who they would normally share ideas or shoot the breeze. Focus groups with local civic organizations in everyday surroundings help to bridge the problematic relationship, Jack Katz (1999: 3) puts nicely, “between the research situation and emotional experiences as they occur in the practical settings of their social lives”. When studying identities, the key question every researcher should ask is whether identities constitute a reflexive and symbolic meaning system to which performable attributes can be assigned to distinguish, name or locate different categories, or whether these categories of naming and locating are part of the power the researcher uses to make sense of the research participants. The premise of the methodological selection for this research was to let the research participants speak for themselves and in relation to each other, thus minimizing the effects of the researcher’s conceptual arsenal. Much like de Saint-Exupéry’s Geographer, who recorded the travel accounts of others, my methodological reasoning is to let the participants set the context for and substance of the research, so that the research would as much as possible describe their views, opinions and sentiments towards the world around them. Since spatial identities are subjective elements of life histories and collective discourses, I argue that a suitable way to study identification with regions is by using a method that promotes collective interchanges of different spatialities and gives enough room for individual identity narratives. Focus groups offer a potential research method for understanding how identities are spatialized and articulated in spatial terms. Peter Hopkins (2007: 528) notes that focus groups “can enhance the role of the research participants in regulating the research findings”. The method allows tapping into the discursive practices that create understandings and attitudes towards 85 spaces (Secor 2007). Focus groups can be empowering experiences as knowledge is created by and for the participants through a collective experience (Bosco and Herman 2010). The dynamism and internal power relations require moderation of the discussion. Focus groups are research settings where themes are discussed - not coffee table discussions that would happen without prompting. The main reasoning behind the selection of the method was to respect the evident observation Mike Crang (1998) acknowledges that people are ‘reflexive agents’ who make sense of the world without academic concepts or analytical distinctions. Such a methodological choice places importance on the analysis of the interviews, understanding the relations between the participants and mapping localized knowledge in speech. Identifying with space is a feature of everyday life that everyone senses on some level. The question of how scholars who are interested in the reproduction and social negotiation of space can measure, identify or describe these sentiments and interactions needs critical debate. Whether using surveys and questionnaires, interviews, ethnography or participant observations, autoethnography, life history methods or diaries, landscape interpretation or other visual techniques, archival or literary research, participatory GIS or Q-methods, the selection of the method eventually leads to variations. The benefit of focus groups is that they allow the themes of discussion to be controlled by the researcher but also leaves enough room for the participants themselves to reflect on issues and discuss them potentially in a way that they would without the researcher. Jenny Kitzinger and Rosaline Barbour (1999: 5) note “interviews are more effective for tapping into individual biographies, but focus groups are invaluable for examining how knowledge, ideas, story-telling, self-representation and linguistic exchanges operate within a given cultural context.” With the stories people them to each other, they articulate and ponder on the categories whereby they describe themselves, which might not be constant or stable even for the time of the focus group (Prins et al. 2013). Focus groups, by implication, help to understand the multiplicity of identity and its changeability. The power of narrative can help the participants to understand themselves better, to “coalesce things” in their minds as Patrick, 66, indicated before I handed a form at the end of a discussion that tested, ultimately, differences between talking about identities and putting oneself in a box. At times, the method, however, needs creative thinking, especially when the objective is to get the participants to talk about issues that are understood to be either taboos or doxa (Jakobsen 2012; Koch 2013). Creating an atmosphere of trust is often of utmost importance. This is to say that focus groups do not become empowering or examples of felt worlds just by sitting around a table with the researcher. Often giving the participants a chance to discuss issues is often more fruitful than ticking or grading boxes. The selection of doing extensive focus groups was partly a critique towards surveys. For example, the Eurobarometer surveys provide biannual European-wide longitudinal studies (See, for example, Antonsich 2010a; Dostal et al. 2011; Chacha 2013) and are good indicators of 86 social cohesion within the European Union. While they compile a reasonable number of nation-based data on attitudes and attachments towards local, regional, national and European administrative levels, they tend to leave open what is driving change in people’s attitudes and present the categories to the respondent as given regardless of national contexts (Keating 1998). The barometers do not explain why individuals identify with certain administrative spaces, how they perform and narrate their identities and most importantly do not take into account the multiplicity of locales and regions to which attachments can be formed. The 23 focus groups provide a window into social movement and civic organization interaction in two countries. I sat down with groups of Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth or Transition, Youth Societies or Local Groups and Local Heritage groups. The spheres of interests of these civic organizations created a discursive setting of universally- orientated and locally-orientated interests. While some scholars critique the conscious creation of dialectics (Sheppard 2008), using such scaled categories offers an insight into different ways space is understood and used. At times, I use the term ‘social movement’ since the majority of these organizations are or have been involved in ‘contentious politics’ (Nicholls et al. 2013). They can be thought of as “hybrid[s] of interpersonal networks and institutional organizations” (DeLanda 2006: 33). While people change in these organizations, their causes are mediated through more stable values and responses to processes against these values. The focus groups are not the only form of material for this research. Interviews with regional actors in Päijät-Häme, Finland, comprise half of the material for the second research article (Vainikka 2013). In addition, the analysis of the focus-group interviews is subject to the observations ‘from the field’51 in the case regions and the differences between the regions and their historical transformation. The material is interpreted as part of the research context, not as independent transcripts. Having refined the theoretical base bridging everyday narratives and methodological choices, I explain the selection of the civic organizations and present the logic behind the case study regions and present some basic statistics of the regions. I also discuss how I used the focus-group method to generate and tease out collectively shared notions and individual attitudes and clarify the regional actor interviews. 51 I took part in some events that the groups organized, became familiar with their local operations and visited their society houses. Spending time in the regions, prior and during the research period helped to understand the local, everyday life and shared social discourses. 87 4.2 Tapping into spatial identity narratives with focus-group interviews 4.2.1 A brief description The potential of focus-group interviews or discussions52 is in their applicability revealing how feelings, opinions and attitudes are shared. With focus groups, the unit of analysis is the group or the interchanges between the participants. The method spotlights group norms as performed through inter-respondent interaction (Warr 2005). Realized in its full potential when practical settings are used as focus groups venues, places that actually matter to the participants (Elwood and Martin 2000; Anderson et al. 2010), the use of such method emphasizes the social context where participants feel comfortable in sharing identity narratives (Hollander 2004; Hopkins 2007; Prins et al. 2013). Much of the literature on focus groups reflects the need to have a common communicative ground and that the participants should be able to contribute to ‘groupness’ (Hydén and Bülow 2003; Skop 2006). Some researchers conflate the common ground with some socio-demographic variable with which they want to explain things (Secor 2004, 2007; Antonsich 2010a) others use real-life communities to provide further explanation how certain variables might affect how different issues are understood, but without considering whether such communities tell more of the reasons why people seek to participate in certain organizations or of the categorized social groups themselves (Munday 2006; Neal and Walters 2006). Focus groups can be used in conjunction with other research methods: as a preliminary research method used to refine research themes and questions (Longhurst 1996), alongside individual interviews (Antonsich 2010a; Mol 2013; Vainikka 2013) or as a way to validate earlier research stages (Wood and Reynolds 2012; Wee and Anthamatten 2014). Focus groups can also be used as a sole research method especially when the aim is to scrutinize social norms and interpersonally negotiated discourses (Secor 2004; Warr 2005; Neal and Walters 2006; Leitner 2012; Vainikka 2012). When researchers ask their research participants to talk about rather intimate and personal issues such as their belonging, experiences or their relation to regional legacies, the social context is extremely important to think about. People, who already know each other or who are strangers to each other before the focus group, generate different types of contexts but also the way the moderator/interviewer conforms to the expectations of the participants and the way the participants profile the researcher, for example through his or her dialect and persona. In a highly influential guide to conducting focus groups, Richard Krueger (1994: 18) recommends that is better if the participants do not know 52 I use focus-group interviews instead of focus-group discussions, because the research situations were signposted by a set of interview questions. David Morgan (1996: 193) describes that, in the group discussions, social interaction is the norm, but it is moderated “by the researcher who keeps the group ‘focused’ through a set of prepared questions and prompts”. While the focus groups generated free-flowing discussions and interaction among the participants where they shared opinions, the focus groups were interview situations with a moderator who paced the discussion (Hydén and Bülow 2003; cf. Ollila 2008: 65). 88 each other, because familiarity brings along the life-histories of the participants and can restrain their freedom to speak. As identities are bound to meaningful and safe memories that are interpersonally negotiated (Yuval-Davis 2006; Vainikka 2014b), rejecting the actual everyday surroundings where these narratives, interpellations and performances take place is a sure way to build a separation between research situations and emotional experiences that Jack Katz highlighted much of sociological research is missing. Jacomijne Prins et al. (2013: 85) prefer using groups of peers that resemble “most of the group of people with whom we would naturally discuss certain topics in our daily lives.” The idea of ‘a group of peers’ is taken rather critically in this research. Sharing some social demographic often fails to underline the intersectionality of identities or clouds other social or cultural facets. The selection of participants in this research is guided by the question of why people become ‘peers’ in the first place and why they gravitate towards certain kinds of groups regardless of their social characteristics. The distinction between the locally-orientated and the universally-orientated and the use of civic organization membership as the ‘explanatory variable’ is in tune with the theoretical discussion. It is more important to analyse identities on the basis of their interests, not through a categorical separation of age, gender, class or nationality. Such issues might explain participation in general but are not the factors that as such would drive their social interests. The aim of focus groups is that participants would discuss and converse among themselves, question, challenge and reply to each other. These discussions reflect the self-correcting processes of everyday conversation and predominant social norms and values, performed rather than preformed (Jakobsen 2012). Focus groups, thus, offer a forum for the participants to discuss everyday issues, understandings and opinions. When used in a way that engages participants it partly alleviates the researcher-researched power relations and makes sure topics and categories are understood by the participants. 4.2.2 Methodological traditions Understanding the methodological traditions and how and in what contexts the method has been used, is critical when we wish to be thorough in any research tasks. Focus-group interviews have a history of being a tool for positivist-orientated marketing research. Different sources credit the first use of the method to both Emery Borgadis in the 1920s or to Robert Merton as both used forms of group interviews to generate socially discussed material (Kitzinger 1995; Morgan 1996; Wilkinson 2004). Merton and his colleagues refined the group interview method in the 1940s and developed a ‘focused interviews’ method for the study of the social and emotional effects of war-time propaganda and mass communication (Merton and Kendall 1946). Following positivist approaches, the use of such method placed emphasis on the controllability of eight to twelve participants whose round-table discussions were audio and/or videotaped or even observed via a one- way mirror in institutional research settings. As late as in 1991, James Frey and Andrea 89 Fontana argued that the method could be at odds with the traditions of observation and one-on-one interviews. They maintained that anthropological “field researchers have judged the group interview technique to be inappropriate and invalid” (Frey and Fontana 1991: 176) or that multiple informants may have been used simultaneously in fieldwork, but they were not classified as focus groups. Frey and Fontana shared optimism about the possibilities of researchers arranging group interviews in natural field locations, thus the focus-group method gradually started to transform from a method of clinically controlled settings into more creative arrangements that chime with everyday spaces. In the 1980s, the focus-group method became a staple in marketing research followed by the interest of scholars in healthcare sciences and psychology (e.g., Kitzinger 1994; Kitzinger 1995; Eysenbach and Kohler 2002). The systematic models of a few influential scholars partly stigmatized the use of the method and cut room for creative manoeuvres (Kitzinger and Barbour 1999; Hopkins 2007). As an instrument for gauging public opinion, focus groups have also appealed to political parties especially in the English-speaking world. In attempts to redefine New Labour in Britain, focus groups became a household name that were used to listen swing voters (Bedford and Burgess 2001; Conradson 2005a; Savigny 2007). Rosaline Barbour and John Schostak (2005: 41) noted the unprecedented popularity among researchers resonated with politicians and marketing consultants ‘love affair’ with the method. In France, focus groups are more sparsely used as a political tool (Lefébure 2011) and in other countries they have gained only tangential references (Campus 2010), probably because as Heather Savigny (2007) notes the focus groups are constructed with very specific socio-demographic features in mind that can undermine democracy itself. Focus groups became popular in social sciences and human geography in the 1990s. One of the early adopters was Jacqueline Burgess’ project on the meanings individuals placed on open spaces in and around London (Burgess et al. 1988a; Burgess et al. 1988b). In their use of in-depth small groups, the research group relied heavily on psychoanalysis and sought to adopt psychotherapy groups into human geographical practice. While they did not label their method as focus groups, their guidelines of how to be sensitive to discussions where individuals narrate their memberships, understandings and belonging to certain spaces were adopted widely. The method was accepted by geographers when focus groups were discussed in an Area special issue in 1996 (Burgess 1996; Goss and Leinbach 1996; Holbrook and Jackson 1996; Longhurst 1996). The authors in the special issues were prompted by a call to use more collaborative research methods to answer epistemological questions raised by feminist and post-structuralist theorists on the nature of socially shared knowledge and the formation of identities in groups but also by the imagined ease of collecting research material and engaging with different people with one-off group discussions. Goss and Leinbach proclaim that group discussions offer insight into social relations and convey that “the ‘stories’ produced in the collaborative performance of a focus group better reflect the social nature of knowledge than a summation of individual narratives extracted in interviews” (Goss and Leinbach 1996: 90 115). The Area special issue underlined that focus groups are a collaborative project that transgress the norm of individual interviews and as Goss and Leinbach continue provide a “privileged access to the truth of an individual’s world”. Arguing for the adaptability of the method has to come to terms with its historical baggage not repeating it. Anna Secor (2009: 200) notes that in “adapting focus group methods from marketing research, social scientists can modify group techniques to facilitate more in-depth and informal discussion among participants.” In this quotation, lies one element for criticism. Why geographers are so keen on following the footsteps of marketing experts, when the reasoning should be formulating the epistemological grounds that fit geographical questions. Building bridges with marketing analysis tools help geography graduates in Britain and North America to find jobs in marketing. If our aim is to explore various aspects of “people’s everyday engagements with their social and spatial worlds” (Hopkins 2007: 529), then focus groups should be readdressed as a geographical method, one that promotes social interaction. Focus groups can be used as a cost-effective way to uncover how issues are discussed by groups of people, but gauging opinions and making sense why social norms have constructed the way they are contributing to two totally different discussions (see also Wilkinson 1998). This relation must be critically scrutinized against the tradition of using focus-group interviews in other countries and by understanding the practices of how it is actually used by scholars. Focus groups are, after all, a method where information is created by the participants but a social setting where information is shared for the other participants (Bosco and Herman 2010: 195, emphasis in the original). With all the guidelines and references given by few influential writers, Richard Krueger, David Morgan, Jenny Kitzinger and Rosaline Barbour just to name a few, there is a danger that the focus group is presented mainly in a positivist conviction. Guidelines that determine the composition of the group and efforts to match some social categories in order to make the ‘sample’ representative can both be too rigid in generating discussions that would make sense to the real world. As Jocelyn Hollander (2004) notes, the social context of the focus group can prevent people from sharing their opinions. When targeting eight to ten participants, there will always be people who will not share their actual opinions. Another issue is the number of focus groups. David Morgan (1996), for example, implies that ‘data saturation’ is achieved with four to six focus groups, but this can only apply to a distinct set of topics or certain populations. Hilde Jakobsen (2012) has shown that such guidelines can become increasingly frustrating if the participants do not feel they can speak freely, understand the reasoning for such method or think that the researcher wants to hear the normative, stereotypical version, not one that would reflect their own opinions and attitudes. What is also common in the guides on doing focus groups is the insistence of qualified moderators. Krueger and Casey (2009), for example, states that a ‘right’ moderator shows genuine respect for the participant, understands the topic of the study, communicates clearly, is open and understands different viewpoints and gets the most ‘useful’ information. Four first points should be self-evident to every 91 researcher doing interviews, but the last is where marketing and social sciences should part ways. If the idea behind focus groups is indeed to tap into the attitudes and opinions, there is no such thing as ‘useful’. Every word, every muttering, every pause, and every colloquial filler can be important for understanding identities as they all tell something about people’s views, difficulties to narrativize or the need to contemplate. In addition, no matter how experienced the moderator is, “it is naive to suggest that even superlative facilitation will remove social desirability and self-presentation pressures” (Hollander 2004: 627; see also Bennett 2009b). In the Finnish context, the way focus groups are translated as ryhmäkeskustelu (group discussions) or ryhmähaastattelu (group interviews) or simply fokusryhmä, is an indicator of an indecisive methodological practice where the international scholarship and national traditions do not always meet (Heikkilä 2008). Marketing researcher Anu Valtonen (2005) promotes the use of ryhmäkeskustelu as the proper translation and rightly points out that the lack of the ‘focus’ does not only relate to concerns about methodological issues but shows the disparity between different geographical contexts and historical traditions. While Finnish scholars have increasingly applied focus groups as a label for their method (Pösö et al. 2008; cf. Honkatukia et al. 2003), such research strategy at the same time creates a cleavage within the traditions of social sciences. Group discussions were used in Finland already in the late 1950s (Bruun 1959; see also Sulkunen 1990), but multiple terminologies of similar methods and basing epistemological grounds on guidelines intended for entirely different interests increase confusion. In a field governed by a belief that individual interviews reveal how people construct their worlds without the need to qualify those opinions, following the footsteps and guidelines of marketing scholars in terms focus groups becomes increasingly problematic if it at the same time forgets how groups were interviewed and asked to discuss before. Engaging with methodological issues relating to focus groups in Finnish sociology (e.g., Valtonen 2005; Tuulentie and Mettiäinen 2007; Uusitalo 2010; Heikkilä 2011; Pietilä and Ojala 2011; Varjonen et al. 2013; Wright et al. 2013) or in Finnish geography (Kuusisto-Arponen 2003; Juhola 2009) is rather scant. Apocryphal references to “works on methodology in the social sciences” (Kuusisto-Arponen 2003: 37) open too many interpretations and leaves scientific traditions undefined. More than following rigid recommendations of group sizes and compositions, researchers should be more concerned on how the method fits to their research questions (Heikkilä 2008), interested in challenging uncreative norms (Hopkins 2007) and keen on facilitating the focus of group interviews or discussions so that it describes felt worlds and understandings of actual people, not only the categories scholars are interested to examine. 92 4.3 Contrasting scales of action and differing regions Selecting research participants is one of the most crucial stages of any research. Most often geographers gather research material by concentrating on one case at a time. Bent Flyvbjerg (2006: 242) makes a compelling case for case studies by arguing that “a discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and that a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one.” Flyvbjerg makes an argument about the nature of knowledge and questions whether societies have generalizable law-like functions at all if one anomaly is enough to debunk an entire theory. Nevertheless, Flyvbjerg cannot get around the fact that the locale and the setting of case studies matter. Taking the example of falsification of Karl Popper that ‘all swans are white’ turns into geographies of singularity when such observing is done along Swan River in Perth, Australia, where every swan is black. I agree with Giddens that “the traditional small-scale community research of fieldwork anthropology - are not in themselves generalizing studies. But they can easily become so if carried out in some numbers so that judgments of their typicality can justifiably be made” (1984: 328). This argument relates to the methodological visions of Vidal de la Blanche and Gabriel Tarde (Barry 2010: 186). Social and cultural geography and sociology are fuelled by comparisons. The pitfall of collecting large numbers of data with a large number of trained analysts is that human errors increase when there is a political pressure to get favoured results (see Belcher 2015) but also that local characteristics tend to get parochial or rose-coloured regardless of similar, and often transnational, processes. Comparative studies give more purchase to generalizations that are drawn from rigorous fieldwork in multiple locations and of analysis of the factors influencing practices in different contexts. Comparative studies too often use some separated socio-demographic variable as a descriptive element of social differences, without reflecting that the research situation itself might highlight other differences within participants or in comparison to the researcher. For example, Tim Phillips and Philip Smith (2000) used mixed versions of rural-urban, social class, age and origin to capture and maximize group variation in search of what constitutes an ‘Australian’, but these variables only provide characterizations of research participants that are random to ways in which those roles are performed and understood. Scholars often acknowledge the intersectionality of identity that can have an influence on how individuals understand things and how they respond in research settings, but still are concentrating or crystallizing the effects of one or two socio-demographic characteristics. Variables such as age, sex, ethnicity or class, for instance, are not only checklists that should be listed as the attributes of the participants, rather they are part of the narrative that with reflexive histories contribute to the performance of a hybrid identity, one made of bricolages of the everyday (Leyshon and Bull 2011). 93 4.3.1 The selection of the groups In this research, the selection of the participants did not emphasize how the focus groups might be composed of homogeneous groups or could as group entities be divided into ‘break characteristics’. My aim with the selection of groups was to tap into different worldviews and attitudes to particular and universal topics. The purpose was not to create socio-demographic differences with civic organizations (Neal and Walters 2006), rather use the civic organization membership as the explanatory variable. This methodological choice underlines the primacy of similar worldviews or memberships that are used to express self-identities and the ways these can be more influential than age, gender, class, nationality, etc. Nevertheless, quite often the different spatial contexts and orientations of the selected groups had an ‘age effect’. At times, people were grown into some civic organizations and see that they have inherited certain ways of participating in the society and local life. Others might seek civic organizations that could help to channel their need to take action and desire influence issues bigger than their everyday life. The purpose of the selection of the participants and groups was to form focus groups that are inherently local by their action or what J. Nicholas Entrikin (2002) might call ‘provincial’ and focus groups who might have a broader or even cosmopolitan view of the world. This, in theory, allows more variegated discourses originating from differently scaled mind-sets. To some point, this worked in practice. Yet regarding their differences as ‘evident’ can turn as another way of imposing identity narratives upon groups of people without analytical rigour (see for example Smith and Burch 2012). Not all of the so-called universalist groups were well-travelled or interested in global issues notably more than of local issues, some even subverted the notion of travelling. Also those regarded as having a particularist, local focus of activities and valuing local traditions and heritage were well-aware, albeit few in denial, of global issues and most were well-travelled and appreciated highly European and global cultural distinctions. The research was done by selecting first the social movement organizations with differently scaled interests, more particular or universal objectives and whose members would presumably have different worldviews, and second by selecting four Finnish regions as case studies in 2008. In 2010, the selection of case study regions came first. For South West England, I sought similar groups in relation to the Finnish groups. As the universally-orientated civic organizations, I chose Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth in Finland. In England, I replaced the latter organization with somewhat similar Transition movement. As the locally-orientated civic organizations, I chose Local Heritage Associations and Youth Societies in Finland and a Heritage Association, an Old Cornwall Society and a local association and an Amateur Operatic Society in England. Amnesty International developed from a letter writing legal organization into a globally recognizable social movement that campaigns for universal human rights locally and through local groups. Its campaigns are predominantly transnational and the national branches often eschew taking a stand on national issues. In 2003, the international 94 secretariat advised that especially in the work against violence against women national sections could (and should) campaign in their own countries. The style of the organization has changed from the 1960s, when it was conceived as an organization that would create knowledge about prisoners of conscience. More recently the functions of Amnesty have centred on gathering members and raising awareness rather than doing rigorously independent research in different countries on freedom (Buchanan 2002; Arts 2004; Haines 2006). Friends of the Earth and Transition can also be termed as universally- orientated groups, as they try to help individuals to realize that their actions influence for the greater good of nature, climate, town planning and sustainable development (Doherty 2006; Bailey et al. 2010; Felicetti 2013). Gillian Bristow (2010) for example sees the ideology that the Transition movement fosters as one that is in tune with resilience and answers to the critiques presented towards the neoliberal competitiveness rhetoric. The ideology of both of these organizations is the ‘think global act local’ phrase and a vision that global problems can be addressed with the multiplicity of local voices. Accidentally, for the regions selected, Friends of the Earth emerged in Finland in Southwest Finland in 1998 and Transition, in England, started to gather momentum in Devon. In Finland, the Youth Society movement developed in the late nineteenth century as part of the national awakening. As one of the three large-scale civic organizations, it was politically perhaps the most of the centre-right in its early days (Meinander 2006). Its ideology of keeping the young out of harm’s way and developing activities that would be civilizing and beneficial for the greater good of the society swept rapidly throughout the country (Stenfors 2007). In some regions, the provincial Youth Societies were actually established before there were any local associations to organize (Hästesko 1931). The organizational structure of the Youth Societies actually paved the way for provincial associations in the 1930s. Currently, the regional divide of the district organizations does not match the official provincial structure, and some municipalities have several Youth Societies. The central activities of the movement today are dance, theatre and sports that take place in the Society Houses built during the twentieth century. In smaller municipalities, these Society Houses provide a sense of community and inclusion. For the movement, international action is important as it creates an image of differences between regions and the significance of parochialism (Numminen 2011). The roots of the Local Heritage Associations are in the Lifelong Learning Foundation and the Youth Society movement that both harboured some of the early associations for Local Heritage groups (Stenfors 2007). The first Local Heritage Association assembled in 1894 in Lohja. The intention of the movement was to strengthen the local cultural traditions and legacies alongside nation-building and to make a distinction to the Russian Empire. The idea behind the first Local Heritage Associations was to empower and engage the ordinary people for regionalist ideals that would generate national identification (Turunen 1996). In the late 1900s, the movement organized into a committee nationally and started to publish a journal Kotiseutu. In coming years research on local regionalism was done by several agents, including the provincial associations. Local Heritage Associations became 95 more common after 1949 when the Finnish Local Heritage Foundation was established. In the 1950s, the movement became a nation-wide and many local heritage museums and associations were established. Trying to conserve the local histories, knowledge and practices became more important in smaller rural municipalities whose population to a great extent was moving to bigger cities and abroad. Currently, the Local Heritage Associations hold some authority when ideas of municipal futures are reimagined. The groups in South West England, to an extent, are comparable to the Finnish groups. The Amateur Operatic Society that facilitates plays and theatre for the young functions like a Youth Society in Finland. The Local Association selected for this study also contributes to the social community and resonates with the objectives of the Youth Societies. The Local Heritage Association in Devon is much like Heritage Association in Finland and the Old Cornwall Society movement initiated by Robert Nance in 1924 with the objective to collect, record and publish information about Cornwall, project natural beauty and to preserve Cornish relics and antiquities is much like the agenda for Finnish Local Heritage Associations. The only difference is the interest in encouraging studying the temporarily forgotten language. 4.3.2 The selection of the case study regions In Finland, the selection of the study regions was closely tied to the spatial distribution of the local groups of the civic organizations. While the Youth Societies and Local Heritage Associations are established in nearly every municipality and some municipalities have several local groups, the distribution of the local groups of Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth most often coincides to university cities. The latter two had groups in 13 or 14 of the 19 regions. Thus, the selection of regions in 2008 had to be adjusted in a way that would allow creating a comparable selection. Regions like South Ostrobothnia or South Karelia had to be left out although they both have a strong Youth Society tradition (Hästesko 1931). All four movements are networked nationally or have a national parent organization. Youth Societies and Local Heritage Associations also have district agencies and at times Amnesty and Friends of the Earth operate like regional groups. While they are active mainly in urban contexts, they do visit schools and fairs in neighbouring municipalities. With the selection of the regions, I wanted to emphasize two other issues as well. First, I wanted that all parts of the country would be represented; from east to west and from south to north. Second, but of less significance, I sought that none of the regions would border each other. The idea behind this was that when the participants would be asked to talk about the three other provinces it would not be based on everyday rivalries but on imaginaries and experiences of these regions. With these three principles, the selection of Southwest Finland, Päijät-Häme, North Karelia and North Ostrobothnia was one of the few possibilities. While it was not the objective of the study, the research 96 areas reflect the so-called original tribes in Finland, Finns, Tavastians and Karelians, that appear in rune stones, Norse or Icelandic sagas or in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Ostrobothnia became a significant part of the territorialized world in the fourteenth century. Yet another justification for the selection can be found in the legacy of Alexander II, who granted the municipal system for Finland. The four regions for the research are descendants of provinces represented on different cardinal sides of Alexander’s memorial at Senate Square in Helsinki (See Figure 3). There is also a method in the distribution of the focus groups within the regions. As Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth most often situated in the urban centres of the regions, I selected groups of Youth Societies and Heritage Associations elsewhere. This strategy was applied to avoid representing the region only through its centre (cf. Antonsich 2007). The selected locally-orientated groups locate in ‘suburban’ areas, in the municipalities next to the regional centre, or near the provincial border 60 to 160 kilometres away from the regional centre. Being aware that the comparison between locally-orientated and universally-orientated civic organizations could easily turn into a comparison between rural and urban, I wanted to include suburban locales that are not rural as such but are important sites for the functionality of cities themselves. In Southwest Finland and North Karelia, the Youth Societies locate near the provincial borders and in Päijät-Häme and North Ostrobothnia the Local Heritage Associations locate furthest from the regional centre. The selected regional level is the local-tier governance. The regions I selected are not part of state regionalism, rather the present-day provinces in Finland are part of the municipal organization and the regional councils (Paasi 2013) are literarily federations of municipalities. The application of regional theories and generalizations of empirical findings should resonate with comparative settings. Researchers have made assumptions of entire regional systems through single regions (Antonsich 2010a), have tested theories through single national examples (van Houtum and Lagendijk 2001; Painter 2008b; Syssner 2009) or have sought to formulate concepts through single national contexts (Paasi 1986b; Savage et al. 2005; Vainikka 2012). As a whole, my research has emphasized the need to recognize differences not only within countries but also between countries (Keating et al. 2003). Comparing the Finnish case regions with the English county level is not a ‘head-to- head’ comparison especially since the concept of region is understood rather differently in each country. In early 2010, I started to plan a research visit to the University of Exeter in South West England. Inspired by an Exeter-based researcher’s visit to Oulu in November 2008, the strength of social and regional geography pursued at the university and recalling a desire to visit the South West already in 2003 during an exchange student period at the University of Sheffield, lead to interest in doing fieldwork based in Devon. I first considered focusing on the Standard (Statistical) Regions, or the regions of the Regional Development Agencies. Since the late 1990s, these political regions became the main discourse of English new regional geography (Jones 2001; MacLeod and Jones 97 2001; Tomaney 2002; Raco 2006). Nevertheless, the scale of the RDA regions would not have yielded an ideal comparison with Finnish provinces. Not only because South West England, for instance, has nearly the same population as Finland, but also because the territories of the RDA’s were not all that familiar to their inhabitants (Deacon 2004). While they seemed to be institutions by their own right, they were administrative constructs filled with party political discourses. Some standard regions have histories in earlier regional divides and correspond roughly to informal regions, such as the West Country, but the English state regionalism as Irene Hardill et al. (2001: 195) note has never followed strict borders and different national institutions have their own divides. Furthermore, these state regions are not, unlike Finnish provinces, part of local-tier governance. Comparable regional division in Finland would have been the former counties or State regional agencies. The European statistical NUTS apparatus was generated during the 1980s but adopted by the European Parliament only in 2003. By dividing Europe into ‘economic territories’, it classifies the individual countries into three levels that provide a degree of comparability across the EU. Guided by population numbers the NUTS system can generate regional levels that have no correspondence in national politics or for civil society (Eurostat 2011). A rather technocratic idea would have been to construct a comparison based on the NUTS levels. My interest was focused primarily on the regions of local government and cultural tradition, not on top-down regions that the state or European Union guidelines can easily redraw to fit contemporary ideologies. The English NUTS2 level corresponds to counties or their groupings, but the Finnish NUTS2 classification includes areas that are not used anywhere else, both pre- and post-2012. The comparison is based basically on NUTS3 regions, with the exception that Plymouth and Torbay are usually regarded as Devonian even though they are Unitaries. Table 1 presents some basic statistics of the selected regions. Realizing that the state regional level in England might be irrelevant to citizens (see for example, MacLeod and Jones 2001) and would not provide a prudent comparison to Finnish regions meant that in order to generate a comparative setting the entire concept of the region would have to be rethought. If the framework of the region entail “the geographical patterns of everyday life and the claims made in praise and defence of such patterns” (Nicholls et al. 2013: 6), then the regional level should be such that it makes sense to people. Timothy Reuter (2006) and Mark Sandford (2006) are among a few that spell out the doxa that in relation to English regions counties should be dismissed or treated as sub-regions. Some scholars who have focused on counties have avoided the county-region dilemma and termed both English Standard Regions and counties as ‘territorial articulations’ (Thomas et al. 2013). My argument, however, is that if region as a term should have theoretical and methodological purchase, we should regard regions as analytical terms, not as a steadfast administrative name. On the other hand, taking the county as a framework for empirical work does not reify the county as a region, rather it 98 allows comparisons to be made from the point of view of local governments, not from top-down state regions. Thus, regions are not married to a specific scale (Paasi 2002a, 2003). Selecting Devon and Cornwall for the case study areas was in the end a rather evident. Concentrating on a rather manageable area for international fieldwork was logistically sound. In addition, I wanted to understand cultural differences within a rather compact area. Earlier literature has painted Cornwall as an exoticized region (Hale 2001) with a small ethno-nationalist movement. Some scholars have characterized Cornwall as a Celtic region (Jones and MacLeod 2004) or a Celtic nation (Deacon and Schwartz 2007). Compared with the ‘othered’ discourse, Devon, as the temporary base for the fieldwork, seemed more English (Vainikka 2014a). In many ways, Devon has been characterized as holding quintessentially English characteristics. Even though Devon and Cornwall are often lumped together and treated as the outermost part of Southern England, the differences between these counties provided an interesting testing ground for issues of identification, belonging and the idea of regions but also a different take on a regional border than in the Finnish examples (Figure 5 for the geographical distribution of the focus groups and the locations of the regions). Table 1. Basic facts relating to the size, population, employment, economics and education of the selected regions and states in 2010. Datasource: Eurostat (2014abcde), except for # Statistics Finland (2014) and ^ Office for National Statistics (2013) Region Area Population Employment Unemployed Regional Alin korkea-aste # (km2) rate (15-64) (15-64) GDP or Level 4 equal. ^ or higher ** Southwest Finland 10 910 462 914 68,3 % # 8,1 % 29 400 € 27,29 % Päijät-Häme 6 256 201 270 66,0 % # 8,9 % 27 000 € 23,76 % North Karelia 21 584 165 962 61,6 % # 12,5 % 24 400 € 22,30 % North Ostrobothnia 37 411 392 110 64,1 % # 10,2 % 28 500 € 26,29 % Finland 338 441 5 351 427 68,1 % / 8,4 % 33 300 € 27,78 % 67,8 % # Devon (incl. 6 840 1 127 629 70,6 % 6,6 % 21 900 € 25,55 % Plymouth and Torbay) Cornwall and the 3 636 530 325 67,9 % 8,2 % 18 000 € 24,99 % Isles of Scilly United Kingdom 248 531 62 510 197 69,5 % 5,9 % 27 800 € 27,22% * * not the UK but England and Wales ** Alin korkea-aste and Level 4 qualifications are roughly comparable indicators for education. As a percentage over the age 15 in Finland, over 16 in England. 99 100 Figure 5. Locations of the selected regions and the settings of the focus-group interviews. 4.4 Focus groups in practice 4.4.1 Recruiting participants The moment the researcher starts to recruit participants for focus groups is the moment the fieldwork starts. Deciding on the composition and size of the focus groups influences the discussions and ultimately how the material can be analysed. Some researchers are extremely rigorous in this sense that they spend external research agencies or governmental institutions to collect groups with specific socio-demographic characters. Anna Secor, for instance, chose participants from a Turkish research institute’s survey database, from a survey she administered and from informal networks. Forming focus groups of rural- urban migrant women in Istanbul (Secor 2002; Secor 2004) or of men or women with different socioeconomic status, religious associations or Kurdish ethnicity in Istanbul (Secor 2007), she was able to analyse variations in approaches to the state, belonging to the city and “experiences and perspective as they relate to instances of larger social processes and discourses” (Secor 2002: 11). Her focus groups were moderated by a native Turkish speaker and were consistently comprised of seven to ten people who did not previously know each other. Antonsich, on the other hand, was interested in issues of identity and belonging to local, regional, national and European levels among educated and non- educated people in their twenties in four regions in four different countries (Antonsich 2008a, 2010a). Administering four focus groups with three to seven participants in Como Italy, Durham/Newcastle England, Montpellier France and Tampere Finland with the native language (Finnish focus groups moderated by a local PhD student), he sought intra-group homogeneity and inter-group heterogeneity (Antonsich 2007). Antonsich recruited participants through advertising or through ‘randomly popping-up’ in shops or restaurants. He admits when some of the participants knew one another and when the number of participants was limited to five the discussions run more smoothly (Antonsich 2007, 2008a). Stuart Barr and his colleagues have used focus groups to understand pro- environmental behaviour (Barr et al. 2011) and issues of sustainable travel (Barr and Prillwitz 2012). In the first study, the participants were recruited either based on previous surveys where attitudes towards environmentalism could be characterized into committed, mainstream, occasional or non. In the latter, participants were recruited through door- to-door method resulting in ward-based focus groups. Peter Jackson has been interested, for example, in understanding consumption that emerges from ‘local’ social relations and in shedding some light on transnational consumer culture. Recruiting from youth and community centres that represent local social diversities (Holbrook and Jackson 1996; Jackson 1999), or through a snowball53 technique in London and a local market research company in Mumbai (Jackson et al. 2007), Jackson and his colleagues admit that different recruitment strategies result in different dynamics in focus-group discussions. 53 One contact recruits another contact, who in turn contacts yet another contact. In order for the snowballing technique to work, it usually needs some kind of incentive (see for example Dodds et al. 2003), moral, social or economic, that will keep the recruitment going for a desired length. 101 Again, whether the participants know each other and the location of the focus group and its informality have a direct influence on the flow of the discussions. Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen (2002, 2003) has studied the construction of otherness in Northern Ireland and the social boundaries between Catholics and Protestants. Her writing about the difficulties of contacting people and trying to organize discussions with the locals through key persons or through snowballing methods illustrates the difficulties of doing field research in another country. Researching such a visible social divide is challenging when the actual definition of one group holds with it an obvious othering of what the group is not. In this respect, a researcher from a politically neutral country in relation to social divides is justified but does not mean that people would easily consent to a group discussion. Finally, Hopkins (2006, 2007) has studied gender and generational relations among Muslim men in Britain. By contacting educational institutions, mosques, community and voluntary organizations and youth groups and using snowballing methods he was able to moderate eleven focus groups with divergent social backgrounds. A critical issue that Hopkins is arguing is that when the participants know one another it might influence the discussions becoming flowing and the participants having more confidence in showing their opinions. What is common in these six examples is that if the selection of focus group participants is not done through the databases of research institutions or if focus groups are not constructed with the help of preliminary surveys, there is a good chance the recruitment for the focus groups runs into trouble. Thus, the question of research material diversity can become an issue if people are recruited with certain contrasting characteristics in mind. Another problem and related to the need to have inter-group heterogeneity is the treatment of social categories that the groups are wished to represent as categorically given. The work of Antonsich with educational aspects and the studies of Barr with approaches on environmentalism are fresh options, but in general focus groups are organized according to social categories which the participants cannot really be reflexive over. The social demographics of the participants are too often taken as having an explanatory value instead of arguing that social identities themselves can be practiced very differently. My approach to focus groups is rather different. First, my intention was to approach actually existing groups that have attracted like-minded people on a voluntary basis. While participation in civic organizations can sometimes become a family obligation (see Munday 2006), the participation in a social movement or civic organization is optional. Associating oneself with a social movement or local group tells a lot of the values of an individual. While participants might be interested in different kinds of activities and organizations, the social context of an already established group creates a discursive setting that conditions much of the discussions. When studying established groups, there can be power relations between the participants but the discussions represent everyday knowledges of those people, not ones they are trying to argument with to possible strangers – aside the researcher. 102 Second, I sought focus groups consisting of four to six participants (Antonsich 2008a). Robyn Longhurst (1996) shows that there can be successful focus groups even with two participants. Having smaller focus groups, or mini focus groups as Krueger (1994) puts it, usually works better than large scale focus groups with over ten participants. If the intention is to talk about identities and the spatialities of everyday life, not marketing or politics, it is more fruitful to have groups whose size actually enables easy and natural conversations and allows the entire group to keep up with the flow of discussion. Bigger groups can also lead to smaller separate discussions, where the participants miss out what other group members say. Also, speaking over each other is an analytical nightmare for transcribing the focus-group interviews. Jakobsen (2012), for instance, has ‘tweaked’ the method by encouraging group members to share ideas with some other participant first and then to discuss the same issues with the rest of the group. The question arises from this that it is probably better to concentrate on smaller focus groups altogether if the bigger group seems to restrict some participants of speaking their minds. Nevertheless, the discussion might stall in smaller groups as well. The difficulty of controlling the number of people coming to a discussion is one of the weaknesses of the method. Some of my focus groups consisted of only two or three participants whereas some consisted of eight or nine participants. Third, in order to have inter-group variation, my methodological strategy opposed treating people as the resultants of their social categories. Rather, in this project, the intention was that the focus groups would be formed according to the participants interests. Using the interest in social movements or civic organizations as the ‘break characteristic’ helped to gather a material of opinions and attitudes that were varied. A few of the participants directly stated a consensus evident in the groups that the as local groups of the selected social movements or civic organizations, they attracted ‘like-minded’ people. Thus, comparisons between the focus groups are comparisons between different styles of thinking more than between distinct social characteristics or locales. Recruiting groups, whose interests are differently scaled, either as locally-orientated groups who work for local histories or particularities or as universally-orientated groups who campaign for more ‘globally’ or translocally recognized values, thus created to different types of groups. Fourth, I saw no point in focusing the research on a single locale in a region. In order to make sure that different aspects of the regional frames were represented, the fieldwork includes focus groups not only from the urban centres but also from the suburban areas and rural areas. Such geographical distribution allows charting, possibly, different understanding of the region seen through urban or rural lenses. The choice of associations tells more about the locations of the civic organizations than of the people participating in them. A minority of participants did not live in the same municipality or ward that the organization operated, and most of the participants were not born in the same locale let alone in the same province or county. In this way, the focus groups provided a good coverage of Finland and England, or opinions and narratives generated in multiple locations (see Appendix 4 and 5). 103 As a summary, my methodological choice was to concentrate on already existing groups with potentially four to six participants constitutive of members of social movements or civic organizations in urban, suburban and rural areas. The next step was to contact the key people of the local organizations. After I had selected potential candidates for the research, I sent an e-mail requesting participation in a group discussion. I called the key people a few days afterwards and usually the date and place were set then. Requesting the groups to participate was quite straightforward in some cases. In a few cases either the method required a bit of tinkering if the participant organization was run by only a few enthusiasts. In some cases, people had to be convinced that the discussion would concern everyday issues and that their opinions particularly mattered for my research. In Finland only one intended group did not respond, in South West England more groups did not answer back. In all, I contacted 17 social movement local groups in Finland for 15 focus groups in Finland (one combined) and 14 different groups in England for eight focus groups. The 23 focus groups that I moderated had participants from two to nine participants. I asked the key persons of the local organizations to form groups from four to six people, but sometimes the core of active members was only two people, more people promised to participate but were unable to make it or wanted to opt out, sometimes the entire board wanted to participate in conjunction with their own meeting. 4.4.2 Creating a conversational space Focus-group interviews decentre the researcher and give room for the participants to generate understandings of the research topic. Even though focus groups usually increase participants’ ownership of the research process and reveal greater complexities of opinions than individual interviews (Wutich et al. 2010), the research situation is far from an informal coffee table discussion. It might develop into one, but rare coffee table discussions sustain a natural, focused conversation if there are more than eight people attending to it. The way the participants ‘profile’ the moderator and how trustworthy they see the researcher influences the atmosphere of the interview. In addition, participants often want to give an outsider an impression of how they would ideally see things, which can make studying real practices difficult. Janet Smithson (2000) illustrates that usually the discussion is situated between the tracks of ‘an explanation to the other’ and the group debating how the topic relates to their lives in an extent they want to share. Compared with one-to-one interviews, focus groups provide a more natural social environment and peer group for the participants. The way the researcher resembles the population where she or he wants to do research is a crucial methodological question. In many cases, the participants wanted to know why I was interested in their organization or the specific place. Showing interest in their cause or movement is perhaps the easiest way to motivate a serious discussion. Nevertheless, researchers are not always able to gather focus groups from their everyday engagements 104 or sympathies. Jennie Munday (2006), for instance, develops her arguments based on one focus group with a Women’s Institute group whose members she knew rather well. Being able to relate to the research subjects, blending in and finding commonalities with the participants are helpful ways to engender discussion and generate trust in the research setting (Bosco 2006; Secor 2007). There are numerous examples of focus groups done in different cultures with people whom the researcher has no previous association. Secor, for example, studied rural women in Turkey, Kuusisto-Arponen religious divides in Northern Ireland, Jakobsen family relations in Tanzania, Koch nation-building in Kazakhstan. In all cases, researchers reflect on their positionality and alterity towards the research subjects (see also Bennett 2009b), and problematize how the power gradients contribute to the nature of the material as a potential strength. Jakobsen (2012), for instance, illustrated that only after she had moderated twenty focus groups, she found methods getting people to talk without responding according to ‘traditional’ discourses or to the expectations of the ‘othered’ researcher. Transforming alterity to a ‘familiar distance’ is about respecting the local and not being judgemental, which gives the participants the latitude to discuss intimate issues with confidence, realizing that there are no right or wrong answers and possibly letting participants to be critical of their own social norms.54 Creating a conversational space where the participants would talk past the ‘formulaic truths’ (Giddens 1994) that can scale the community to continent-wide discourse of tradition or work as shorthand for describing troublesome issues for the ‘other’. As Claudia Puchta and Jonathan Potter (2004: 123, emphasis in the original) note, “the crux is not whether opinions are ‘real’ but to whom they are performed to.” Seeking consensus, as some methodological guides are proposing, is something the researcher has to be to be critical about. If there are no differences in opinion between the research participants, then the group probably has not gone deep enough in the discussions and does not reflect their own ideas, only what they want to represent to the researcher (Jakobsen 2012). Such findings relate to one positive side in focus groups with civic organizations since they usually include more talkative and more socially active people than the imaginative ‘ordinary people’. The interviews were more centred on different like-minded people who were perhaps less keen in tailoring their opinions to what they thought was mine. Doing focus groups places importance in understanding the ways the participants might profile the moderator or researcher (Hopkins 2007). While theorizing the participants as subjects capable of agency (Nelson 1999) or as reflexive agents (Crang 1998) has been part of the geographical vocabulary for the past twenty years, doing focus groups in multiple places means that this relation between the researcher and the participants must be reviewed. In my 23 focus groups, the participants related to the researcher in rather different ways. At the time of most interviews in Finland, I had lived in Oulu for just six months. The university affiliation allowed some of the participants to view me as a 54 Juhola (2009) used local moderators to collect the material in Ghana. While this method can have a positive effect on how the participants are sharing thoughts, it at the same time alienates the participants from the researcher and undermines the notion of ‘informed consent’ as the participants do not necessarily realise who is using their stories and discussions for research. 105 person from Oulu.55 Sharing the home country presents the danger that some culturally situated ideas remain unspoken as self-evident. Doing research in one’s own country is balancing between the less discussed or indirectly hinted truisms through which the participants organize their socio-spatial worlds and the nuanced local knowledge that requires close-reading of the meanings of the local in spatial identification. In England, I used the research affiliation with the University of Exeter and fluent English to generate more trust with the participants and to interest them to take part in the first place. In the Finnish cases as a methodological strategy, I tried to adapt my own dialect to the one the locals use. In Finland, I brought a pack of coffee with me if the focus group members had suggested meeting in a non-commercial place. For the focus groups that convened in pubs or cafés, I usually offered a cup of coffee or tea to the participants. Offering refreshments or bringing coffee are part of the cultural codes in both countries and help creating more informal atmosphere. In one focus group in, I started the interview with part of the participants still on their way. Leaving the recorder on, I went to get more refreshments as the participants exchanged compliments and chatted knowing that the recorder was on. A few months later I checked the transcriptions and noticed that I had missed a part. By leaving the recorder on, I was able to tap into the ways the participants discussed the researcher. The part that made me realize the importance of actually relating to the participants, being open about the research and being able to generate an atmosphere of trust was when the first arrived participant assured that “maybe he is not a spy”. By leaving the recorder on, the focus groups revealed how guarded participants can be towards the researcher-stranger. While it makes sense to deliberate the situated knowledges of the researcher (Rose 1997), more should be talked about how the researcher talks through her or his own interests to the research subjects and level their prior knowledge with the participants and how with the acts of the researcher group cohesion between the participants is formed. Especially when the researcher comes from another country, finding some common ground between the researcher and the participants is extremely important. Knowing the language and having a perception of how the society ‘works’ are integral. In addition, sympathizing with the causes of the organizations is also important. Being able to compare the insights and societal practices of human rights, energy politics, air travel, folk traditions, minority languages, local histories56 or tourism, for instance, were of utmost importance for the creation of trust in the focus groups. The discussions in South West England were perhaps more informative and spelled out some more taken-for-granted phenomena in the counties. People were rather keen in describing regional distinctions but at times discussed 55 In order to let make connections, I performed and enacted my identity as an Ouluan researcher in North Ostrobothnia, a formerly Lahti-based researcher in Päijät-Häme, a former student at the University of Turku in Southwest Finland or said that my roots were in South Karelia. 56 Just to give a pair of examples, for some older people the identity ‘badge’ of being Finnish reminded of veneration of the Finnish war efforts during the Second World War and talking through my experiences living close to the Finnish eastern border for the 1980s and 1990s, led to intriguing conversations. For some others, sharing stories about the Eyjafjallajökull eruption a few months earlier was a shared event. 106 more localized knowledge that required spending time later with Google Maps and other illustrative data sources. As mentioned, in Finland, some opinions and attitudes at times were highlighted as local problems but at times opinions were shared with retaining some hidden truths that with a Finnish-speaking moderator need not to say out. Although the world might seem as post-national for some (Antonsich 2008b; Risse 2010), realizing and being open about how being foreign or of the same nationality can have an effect on how willing the participants are in sharing their thoughts. Doing cross-cultural and comparative research, focus groups can be a good way to let the participants have more control of how they want to represent social norms, define the topic as they see it and with the confidence among their peers to discuss sensitive and intimate issues as they would do without the researcher. 4.4.3 Socio-demographic variables As mentioned above the purpose of the selection of civic organization groups as focus groups was to construct personal interests and civil society activism or participation as a ‘break value’ or a shared background. Nonetheless, the participants shared some socio-demographic variables. First, the participants were often the core members of the local groups. Although in some focus groups there were members who participated in the group more irregularly most often the participants were people who carried the local organizations, had been part of the groups for some time and knew most of the members. The participants were white and mainly middle class.57 In the entire material, there is a slight overrepresentation of white-collar occupations. While there were some farmers and industrial workers in the groups, especially the universally-orientated focus groups had more teachers and specialist occupations compared with the general public. In relation to age, the Finnish ‘sample’ with 66 participants (30 women / 36 men) is representative of the wider populations. The average age of the Finnish participants at the age of the focus group interviews was 47. The South West English ‘sample’ with 28 participants (17 women / 11 men) is slightly older than the wider population in Devon and Cornwall, whose average age was 59 in 2010. The percentage of participants born in the respective county or provinces was between 47 and 50, except in Devon where only one in five participants were born in the county. The participants of the locally-orientated groups were most often born in the same region. Two-thirds of the participants in Local Heritage Associations and Youth Societies were born in the same region in Finland and just over half of the participants in similar groups in South West England. These numbers are considerably different in relation to the participants of the universally-orientated groups. In Finland, only 23 per cent of the members of Amnesty International, Friend of 57 Some of the students in participating in Amnesty International or Friends of the Earth could be regarded as on their way to middle class since living on the student allowance does not allow to categorize them as middle class. 107 the Earth or the Nature conservation groups that participated in the focus groups were ‘born-and-bred’. In England, only nine percent of the members of Amnesty International or Transition were native to their counties. 4.4.4 Keeping the discussion going, questions and stimulus Storying identities is an identity performance (Prins et al. 2013). Ideally, focus groups sustain a free-flowing discussion prompted by the moderator in the direction he or she wants. This is most often not the case. In many focus-group interviews the participants themselves took turns in answering to the set of questions I wanted reflections on, because they did not want to talk over each other and because they wanted everybody to have a say. There are many ways to stimulate the discussion in focus groups. The easiest way is to ask well-phrased questions. I used from twenty to thirty questions or themes to facilitate the discussion. As presented in Appendix 1 and 2, I first asked some personal background information. The first set of topics revolved around ‘association activities’ and ‘attendance’. Although this did not directly concern the research questions or the spatiality of identities, it was an integral part in getting the participants to settle in, show interest in the cause and aims of the participants and set a common ground for the group discussion. The first 15 to 25 minutes were also used to discern group dynamics and what sort of relations the participants have between themselves. Longhurst (2003), for instance, supports this idea that the participants have to feel comfortable answering the more relevant or trickier questions and those should not be presented at the beginning. The second set of questions concerned intimate forms of spatiality, where people think they belong and the things they associate with to that ‘area’, how they understand the concept of identity, and what kind of variations they see within the country. To this point, I had not brought regions, Finnish provinces or English counties, to the discussion myself, but I did not restrict participants from talking about regions and regionalism if they saw their most intimate belonging related to regions. Especially in Cornwall, the discussions often started by some participants reminding the salient near ethnic regionalism, even without talking about regions directly. I changed the discussion more explicitly about regions by showing a respective coat of arms or a regional flag to the participants. Using such stimulus is an effective way to generate discussion among focus group members in a more straightforward manner. The ‘focusing exercises’ (Bloor et al. 2001: 43) that refer to cards, movie excerpts, drawings, audio material or maps, help the participants to step out of the interview and respond to symbols or meanings that the stimulus presents. In some cases, such stimulus can re-pace or set the discussion on new tracks. The last third or quarter of the focus groups concerned the role of mobility, roots and media on identification and the importance of globalization, global spaces, Europe and nationalism. In overall and as can be ascertained from Table 2, the focus groups lasted on average one hour and forty minutes. 108 Table 2. Locations, compositions, settings, dates and durations of the focus groups. On average, the duration of a focus group was 1 hour and 43 minutes. Civic organization / Province Location Participants Setting Date Duration Social movement (W/ALL) Amnesty Turku Association 7.10.2008 1:10:20 3/4 flat Southwest Friends of the Earth Turku 0/2 Pub 5.2.2009 1:07:07 Finland Youth Society Koski Tl 0/3 Society house 8.10.2008 1:36:56 Local Heritage Kaarina 6/8 Association 9.10.2008 1:57:26 Association flat Amnesty Lahti 4/6 Multicultural 17.11.2008 1:54:38 centre Friends of the Earth Lahti 0/2 Youth centre 13.11.2008 1:38:20 Päijät-Häme Youth Society Hollola 1/4 Society house 18.11.2008 1:37:48 Local Heritage Sysmä 2/9 Pizzeria 4.11.2008 1:05:43 Finland Association cabinet Amnesty & Friends Joensuu 2/4 University 27.10.2008 2:00:30 of the Earth music room North Karelia Youth Society Nurmes 2/4 Society house 24.9.2008 1:39:11 Local Heritage Kontiolahti 2/4 Association 29.10.2008 1:54:56 Association house Amnesty Oulu 2/5 Private home 18.9.2008 3:42:21 Nature Conservation Oulu 0/3 Library room 3.3.2010 1:55:24 North Association Ostrobothnia Youth Society Oulunsalo 3/3 Society house 10.9.2008 2:21:42 Local Heritage Haapajärvi 2/5 Association 13.10.2008 2:12:41 Association flat Civic organization / County Location Participants Setting Date Duration Social movement (W/ALL) Amnesty Exeter 2/2 Café 15.5.2010 1:14:58 Transition Exeter 2/2 Café 4.6.2010 1:01:24 Devon Local Association Torridge 4/4 Private home 28.5.2010 1:38:15 South West England Local Heritage Seaton 2/6 Association 26.5.2010 1:33:34 Association flat Amnesty Truro 2/3 Private home 10.6.2010 1:37:28 Transition Falmouth 2/4 Pub 27.5.2010 1:41:35 Amateur Operatic Cornwall Redruth 3/5 Pub 8.6.2010 1:40:09 Society Old Cornwall Looe 0/2 Pub 5.6.2010 1:05:46 Society 109 Prior to the focus-group interviews, the participants were not given specific information on what the discussion was going to be about. Their ‘informed consent’ relied on the discussion I had had with the contact persons of the groups and an email that most often had circulated amongst the potential participants. Some of these potential participants had opted out from the focus groups and I gave that opportunity before the focus groups started. In an Email I had sent to the groups I illustrated that the discussion would be about their associations or groups and how they see the world and identify with their social environment. The actual list of themes and questions opened up during the interviews. Thus, the participants had no prior knowledge of the exact questions and could not prepare and think in advance what they would answer (cf. Hares et al. 2010). Therefore, the focus-group interviews resemble spontaneous discussions between people they already know and with an interviewer from the university that adapted to their ranks. Before the focus group ended, I handed a questionnaire for each participant, where they could tick the five spatial scales where they felt that they belonged the most. Unlike in the discussions, the spatial scales in the form were pre-given. Many of the participants argued that the previous discussion had made them more aware of their spatial identities. This awareness for some confirmed their position on valuing different levels of spatial identity but for some the previous discussion had made them suspect that thinking through issues of identity for one or two hours had made them change their valuations and that they filled the form differently if they had got it before the discussion. The recorder was turned on during the time when they filled their forms. When I collected them back and asked for some reflections of the focus-group interview, the atmosphere most often seemed to loosen to a normal level. Even though the participants knew each other, the discussions were still a research situation that at times were informal enough to be compared with ‘coffee-table conversations’ with the separation that one person moderated the discussion and asked more questions. 4.4.5 Analysing conversations With focus groups, the unit of analysis is the group or the interchanges between the participants. Riie Heikkilä (2008: 294) argues that “even in separate lines the entire group speaks with their values and attitudes.” While such a statement is a quite bold one, it reflects the traditions of consensus that are often associated with focus-group discussion. My analysis gives more emphasis on how the individuals narrate their identities, how they qualify their sentiments and understandings and how this might affect other participants’ views and responses. The analysis in the articles is formed in a way that collects narratives and dialogues that were shared and negotiated by the participants. Not seeking consensus but issues and understandings that the engendered conversations or processes where meanings were actively created (Kitzinger 1994). 110 The focus-group interviews were analysed according to qualitative textual methods (Warren and Karner 2010). The analysis is based on my close reading of the transcribed material, preliminary coding (Cope 2003) and the conceptual categories that I interpreted to emerge from the material as recurrent themes and ideas. The close-reading of the material took several rounds and the coding of the material was revised for every research article. I also rechecked the recordings since some of the nuances in the transcriptions could have been easily missed in writing the empirical sections of the articles. The analysis in the articles concerns how the participants formed their shared understandings of belonging, how they used regions as part of their personal identity narratives and how their ideas especially related to emotionally driven approaches to communities and landscapes were scaled. The material was first cleared of irrelevant parts, interruptions, wanderings from the topic, and so forth. I close-read the material several times, made notes and highlighted passages that spoke of some of the following themes: Personal backgrounds, Space/ spatiality, local mentalities, identity, sociospatial categories and imaginaries, changes in the society, and historical descriptions and symbols. These were my crude criteria to approach the entire material. I coded the material using Nvivo10 into smaller sections. In some articles, such an approach worked well. Using the Nvivo10 coding enabled the recognition of communities and landscapes as the two most emotionally relevant categories for the analysis of the fourth article. For other articles, such approach only highlighted the fragmented meanings the participants associated with regions and resulted in mostly decontextualized parcels of text. Yet, in such situations as well the coding provided signposts for further analysis. The separation of the locally- and universally- orientated interviews from a particular region into two sets provided a way to analyse how the respondents understood identity, what kinds of issues they link to the region and how these issues contribute to the social negotiation of regional identity set by set. The emphasis was on how the participants understood identification with regions and how those understandings were discussed, agreed and negotiated. The content-interaction debate is one long-running discussion with focus groups (Halkier 2010; Belzile and Öberg 2012). In the analysis, I emphasized the dialogical moments in the focus groups. There were some cases where a participant would provide lengthy and informing characterizations of identification, but in the articles I wanted to show more the discussions as examples of how the collective identities were negotiated. 4.4.6 Times of the focus groups The timing of the research has an influence on what kind of issues the participants discuss and who they exemplify their belonging. The Finnish focus groups were organized predominantly between September and November 2008. In addition, I moderated one 111 focus group in February 2009 and one in March 2010. Fall of 2008 was a meaningful time in many aspects. The global financial crisis started to unfold marking a time of economic crisis for several years to come (Christophers 2015; Hadjimichalis and Hudson 2014). The confidence in the economy that had been generated since the early 1990s translated in belief in the European common market and in trust that Europe would be the global actor that would, as one participant implied, ‘solve the problem’. In retrospect, the focus-group interviews paint a picture of calmness before a storm but also a sense of new hope. During the research time, Beijing had hosted the summer Olympics, former president Martti Ahtisaari was recognized with the Nobel peace prize and Barack Obama was elected as the President of the United States through a campaign that emphasized the empowering element of social media for change. Plans of the centre-right government to rearrange the regional state administration were in talks but very few of the participants had taken notice of them. The focus groups in South West England convened in May and early June 2010. If there were changes taking place at the time of the Finnish focus groups, there were at least of similar magnitude in 2010. The general election had been held just before the first focus groups and politically the United Kingdom was in limbo. The plan for the first coalition government since the Second World War was introduced only after the last of the eight focus groups. The future direction of the country after 11 years of Labour governments was only shaping. At the same time, Eurozone countries issued their bailout mechanisms that would collectively secure stability in continental Europe. Spring of 2010 had two events that showed the fundamental way people are imbricated in topological structures. First, the Eyjafjallajökull eruption had caused a major disruption in the European airspace resulting interesting reflections on dependencies on aeromobility in general (Vainikka 2010). Second, the preparations for the World Cup in South Africa increasingly brought English flags to the urban landscape (see Figure 7), but also started to attract views around the world to one event (Kolamo and Vuolteenaho 2013) just after my field research period ended. Both research periods took place before utter nationalist parties in entire Europe became influential political powers and before governments in both countries started to rethink the region. The financial crisis that started in 2008 and the bailouts of countries in 2010 and 2011 influenced political climates throughout Europe and gave a more rhetorical base for nationalist ideas. In addition, the liberal pluralism and increasing migration to Europe has undoubtedly made some people feeling that their identities are ‘threatened’. Thomas Risse (2010) records that especially attitudes towards Europe are divided severely between those who flag for a liberal Europe and those who underline being native of their countries. In Finland, the coalition government started to forge new realities of the municipal structure. Framing the project as ‘patriotic’ and ‘modern’, the idea was to dragoon central cities and their surrounding municipalities into ‘basic municipalities’ along functionalist ideas. By implication, such a project would alter the role of the more or less institutionalized 112 provinces since most of them were structured along functionalist principles in the first place (Moisio 2012; Vainikka 2013). The project was designed from an urban network basis that has for long not been in tune with the insurmountable responsibilities for the rather small municipal player (Andersson and Sjöblom 2013). Launched in 2011, the initiative showed that regions indeed are political pawns that politicians thought they could easily restructure, but the public response showed how imbricated people are in their established regional worlds (Zimmerbauer et al. 2012). The focus groups describe a time when municipal mergers had been in forefront political discourse and practice but not as a nation-wide aim to redesign the state-space. In England, one of the first issues that the Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition government ordered was the dismantling of Regional Development Agencies, which had been the hot pot for regional geographers in Britain for 12 years. Suddenly, as John Harrison mentioned (2012a), ‘the region became a curse word’. The RDAs were replaced with Local Enterprise Partnerships centred on the optional coalitions of counties, which became the new units of regional development (Pugalis and Townsend 2012; Ayres and Stafford 2014). To some extent, LEPs as regional assemblages are more prudent and practical. For example, the territory of the South West RDA included areas that were not traditionally viewed as parts of the West Country or South West. The new initiative reduced funds given to regional development but it, at least, gave more latitude for local government to structure their own co-operation networks; Cornwall and the small Isles of Scilly teamed up and Devon and Somerset shared resources under the revamped name ‘Heart of the South West’. Another political event that took place after the focus groups and which stirred political interest towards the regions was the unsuccessful attempt to restructure the numbers of members in parliament in both Houses of Lords and Commons. The motion aimed at creating constituencies for the House of Common equal in number of voters, thus making the Members of the Parliament proportioned to the entire British society not representatives of distinct regions. Such a mathematical provisioning of Britain would have created new trans-county constituencies. In Cornwall, the objection against the motion was intense and objections against the initiative, at first, included also Conservative MPs. Initiatives concerning both Houses were left on the table and showed incongruities between national politics and local or regional level politics. 4.5 Interviews with regional actors Not all of the empirical material for this dissertation comes from focus groups. In the second article (Vainikka 2013), I use interviews with different regional actors. Based on a previous work history in Lahti I became interested how the regional elite, most often the directors of regional agencies and institutions, facilitate the regional discourses and have a significant part to play in how the region becomes materialized. What troubled me already in 2006 and 2007, was the observation that many of these organizations 113 work through different framings of the region. Some of them were promoting Häme as a combination of Kanta-Häme and Päijät-Häme, some administrators saw that it was integral to have strong connections to the Helsinki metropolitan region as Helsinki is just one hundred kilometres away, others operated in the entire Southern Finland. In addition, for other institutions the sphere of interest was not the province of Päijät-Häme rather the Lahti city-region that some of the municipalities in Päijät-Häme showed only limited interest (in marketing, for example). Requesting regional actors from different agencies and association for semi-structured interviews was often rather straightforward although some of these actors needed reassurance if they had just started in their posts. Rather than trying to encapsulate what the established elite thought of the region, I wanted to understand positions that facilitate regional discourses and ‘step inside’ the governance networks (Harvey et al. 2011) that produce different versions of the region. The eleven interviews comprised of regional actors in regional administrative, economic and cultural bodies, and the editors of the regional papers. Two of these actors were women and nine were men, and their average age was 54. As shown in Appendix 3, some of the questions were common with the focus groups but some concerned more directly the efforts used in region-building, how regional development was understood and how the regional actors saw their own position in relation to the region. Three of the thirty- to sixty-minute interviews were conducted in November 2008 while I was doing focus groups in the region and the rest eight in October 2009. The analysis of the semi-structured interviews followed similar lines with the focus groups. The differences between subject positions, however, became much more highlighted with this material. As the purpose of the interview is as Longhurst (2003) points out is to elicit information from another person, the process of eliciting is not always the most simple issue when one is doing interviews with people how possess a fair amount of personal power. Quite often, the participants were trying to lay the foundations for the views of their organization and in other moments they were talking from their own perspectives. The interviews actually concerned ‘two’ participants speaking with the same voice but in different tones. Thus, the respondents might share the more ‘official’ stance of the organization that was shared within the organization but continue highlighting how they personally felt about the issue with less fervency. Another issue is that regional actors have identities themselves. Similar processes of identification are operating with them as with the rest of people. Some people would, ideally, develop the region they are originally from, while being realistic that the strong interpersonal networks that help in region-building and in getting the stance of the organization known only come through time. Separating the professional self and the individual self is something that the analysis of the talk of the regional actors has to concern. 114 Figure 6. ‘Le rocher ne roule pas’. A gravity defying natural stone in Ruokolahti along Highway 6 en route from Lappeenranta to Joensuu. (Photo by the author, 10/ 2014). 116 5 Review of the study results 5.1 Reflexivity and assembled structures At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Albert Camus (1955 [1942]: 91) In a rather unorthodox way, I start the review of the study results with a quote from Albert Camus. In his philosophical essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Camus describes a haunted figure from Greek mythology. Sisyphus stole the secrets of the Gods, cheated and chained Death, in his purgatory was given a chance to relive in Earth, but prolonged his stay as he found earthly delights too comforting. The Gods condemned him to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a hill only to see the boulder fall back of its own weight. Sisyphus might be bounded by the Gods, but his story becomes tragic in the moment when he reaches the top and lets the rock go. The moment that the rock rolls again is the moment when Sisyphus understands the absurdity of everyday life. Still, the approach on Sisyphus is highly humane. Camus negates the concept of fate and transforms it into a fear of making a wrong decision that can only be outdone by faith in the Self. When people look back at their lives, there are no wrong decisions. The individual is a result of his or her choices and Sisyphus chooses to lift the rock, again, instead of giving up to the Gods. Turning free will more powerful than control resonates with the identity discussion between Tarde, Durkheim, Deleuze and many others. Our identities are what we make them. The mundane practices people continue to follow, not imposed social categories or taken-for-granted characterizations, make up most of the modern life. While Camus essays to understand the reflexive moments when people understand the absurdity of their everyday life, such absurdity also helps to generate the positionalities and situatedness or the ways identities are drawn from practical consciousness (Giddens 1987). Being part of social life, its ebb and flow, discourses, legacies and practices is analogous with the boulder Sisyphus lives with. People have to work out their own relation to the ‘social facts’ as identifying with space must start from the individual. For Sisyphus pushing the 117 boulder up the hill is a conscious act, a practice that fills his condemned, mortal life (see also Smith et al. 2009: 1). Similarly, inhabiting a given region constitutes part of an individual’s life as long as civil society operates through some territorial articulations. Le Mythe de Sisyphe is a story that illustrates that people are part of certain structures but like Camus ends the quote, we are entitled to ‘imagine Sisyphus happy’ as much as we are entitled to identify and construct our lives through space. There is a related lesson to be learned from Patrick Modiano’s Rue des Boutiques obscures, where he understands everyone as people from the beach, unknown to strangers but visible to everybody’s eye. Without conversations and without shared narratives our experienced, accumulated identities remain unrecognized. The encapsulated time does not preserve our identities – it holds them like the sand “preserves the traces of our footsteps only a few seconds” (Modiano 1982: 73 (my translation)). Identities are always struggles for continuity, struggles for representing our own values and being seen through those representations by others. Identities are never ready or finished, but pushing the boulder up the hill eventually makes the rock seem like it would stay at the top. Accidentally, the story Camus relates to issues of time and the chasm between realism and idealism; realism in the sense that it excites the imaginaries of landscapes of real mountains and rocks, but idealist in a way that it depicts the struggle of Sisyphus as eternal. The absurdity of everyday life is not in the banal practices we continue to follow unreflexively, but in the thought that such practices could go on unchanged. Rocks and mountains weather and erode. The boulder Sisyphus rolls would eventually break, crack or exfoliate, transform into smaller pieces and become covered with moss like the natural stone in Figure 6. Likewise the accumulative places individuals construct, the meaningful locales that people reflect on, die with their owner (Paasi 1986a). Regions and other territorial articulations, on the other hand, can have a more perpetual function, living on as the legacies of different times. I start the article published in Fennia with a quote from Henri Bergson: “We change without ceasing”. To a certain extent the idea that a collective construct has no end or beginning, only the horizon that we see from the contemporary time, leads all of the four articles. The first article (re)thinks the relations of individuals to regional communities and how belonging is imagined in the first place through the practices of entitlement and obligation. The second article goes deep into the transformations of regions and how the process of institutionalization can leave a region splintered, malleable and open to political struggle. Another idea structuring the research articles is the idea of being reflexive. Especially the third and fourth article push for a better understanding how people generate their identities through their individual and collective pasts and how the continuous change of the concept ‘we’ is constructed through positionality and scale. In a time, when an ethical meaning of ‘we’ is splintering into various situated practices (Murdoch 2006), understanding how people project themselves into the realm of ‘sameness’ becomes more important. 118 5.2 Narrating spatial identities and the practices of entitling/obligating The first research question: “In relation to spatial identification, do regions provide a meaningful source of identification and in what contexts people identify with regions?” is not an easy or a simple question. Regions can provide a meaningful source of identification, but the possibility for this depends on the region and the social context. The new regionalism discourses have underlined the importance civic pride, informal connections and identification with a region, or the ‘soft factors’ in economic development (Lovering 1999; MacLeod 2001; Frisvoll and Rye 2009). Yet, when going into the field, there should not be any taken-for-granted regions or given discourses of regions. The participants should be allowed to articulate belonging in their words so that it makes sense to the participants’ friends and colleagues. The social sciences literature is filled with surveys that test the attachment of citizens to certain territorial levels (e.g., Carey 2002; Helander and Pekola-Sjöblom 2006; Antonsich 2010a). While research that bases on Eurobarometer or national surveys might underline the importance of how different territorial levels are understood, articulated and even felt, relying on the categories of analysis and seeking answers to the concepts defined by the researcher runs the danger of not depicting attitudes and opinions in everyday life. The risk of testing categories should be overcome by letting the participants form and discuss the categories that matter and qualify how they understand such categories in the first place. Simply put, we cannot compare regions through a ‘template vision’ (Kramsch 2012), expect that the characteristics of the region explain identification or render identification with regions to simple yes/ no questions. Such positions and presumptions tell more about the system that tries to understand itself rather than of the identification of unique, interdependent individuals. People forge and reproduce their affinities to space and identify with regional ideas, symbols or names regardless of the politico-economic influenced talk of the resurgence of the region (Storper 1997; Paasi 2009c) and interest in state rescaling (Brenner 2004). Still, the social and cultural characteristics of the region are not redundant. The term prospecting that I have used (Vainikka 2012) describes the open and uncommitted approach to the spatialities that matter to individuals. While I acknowledged that there was a good chance of finding genuine and original approaches to provinces among other spatialities, prospecting illustrates the expectations and anticipations without supposing a definitive outcome. While the focus-group method leaves room for the participants to argue within themselves the elements they find meaningful, it also reduces the need to pigeon-hole lived experiences into the categories or under the labels of the researcher. The first research questions centres on the topic presented in the focus groups: “where do you feel you belong to?” It also draws on the responses to the visual stimuli of the territory and symbols of the province or county. Prior to the focus groups, I had informed the participants that the discussion would concern the “interplay between local cultures and globalization as well as the ways places and regions are experienced in everyday lives”. 119 Much like Andrew Hares et al. (2010), who did not want to make an a priori connection between holidays and climate change, I deliberately avoided using terms like regional identity or provincial attachment in the recruitment process. In fact, I used from 20 to 30 minutes to discuss the objectives of the organization, rationales for their participation in the movements and their personal backgrounds. Not only to understand the reasons why they were involved in these movements, but also to generate the atmosphere of trust and interest. What became evident quite quickly doing the focus groups, was that people articulate and exemplify their identification with their everyday surroundings and to the spatial constructs that they are in functional relations, for example, as tax-payers, voters, consumers of services. The spaces that people can reach or which they use to illustrate their day-to-day movement and the regions whose emblems they are familiar with are the spatial vocabularies upon which people construct their identities. While the county- level regionalism in England is more salient than provincial identification in Finland, the argument is not that regions such as provinces lack meaning among the participants. Identification with regions, both counties and provinces, is part of the continuum or spectrum of spatial identities. Regions are parts of the identity puzzle, but their importance is exemplified in different ways. While local identities are more easily transplanted through everyday practices, national media, one-size-fits-all welfare systems and architectural similarities, tapping into a collective, historically infused discourses requires conscious contemplation. Regionally framed differences, legacies, functional settings and the visions for the future of various local, regional and national actors are the ones that provide the substratum for identification but do not define it. In order to revisit the first research question, I draw on all four articles and divide factors that influence identification into three main categories. These categories are 1) historical and territorial, 2) individual and life-history and 3) relational. It is noteworthy that, on its own, a factor within these categories does not explain identification. Such a process is always interplay between the factors. The historical and territorial category covers four factors: regional legacies, antecedent otherness, the nature of boundaries and the city-region nexus. First, contributing to a sense of difference, the culturally situated discourses of regional legacies not only tell about the relationship between the region and the nation but also of the ideals of various times. The main argument is that regions are not only conditioned by nation-building rather regional elements that have enabled the nation to be imagined and the asynchronous and fluctuated development of regions have left imprints on socially shared beliefs and opinions. While such legacies might be inherited, invigorated or invented, they participate in the discursive construction of the region and provide historical vocabularies for individuals to anchor their identification (see also Brace 1999, Tomaney 2007; Zarycki 2007; Vainikka 2014a). The regional legacies factor underlines the fact that the past is never singular in relation to the ideas of the social. Rather identification draws from multiple regional ideas and frames that can seem out as a palimpsest of earlier boundaries. As illustrated in the focus 120 group excerpts of two Local Heritage Associations in Southwest Finland and North Karelia, people can construct narratives through past communities, but position the region in polar traditions. In addition, in both cases the ways religion is approached influence identifying with the past. Helena58, 71: Kaarina is different from many young towns, Kaarina actually turns 700 years, so there’s… Merja, 52: …quite national history, when one thinks about entire Finland. Väinö, 67: But a little spot it [Turku] has been, as it has scooped huge areas from Kaarina. We used to be on the edge of its grid pattern. Riitta, 64: But now Russia is a greater threat in our minds than Sweden. Unto, 55: Yes for us, but if we think about the people who lived here – they were largely orthodox, and the bad came from the west. Their religion and their possessions were taken. […] for us, the history writing is too western through-and-through. Hannele, 55: […] From the Treaty of Teusina they [the Orthodox] have been banished, as if the idea is adverse. Second, the sense of antecedent otherness is important in creating distinctiveness (Vainikka 2014a). Every nation is a mosaic of different regions that have been politically and socially patched up as territorial constructs (Johnson and Coleman 2012). As the previous excerpts show, some regions more than others can draw from this sense of past otherness and use their relative difference as a means to mobilize a sense of identity, legitimize regional development programs and attract visitors. Relatedly, regions such as Cornwall or North Karelia can be described as absorbed regions. While these regions have been important in reframing a national past they can be imagined as being different from the more archetypal regions. The distinctiveness of the absorbed regions is not constructed based on their own legacies only. Nationalism and constructing a more encompassing national story has often embraced locally survived myths or legends for the justification of a wider national idea (Hale 2001; Raivo 2002). Furthermore, a sense of antecedent otherness can subjectify other regions and work as a pretext for difference. The next discussion between members of a Local Heritage Association in Devon shows how Cornwall is treated as an agent. For the Cornish, the Celtic tradition is used to explain regional mind-sets and practices as in the latter discussion between members of an Amateur Operatic Society in Cornwall. Raymond, 81: Cornwall tries to be separate. Marlene, 65: Cornwall thinks it has its own language. George, 73: They’re probably the most nationalistic, Cornish people are Cornish. To Cornwall, the rest of us are foreigners – to real Cornish people. 58 All names are pseydonyms and Finnish names ending with ‘a’ are women. 121 Alan, 31: So we’re all Celts, and we’re very stubborn anyway. Carol, 65: And we’ve got a song about Trelawny where we all marched up to the Tower of London and defended Trelawny.59 Most participants stated that their identification with the region was affected or complicated by a sense of shared knowledge of histories, taboos and survival stories linked to certain spaces, their ancestry, discourses of ‘my people’ or ideas of collective memories. Third, the nature of the regional boundaries and the rivalries across such boundaries has an effect on how the region is imagined. The boundary between Cornwall and Devon is an evident example. Several participants underlined the emotional transition when going over the Tamar River. Crossing the bridge is a symbol of going away. In addition, the shape of the region can become a sign of cultural literacy (Donaldson 2006) used for seeking support for local economy. North Ostrobothnia has a different story to tell. The unobtrusive and nebulous border between North and Central Ostrobothnia where the cultural, administrative and functional borders differ notably and the tendency to view Koillismaa as a significantly different sub-region, testifies that the boundaries of the region and the way people understand the region might be incongruous. An Amnesty member in North Ostrobothnia understood some ‘periferic’ municipalities. Joonas, 26: You don’t perceive them, like, where they would absolutely go, “well lets put them in North Ostrobothnia.” But perhaps they have their own North-Ostrobothnian identities since I haven’t been around there. Nevertheless, regional affinities tend to crystallize into regional pride when contrasted with some other region. Understanding a regional community as different from other imagined communities; highlighting practices and values that have been taught in schools; or believing in regional truisms are ways of showing that the region is important even though people might not define themselves through such characteristics. Fourth, the relationship between the central city and the rest of the region has significant outcomes to the labelling and naming of spatial identification. Often for people living in the central city of the region the city itself is used as a label for identification. For many younger participants especially in Finland, the central city – Turku, Lahti, Joensuu or Oulu – was the only necessary spatial category within their region even though they realized the importance of the surrounding area to their home cities. The following discussion in an Amnesty focus group in Päijät-Häme underlines the significance of the central city and how such significance might be rescaled. 59 Native of Cornwall, Trelawny, as the Bishop of Bristol, took part in a petition against James II and Cathol- icism starting a course of events that led to the Glorious Revolution and throning of William III of Orange. 122 Ritva, 63: All roads lead to Lahti, like they lead to Rome, they gather the same way Emilia, 28: Centre Ritva, 63: Yes Emilia, 28: It is all country the area around Eila, 69: And so many jobs in Lahti for the surrounding municipalities Marjatta, 63: Think – Lahti has always been an amazing city. What city from Finland was known around the world? Lahti. Because the radio station [the only longwave transmitter] was here and for all other countries in the world it was always Lahti. Lahti sort of was on the world map before it knew it. When seen from the city perspective, the province might feel an unnecessary concept, whose meaning for identity narratives can be downplayed. Still, regional distinctiveness exists. Sometimes people use the urban centre or urban way of life as a label when they are talking about issues that have a more regional resonance (Antonsich 2010a). Valtteri, Friends of the Earth member in Southwest Finland put it bluntly “if you say Pirkanmaa, I hear Tampere.” Thus, the urban way of life can be a version of regional practices and discourses. The functionalism of civil society especially in Finland, where provinces mostly correspond to the areas of influence of a bigger city, can permit individuals to name wider regional dependencies with the central city. The personal and life-history factors relate to positionality, sedentary or multilocational life-paths, needs and preferences in relation to the region and the nature of worldviews. First, the positionality factor relates to the geographical location within a region. As an example of two extremes, it makes a difference whether one lives in the city centre and has a (past) social network in another region or whether one has lived most of one’s life in the countryside utilizing the urban areas as the functional centre of the region. With the exception of second-home ownership, the sprawling of suburban municipalities in Finland and retirement migration to coastal areas of South West England, local rural life in both countries is somewhat an opposite of the urban dynamism characterized by anonymity. The social networks in urban areas are less compelling than those in small rural localities. Imagining oneself as a part of a wider community in rural areas takes the shape of the region more often than in urban areas. Second, the factor of ‘born-and-bread’ – having a rather regionally sedentary life-history – or having lived in several places and a mobile way of life, affects how regional discourses are adopted and used in personal identity narratives. When an individual has lived his or her entire life within one region, some of the local or regionally framed characteristics can become taken-for-granted practices or performances that turn into discourses of regional identity. For example, a Transition member Vincent, 65, counted the locales where he had lived in Cornwall and estimated that he had “run out of places to live”. If the life-history of a person has been sedentary or the locations that one has called home all situate within a bounded area, there is no choice but to use the territorial vocabularies that form a more or less institutionalized discourse. For the sedentary people, there is a choice of emphasizing one scale over 123 another or to find comfort in regions from different ages that enable the understanding that the contemporary region is not the only one defining a person. For people who are have faced new social environments and who have had to adapt their everyday lives at some point, the spatiality of identity takes different paths. Moving to another region can highlight some of the differences between distinct locales and attribute to the duality of identification. For example, whereas Jill from a Local Association in Devon illustrated the difference between urban and rural lifestyles, Lotta, an Amnesty member in Joensuu, tried to clarify her identification with Joensuu, which represented most of North Karelia for her. Jill, 62: I’ve had quite a shock when I came here. Because it’s a farming community, and I’ve never lived in a farming community ever. Being a professional all my life until 10 years ago and it’s very, very different, uhm different values, different standards and much more community based as Lynn said. You know they look after their own. Lotta, 23: Well, I do say I am from Joensuu more than from Kerava, but it tends to get somewhat awkward that you are not from Joensuu but you are that more than anything else. Juuso, 24 [Friends of the Earth]: I too say Joensuuan, but that took several years. A sense of in-between or a feeling of ‘other’ than the perceived local or being included is generated when individuals reflect on their identity narratives. Such mobility concerns not only younger participants who had moved to a new city for studying but also older participants who had moved away from their childhood home as evacuees, because of education, jobs or for a partner. Johannes, 71, spoke for the entire Youth Society focus group in Päijät-Häme: “We four have roots somewhere else and we all have a dual identity”. Not being born-and-bred in an area engenders a need to qualify one’s relationship with a region, a narrative of entitling oneself to the discourses that seem to be in place in spite of personal experiences. I use entitling as a concept as it translates the idea that everyone who lives in a region is as much entitled to describe themselves as a citizen of that region. Yet such entitlement has to be claimed in the narratives where a person describes oneself and articulates ones belonging. Put it differently, when a person moves to an area he or she may opt out of the collective identity discourse and find such discourses only emphasizing the previous identity narrative, but gradually one might come to terms with a new area and entitle oneself to the discourses wreathed around social interaction (Vainikka 2012). In some urban areas, such entitling might in fact be easier as could be understood from Pietari’s contemplation in an Amnesty focus group in North Ostrobothnia. Pietari, 25: I discussed a long-time with one Norwegian couple. They asked… which was a terribly interesting point and tells a lot of Oulu on the whole … are there people that have been born in Oulu, everyone they’d spoken with had moved here from somewhere else. 124 Third, and relating to a discussion whether identification is a conscious process, people have different needs for constructing their identities through regions. For some people, regions are somewhat unnecessary parts of their identities, labels that they do not use of themselves, but without which they cannot define their being. Defining oneself through social categories, such as regions, is not a simple question of yes or no preferences, as the interpretation of the region with its different layered legacies is open to the individual. People often have difficulties in articulating habits, customs, ways of behaving and speaking and values that people observe in their everyday life. A regional habitus can become visible basically anywhere; in those “funny moments” when the local team wins even though a person does not follow sports or in encounters outside ones hometown, where an individual thinks that his or her birthplace or places of domicile are irrelevant but can be profiled either way. For some participants, the ‘spheres of influence’ of everyday life might be taken as natural and in less need of problematizing. Regionalism ‘comes into life’ in some daily practices, reading the regional newspaper or supporting a sports team, for instance. This latent regionalism can, however, surface as pride in big organization celebrations, for instance. A Youth Society member in Southwest Finland remembered that: Hannes, 44: Some years back it was a grand feeling when we sang the Anthem of Southwest Finland. No that has waned a bit because there are not such singers and people in big meetings have decreased. Fourth, the nature of the worldviews of individuals has some influence on how regions are understood. The technique of selecting the participants for the study has an effect on this factor, and the factor itself should be seen through the three other issues raised in this personal views category. Whether one spends a good part of free time in thinking about local traditions or activities that promote localism or whether one is interested in campaigning for the same human rights and freedoms for everyone else or stresses the local importance for global problems, has some effects on how regions are understood. The localist-universalist setting, that was created for the Academy project and this study, is, however, not shorthand for identification. While the former seemed more interested in histories, traditions and the local ways of life, such peculiarities cannot be translated into regionalism. The latter with the adopted views of responsibilities towards the global environment or human rights can as well use regionalism as a springboard to influence social perceptions (Vainikka 2014a). The relational factors cover four issues. First, the contexts to whom and where people narrativize their identities can structure the identity stories people tell themselves. Such consideration places importance on not only the forums where people start to talk about where they feel they belong to but also to which communities they see worth projecting themselves. Identity narratives are more detailed the closer to home they are shared and when one is amongst known people. Even though national identities are not important 125 for some, when people travel abroad being from some country is the most evident identity label, or as a Friends of the Earth member in North Karelia implied, “while abroad it does not make sense to say from Joutseno”. Following this trend, European identities, for example, are more pronounced outside Europe or after coming home from a longer excursion (Vainikka 2012, 2014b). Similarly, a person living in London might profile a person coming from Cornwall as Cornish even though in Cornwall the term Cornish might be negotiated differently. An Amnesty member, Colin, 58, argued that for people in London “The fact that we actually don’t feel Cornish in the way that Cornish people think of it down here is quite irrelevant”. Second, people have different desires as to how they want to be defined. They seek acceptance of others either by sharing the same regional attachment or wanting to retain previous attachments while forming new senses of belonging. The term ‘obligation’ refers to relational identity formation as people can expect that the ‘collective other’ upholds a discourse of such and such characteristics. Imagining a social pressure can influence the transformation of a sense of identity and, consequently, to the way people see space around them. In the discussion between Amnesty Members in Cornwall, before the previous quote, Lilian, 73, first admitted feeling links with Cornwall and Cornishness, to which Colin responded about the dangers of tribalism and strong English nationalism finding European values eventually more progressive. Lilian: Ok, can I qualify? I’m at one with Colin on Tribalism […] I suppose I would think of myself as European. But, on the other hand, I think Cornwall has a particular identity, and there has been long periods when it’s been ignored by central government […] It also has its own language, while I definitely don’t want get tribal, I do think that there are parts of the culture that should be preserved, as they should be preserved, wherever. Colin: Yeah, absolutely. Mary: Well, it’s difficult to answer this one, uhm I mean if you ask me my nationality I would have say, British. Uhm, within that, I’m really English, I would hesitate to say I was Cornish, because I don’t think anyone who actually really comes from Cornwall would be very happy for me to start saying I was Cornish. Lilian: Oh I don’t know… Mary: Because uhm they know I’m not. Colin: […] Can I just say, not to sound over-philosophical. The problem with defining yourself, is that you define somebody else as not being that something. They become the “other”, and we know what happens when people become the “other” and that’s where I have an issue with the whole business of nationalism, I’m an anti-nationalist of whatever colour. Thus, there is a difference between the narrative and practice since narratives can lead to feelings of exclusions but place-based and regionally framed practices construct differences often unconsciously. Where there are strong social discourses of, for instance, how people behave whether it is a ‘laid-down, stubborn’ Cornish or ‘taciturn, hard- 126 working’ Hämean, such discourses effect on people and obligate their identities in a certain direction (cf. Crang 1998; Bialasiewicz 2003). The use of such ‘ethnonyms’ brings about stereotypical characteristics of people living in an area but also forces people to come to terms with widely circulated discourses that operate as identity markers. A Youth Society member in North Karelia argued that: Maaret, 46: Don’t they usually say that the people of this region are more extrovert, communicative, and get to know people more easily than those from the other side of the country (laughter) Such social discourses become more evident when a person meets people from another region and might have some pre-categorization of ‘others’. Third, using the region as a source of identification has a generational aspect as well. It has long been noted that those who have lived longer in a region are more attached to it but also that different generations learn and are taught different things about regions (Antonsich 2010a). When regional symbols change or new symbols are adopted, when regions are redrawn or when ideological shifts towards regionalism take place, people of different age groups accept different versions of the regions, which eventually lead to different perceptions of the importance and the cultural content of regional identity discourses. In the focus groups that had participants of different age groups, some of the age-related attitudes towards regions and Europe became more visible than in focus groups consisting of participants of the same age. Not that age would correlate with a strength of attachment, but because different generations can include different things in regions. For older generations who have lived their entire lives in a region, claiming a regional identity in narratives of ‘who I am’ and ‘where do I belong’ is often a taken-for- granted issue. Often there is a sense of obligation to follow the regional discourse that against other regions or locales fits and describes the space that they share. Moreover, there was dispersion in regional sentiments within distinct age cohorts. The generational talk refers to shared historical events, school teaching and generally different objects of interest that are more imitated among different generations than inherited from parents or other relatives. Fourth, the need for a regional category in terms of other spatial categories could be regarded as a territorial factor but I think there is a more evident relational element to it. The use of the region as a constituent of one’s identity reflects the forum where identities are storied. People can claim to belong to different spatial scales, including the regional and European level, at the same time. Identification with a region should not be seen as a lesser attachment to a nation or locality. Nevertheless, when identity issues are negotiated interpersonally, people can revere the born-and-bred so much that they scale up or scale down their own identification elsewhere or simply count themselves “as almost Devonian”, for instance. In relation to people who have lived their entire lives in one region, those with more mobile life-styles and experiences of living in multiple locales might identify themselves as citizens of a nation, even though they might privately or in 127 another context entitle themselves to an identity characterized by that region (Vainikka 2014b) or simply find the regional identity frame more vague than useful. Similarly, people, who have lived their lives in a closed circuit, might after several years still see their friends and acquaintances through the regional prism but also through the places of their origin. Scale is adopted in discussions between different people and used as a medium with which to proportion and articulate experiences. The narrative claims where people tell themselves who they are, for some, are influenced by a sense of obligation of having a dual identity or multiple identities. Not feeling fully ready to embrace a new spatial identity in terms that seem shared, people can think that the categorization fits better with the ideal, general public, whose membership one has to negotiate and validate to oneself. Thus, people entitle themselves to local and regional discourses but might at the same time feel the ‘social’ community as an obliging label that prevents them from fully identifying with space. The practices of entitlement and obligation attribute to the social negotiation of the meanings of a region. Distinct regions seldom appear as determining a collective identity category. Furthermore, different local viewpoints, mobility and migration, different historical layers and legacies and generational understandings confirm that the ‘collective discourse’ in itself is not a ‘social fact’ hovering over and above it is a field of social practices (Bourdieu 1977 [1972]; Hilgers and Mangez 2014) that everyone understands somewhat differently. Finding that individuals understand regions in different ways, so that a regional consciousness is hard to articulate definitely has resonances with the Tardean notion that ‘to exist is to differ’ and that all identities are versions of a similar idea. Finding such reflexive and open formulation does not refute the idea of regional identification in itself, on the contrary. 5.3 Promoted identities, identification and porous/splintered territories The second research question: “How regional do actors conceptualize and facilitate discourses of regional identity and do citizens believe in such collective, institutionalized discourses?” with the auxiliary question “Can institutional regionalism patch splintered imaginaries of a region?” is best answered through the case study of Päijät-Häme (Vainikka 2013). As implied in the first article regarding Finland (Vainikka 2012), the ‘institutional’ discourses produced by Regional Councils, regional marketing agencies or even media can remain outside everyday life narratives. People can recognize regional symbols or categories, but they do not consciously perform or organize the space around them through regional vocabularies. In addition, the article made the first indication that the contemporary regions are not the only ones providing a regional vocabulary for identification. Here the difference must be made between the territorial extent of a region and the terms that are used to name it. Since the visual and the textual never fully correspond to one another an analysis of identification with regions must acknowledge 128 that citizens, who do not think in regional terms every day, and regional actors who work for and lobby for a region, emphasize the visualization of a region differently. Occasionally hearing a regional term and organizing work for a territory is one of the primary preconditions for dissimilar understandings. Päijät-Häme more than any other of the six case regions offers a good example of a complex regional structure or form, where parts of the region had been in a ‘wrong’ administrative region or people feel that some parts do not properly fit to the contemporary functional region. Unlike in Wales, for instance, where the political-economy is the prime reason for an economic fragmentation of the region that also contributes to a Welsh linguistic ‘heartland’ in West and North Wales (Jones and Fowler 2007), Päijät- Häme is more a victim of historical divides (see also Zarycki 2007 on Polish regional historic legacies). A legitimization for the region can be sourced from mediaeval historical legacies (Heinonen 1997) but the palimpsest nature of boundaries that characterize the historical form of Päijät-Häme complicate the arguments for and promotion of a coherent or culturally continuous region. The splintering fault lines provide discourses for the inhabitants and regional actors alike to connect different ideas to the region’s territorial shape. The historic fault line that the county administration between 1832 and 1997 strengthened is visible also in the newspaper subscription patterns and perceptions of different styles of dialects. Yet, the broader picture is much more complicated than a division between the Lahti region and Itä-Häme. What became clear in the focus groups was that nearly everyone has at least a dual identity. This observation, however, is partly a result of a common discourse that it is hard to find a person who has been born in Lahti or a person that would speak for the city. In contrast to spatial identity discourses in South West England, where the born-and-bred have a different kind of ‘ownership’ of the counties, similar discourses in Päijät-Häme highlight reflexive stories of moving to or moving back to the region and their relationships with specific landscape types. People frequently shared stories how their parents were brought to the city by train or what kind of ancestry they have in the ceded part of Karelia. The fact that the population of the city of Lahti grew dynamically after the Second World War until the mid-1970s explains partly why the central city of the region, holding half of the region’s population, is often characterized as the city of ‘migratory birds’ and spatially porous. Most citizens in the province construct their identities through their memories of childhood and youth with a sense of nostalgia of past landscapes. When these places coincide with their current homes, the identification is much stronger (Vainikka 2013). Jouko, 61, from the Local Heritage Association reflected his work career elsewhere and pondered that “when you get back so then everything is amazingly well.” An issue that was repeated quite often was that identification with the region establishes through everyday practices, the places one can physically reach and a longing for an ideal sociable community. One of the most interesting findings for Päijät-Häme was that the denial of a regional identification has become a ‘formulaic truth’ (Giddens 1994). Negating the existence of a regional identity 129 is a form of identification in itself and has turned into a social discourse. The experience of Päijät-Häme is a bit off from the new regionalism literature, where social cohesion and strong associational networks are seen as the premises of economic competitiveness or resilience. Some of the regional actors acknowledged as a regional characteristic that people do things first and talk about them later if they talk about them at all (Vainikka 2013: 32). This separates Päijät-Häme from some other regions in Finland where identity discourses have been more heavily used in order to seem competitive. The provincial accounts Topelius championed where people from Häme are hard-working but subdued combined with the shared memories of lost Karelia for a lot of people living especially in Lahti, creates a combination where the regional identities are not extensively heralded. Storied like this, it is perhaps no wonder that new regionalist discourses do not find resonance in civil society. Under the surface of marketing material, similar regional actors do not always believe in a strong civil society regionalism and are, perhaps, in- between the efforts of promoting the region and finding other more relational means for developing the region. As already mentioned in Chapter 4.6, the territorial frameworks and ideologies of the interviewed regional actors were somewhat different, depending on the stakeholders that their institutions presented or depending on other spatial organizations. Most of the regional actors were rather realist or even cynical in relation to the provincial rhetoric. While the term Päijät-Häme can be sourced to the 1930s as a regional concept, it started to matter more in regional development in the 1990s when the provinces became instruments of the EU regional policies. It is not that the regional actors would not realize the importance of the territorial thinking behind the province, but this thinking has to be put in context of different terminologies and spatial configurations where the provincial lobbying takes place. The province has different meanings in different contexts. One respondent working in regional administration claimed that “if the state regional division become such that Päijät-Häme comprises ten percent of the population the qualities of our province cannot be thrown into relief ” but on the other hand claimed that “if one talks about competition between regions, one talks about bygone times, that today it is all about networks that compete and regions contend within those networks.” What comes clear from these two short quotations is that regions are territorial and relational at the same time (Morgan 2007; Jones 2009), they have a shape in themselves but such shape can only be constituted in relation to other agents working for and in cooperation with other regions. When the history of a region is complicated and the content for the regional identity discourses must be sought from the functionality of the state administrative spaces and civil society. Such efforts are somewhat hampered when the Finnish province is subject to only indirect political participation through the municipalities and when the main regional newspaper talks more about the Lahti region and by implication respects Itä-Häme as a region within the region. Provincialism does not often find an echo strong enough to make a difference for the citizens and it can leave people, like the Youth Society member Pauliina, 25, wondering “what would be Päijät-Hämean” even though she worked in Kanta-Häme and “had noticed differences there in relation to us Päijät-Hämeans”. 130 Yet regional development and identification with regions are imbricated since regional development requires its audience. Contrasting the case study of Päijät-Häme with England, the Regional Development Agencies partly missed their targets in England, since the ceremonial counties, which sometimes coincide with the present-day county councils have stronger audience for regional development in England (Deacon 2004). While the eight Regional Development Agencies might fight the fragmentation of regional policies, it is a question of whether regional development policies should be recognized as emerging from local needs or whether they are used to balance state-space into larger regions that partly fade out more local-scale social disparities. Regions can mediate state-wide injustices and local-level spatial segregation, so that development policies are balanced within the spaces of people’s everyday experiences, but if the region is not an object of common acceptance the development discourses can turn against themselves. While the regional actors in Päijät-Häme agreed that regional culture is relatively important and should be a starting point for regional policies or even a source of passion for doing work for the region, these ideas are not couched in the terms of ‘competitiveness’ and ‘resilience’. The two ways of understanding progress, evident in the regional actor interviews, economic prosperity and happiness of citizens, are understood to support one another, but the former is often thought to drive the latter (see also Bristow 2010). As an answer to the research question about facilitating regional identity discourses and believing in such ideas, the most significant factor is time. The articles highlight that identification with space is in no ways a redundant phenomenon. The changes in regional systems, the mobility of people or the way their landscapes of their youth have transformed, do not wash away the condition of a need to belong somewhere. In short, we need to do region-building, but such region-building has to start from the everyday practices, not from glossy marketing material, which, admittedly, might engender new imaginaries of the regions but as such does not offer a substratum for identification. In this sense, Päijät-Häme provides an example of the interplay of the ideas of Tarde and Durkheim as co-constitutive not separated. Citizens need imaginaries – inherited, invigorated and invented – for their identities. Going back to the very first page of the dissertation and the analogy between regions and the statues; there has to be a statue in the forest, in order for the forest to feel special. Similarly, regions need time so that they would seem more natural and not simply administrative constructs. 5.4 Seeing regions through different worldviews and legacies The third research question more than the others calls for a comparative methodology. By asking “how do people with differently orientated worldviews recognize regions in the identity narratives and how different regional legacies shape these narratives?” I sought to understand regions as differentiated and culturally situated expressions of 131 identity. Furthermore, I wanted to understand how people with different life-paths and worldviews use regions as the objects of identification. Surprisingly, regional geography is not littered with comparative studies. Studies that relate to the institutionalization of regions by Paasi (1986a, 1986b) are based on Finnish regions. Antonsich analyses in various papers four regions with “different socioeconomic, political and geographical conditions” in four countries in Western Europe (Antonsich 2010a: 265; see also Antonsich 2007, 2008a, 2008b). Michael Keating et al. (2003) analyse the relationship between culture and regional economic development through historically and culturally specific regions that were successful or less successful in institution-building. Benito Giordano and Elisa Roller (2004) sought lessons from differently autonomous regions in Spain to benchmark devolution processes in the UK. Painter (2008b) illustrates through four regional case studies that there is no uniform relationship between a European citizenship and regions. However, most comparative studies (van Houtum and Lagendijk 2001; Smith and Wistrich 2007; Syssner 2009) do not engage with different points of view or more sedentary and transplanted experiences (Savage et al. 2005), or why the differences between their case regions might seem long-lasting (Johnson and Coleman 2012). In order to answer the challenging research question, I draw from the insight of the third article (Vainikka 2014a) while thinking through the question with the help of the three other articles. In the first article, I was rather cautious in making differences between the members of Youth Societies and Local Heritage Associations and the members of the Friends of the Earth and Amnesty, simply because it seemed that the provinces, as a whole, did not matter that much to these participants. The older participants might have better knowledge of regional symbols and ideologies in general, but the younger people, usually associated with the latter movements, had experiences and interest in regional bodies, histories and ideas as well. The main issue for identification or knowledge of the regions seemed to concern more the contacts with different regional agencies more than with the discourses of regional identities. In Päijät-Häme and North Ostrobothnia, whose territorial shape is not always that definitely imagined and whose central cities dominate some identity discourses, provincial identification had a lesser impact in all focus groups. In North Karelia and South West Finland where the historical ideas of the region’s distinctiveness extended deeper into history, the difference between the locally-orientated and universally-orientated groups was more visible. The contrast is not prominent but it is detectable. In comparison, in South West England the difference between the groups and especially between those who have lived their lives in the region and those of work to transplant those identities is more salient. While people can adopt new counties to their identity narratives, they recognize that the born-and-bred might understand their ‘regions’ solely through one county and not through a duality or multiplicity of identity regions. However, identification is not always narrated, rather identification is part of the ‘practical consciousness’ (Giddens 1991) that people feel but cannot always put into words. The ways people read space is a result of at least two processes: former experiences and scale. Former experiences highlight the fact that the ways in which people identify with 132 space is a product of their own past and these life-paths can concern both movement in a limited area and multiple locations throughout the world. Both styles of experiences contribute to a sense of place (Calhoun 2003; Prytherch 2009). Scale on the other hand can be read as a medium for negotiating belonging (Vainikka 2014b) that is contextually used to rescale one’s belonging to a level where the former experiences of people who share their identity narratives find congruence. Especially in Cornwall and Devon the differences between the born-and-bred and migrants, usually from the Home Counties, are sometimes scaled as being British, for example, in order to find a common spatial basis for identities. When the participants talked about identification with the counties, the narratives shared in locally-orientated focus groups concentrated more on the people who have a ‘right’ to talk for the region. The incomers in these groups did not always think they were included fully or thought that they were not entirely entitled to use the regional symbols. For example, in a Local Association focus group being born-and-bred came with a burden of expertise on the whole region as included incomers personified the entire region in one person. Jill, 62: You’re the only one. Pauline, 59: We are all outsiders. Teresa, 57: Yes Those who were native to the regions in the universally-orientated groups, often tried to convince the others that anyone who wants to associate themselves or identify with the region they were talking about can do so. While doing the focus groups and while reading the transcriptions over and over again, it seemed that those who were native to their regions and those who had moved to the regions were in fact talking past each other. While people often spoke of their emotional connections to the landscape and how they had imbricated in some landscape types (see Conradson 2005b), those who were born elsewhere felt that they had to qualify their connection to the regionalist or even nationalist ideas concerning the region before they could make a direct connection to the landscapes or communities. Thus, people do not always see and read space as natural; rather belonging is mediated through positionality in social networks and through the inclusiveness of collective, regional legacies. Not all people feel confident to entitle themselves to regional discourses, but on the other hand, especially those working for locally-orientated organizations felt as an obligation to describe oneself in some regional terms. In addition, for especially the environmental movements regionals symbols were not that important in the first place. Richard, 54, a Transition member in Cornwall implied that he identified with “certain set of ideals: the environment. Sort of environmental stuff, living on the planet and I don’t think flags necessarily help.” The differential belonging needs to be put into context. Regions are different, and as the example of Päijät-Häme shows the various regional legacies can provide a palimpsest historical space that eats the coherence of present-day regions. Other regions have more 133 historically relevant territorial shapes. It has to be underlined that Päijät-Häme and North Ostrobothnia as such do not lack history; the historical discourses in these regions have not permeated into national imaginaries as visible as elsewhere. In Finland, Southwest Finland and North Karelia represent two different types of relevance to national histories. Whereas Southwest Finland, as the former administrative centre of Finland can be regarded as an archetypal Finnish region, North Karelia, on the other hand, provides a different story. While North Karelia can be imagined having ‘preserved’ the idea of untamed Finland it was also the last territory outside Lapland to be absorbed to Finland politically. Albeit this change took place politically in the early seventeenth century, the cultural inclusion occurred only in the nineteenth century, especially with the arrival of the railroad. South West England has a somewhat similar story. Devon can be regarded as an archetypal English county, especially when it is contrasted to Cornwall, whose regionalist discourses have been exoticized especially in the nineteenth century (Hale 2001). The division between archetypal and absorbed regions whose difference is fuelled by a discourse of antecedent otherness provides rather different positions not only in relation to the ideas of the nation but also in respect to identification. Significance of regional identity discourses that draw from different relations to the nation helps to understand why in some places more than other regions continue to structure everyday practices. These regional legacies give more material for identification and more importantly offer an authoritative discourse for citizens to reflect. People, partly, down-scale national ideas when they identify with archetypal regions. In absorbed regions identification with the region is often as something different than the national idea. Take Southwest Finland and North Karelia for an example. While in the universally-orientated focus groups identification with the region was rather low, knowledge of the region across the country was based on blunt stereotypes. For the locally-orientated groups, the region represented more feelings of belonging and pride. The following discussion between two Youth Society focus group members indicate that some are more ready to underline the speciality of the archetypal region. Jarkko, 41: Surely it has been thought that Finland Proper [Southwest Finland] is the finest. Hannes, 44: Of course, but so they say… Jarkko, 41: I guess it’s like that elsewhere, that it’s more cultured than the rest. Hannes, 44: It’s been taught to all that one’s province is one’s own province. Jarkko, 41: I don’t know, Finland Proper… it comes from the word that it is Proper Finland, it’s the elementary Finland. Finland and the Finnish language originated from here… The trick is what kind of regional discourses the locally-orientated and usually more sedentary people and the universally-orientated, who also work at the local level, but have usually more mobile life-histories, can share. One solution for the differently scaled views is to understand the regions more as the products of their own time. This is not an argument against history, but an argument that regions mean different things in different times and how they are negotiated and moved forward in the present is more important 134 than trying to find a single, meta-narrative. The historical analysis in Part 3, hopefully, has shown that the legacies different territories in different times do form a continuum but are not primordial in any way, only categories devised from the present (Tosh 2010). 5.5 Emotional mediums of scalar identification The fourth research question relates to the different and potential objects of identification that condition regional identification. By asking how people negotiate and piece together multiple, bounded senses of belonging, the research recognizes that regions are only one part of the identity matrix of individuals. The extension, what emotional mediums and approaches do people use when they rescale their identification and imagine, operationalize and question the binaries between ‘us’ and ‘others’, tries to understand scale as more than a discursive element that puts different concepts together and implies that the scaling of identification depends on different mediums that engender emotions. Thus, the research question starts from the idea that different spatial abstractions are not only available, but individuals work their identities in relation to such categories in everyday life. Such approach uses scale foremost as a category of practice and only secondly an ‘ontological question’ (Moore 2008). The idea behind this question was laid in the first article, where I use spatial identity as a form of identity that does not predetermine the scale of the spatial. Rather the spatial is a spectrum of different scales and people understand their everyday environments and the world through an assemblage of different scales. The question drills into the social and cultural processes constitutive of identities as they appear ‘on the ground’. In relation to Marston et al. (2005), my approach on scale does not expurgate the concept rather it gives power to the individuals to narrativize their identities so that scale makes sense. On one hand, multiple, bounded senses of belonging start from a site, or from a situation where people could share their ideas, but such belonging is driven by the idea that identities of people are not locked in a certain scalar discourse or binary. Identities define space so that identification with a certain ‘level’ is dependent on all other scalar levels. The emotions a certain spatial construct engenders, contributes to identification with other spatial constructs, directly or indirectly. On the other hand, the question probes into the difficult status of the ‘we’ and why in some cases people can use very malleable ideas of ‘we’ and in others have more fixed idea of ‘we’ that hampers its own rescaling. Rather surprisingly, the scaling of belonging and identification has been rather poorly conceptualized in the geographical literature (Antonsich 2010b; Wood and Waite 2011). Most often scale is worked out through the binaries of the local and the global inscribed usually in national or western ideas of how social and political connections are forged (Marston et al. 2005; Pain 2009) or through immigration studies that categorize people after their nationalities (Koefoed and Simonsen 2012; Leitner 2012). Questioning how ‘we’ might be something else than the local or national and how this ‘we’ is scaled from 135 the perspective of the individual and not through shared qualities has remained rather tangential. Especially in the last article (Vainikka 2014b), I work through these ideas to understand when people narrativize their identities to overcome or emphasize the divide between ‘us’ and ‘others’ and what kind of emotional mediums operate across imaginable scalar levels. In the first drafts of the fourth article, my intention was to divide scalar spatial identities according to emotional and rational mediums. While such separation has steered approaches to emotions in social sciences (Barbalet 1998), such an approach would not had made a progressive contribution to emotional geographies, whose students seem to speak for the ubiquity of emotions (Bondi et al. 2005; Smith et al. 2009). Close-reading and categorizing the entire focus groups material after the idea of how identification is narrated as emotional started to concentrate on two different issues: the landscape and the community. The way people perceived their landscapes, the traces of different scales and the way communities were framed as a sense of self-inclusion proved to be the two most important emotional mediums or factors that bind people to space. Both of these categories contribute to a sense of ‘we’ and allow individuals to shift their identification depending on the context. Rather than approaching a sense of ‘we’ from the point of view of administrative territories or people encapsulated by borders, the identification with different spaces through elements in the landscape and imaginaries of community creates malleable boundaries between scalar categories. Instead of resorting to scale- jumping (Herod and Wright 2002) or reducing scale to identification with one ‘level’ at a time, my approach to scale is that people inhabit multiple scales, their local, regional, national and other identities condition each other. People can be European, Finnish and North Ostrobothnian at the same time, but they negotiate their belonging to these categories through their narratives, everyday practices and understandings of the different legacies they might entail. Thus, scale is a situated category, whose spectrum individuals perpetually negotiate perpetually to overcome or emphasize the distinctions between ‘we’ and ‘others’. In a Youth Society focus group in North Ostrobothnia, the participants argued that different borders have become more porous but used scalar categories to make sense of them. Mona, 40: Barriers have straddled in many sectors, it is the effect globalization, that in our immediate surroundings or Finland as part of Europe makes people crisscross for work in Europe, so these boundaries do not have such meaning. The difference between the universally- and locally-orientated groups is perhaps fruitful to review here. The universally-orientated groups had more participants that revered the local communities, understood themselves as ‘anti-tribalist’ or experienced it difficult to construct connections with regionalism. Instead, they often perceived their commonality with other ‘locals’ through the nation or Europe illustrating values that could be more 136 universal in the locality. For example, one Friends of the Earth member in Southwest Finland understood that we should seek wider solutions to pressing problems. Valtteri, 24: I am strongly pro-European Union, even more the UN. Our problems are so big now that we need bigger decision-making units. Finns in the Turku local council cannot solve global warming or the eutrophication of the Baltics. While similar responses might speak of non-attachment to the region, they also underline a wider sense of community and solidarity among people. In the locally- orientated groups, some felt more threatened by scales wider than the nation. These sentiments are not against solidarity among humans rather recognition that all people are hailing from somewhere, have their own histories, their peculiar ways of speaking that help to pinpoint past experiences. For these people, the local scale implies the communities of trust and landscapes of ‘the heart’ rather than forces out of their control. A Youth Society member in Päijät-Häme scaled the identity categories somewhat differently. Johannes, 71: We are European, we are strongly Finns, we have our identity that has roots in our parent’s birthplaces, from there identities emerge. Then are we ready to open Europe. These two different approaches should not be understood as exclusionary, rather as different ways of relating to the ecologies of space. Common to both approaches is the idea that people practice and narrate their identities through a variety of scales that help to frame conceptions of reality. It is the paths, stories, beliefs and emotions of individuals that define societies. 137 Figure 7. Metaphors of time and space in the landscape of Hartland, Devon. Time is a one- way street that allows people to be reflexive upon their past. In the end, inter-personal narratives, mobility, shared emotions and scaled identities make space meaningful. (Photo by the author, 05/ 2010). 6 Conclusions and discussion 6.1 Metaphorically speaking, or the premises of the research At the beginnings of most sections, I have drawn from philosophical discussions that refer to ontological positions on the nature of ‘reality’ or the relationship between the subject and the object. Illustrating the freedom to narrativize oneself with the help of shared imaginaries; these metaphors also exemplify the relations between social individuals and the collective discourses such individuals follow. In the first section, I applied the earthworks statues of Olavi Lanu to show that regions and especially administrative regions are not ‘ready’ the moment they are erected. The regions themselves are always constructs but can start to blend in with the spatial imaginaries of people; it only takes time. While it could be easily assumed that once a region is institutionalized, it has already won the hearts and minds of its citizens. The ‘collective consciousness’ emerges slowly if it emerges at all after local or regional restructurings (Deacon 2004; Zimmerbauer et al. 2012; Vainikka 2013). In the same section, I draw on the discussion about the nature of colour. Metaphorically, it serves as a statement that the world or reality is not just ‘out- there’, rather people create, in interaction with each other, their own picture of a regional reality, which, relating to the discussion of Tarde (1895; Candea 2010) and Deleuze (1994 [1968]; Doel 2000), is different in its nature in as much that no normative structure cannot ever be observed by our senses. In the methodological section, I use the encounter of the Little Prince with the Geographer as a springboard to the subject matter of and changes in geography during the past fifty or so years. Geography is not a science of what is eternal or of topographical facts, it circulates around the question how a sense of permanence is constructed through the interplay between relational and territorial spaces, how different locales carry with them multiplicity of legacies and how such spaces are felt and experienced. The excursion into the asteroid B330 is also a reminder that contribution of geography to the social sciences, or to the Durkheimian version of it, is the insight that “universality cannot hold” and that “[d]appled and pied geographies reign” (Barnes 2015: 2). The dappled, pied, variegated or eclectic identities require a methodology that respects the different visions people might have on space. The reasoning to use the focus groups method engages with the discussion about perceptions and the nature of geography. The final excursion into Sisyphus and Albert Camus is a complicated one, at first. Fundamentally, regions offer an answer to the question ‘who are we’ but such dispositions must emerge from free will. Regional identities are not imposed on individuals, rather identification is a choice enabled by memory and, to an extent, by scale and conditioned by collective identity discourses that create expectations for those identities. If we take regions to exist as long as someone believes in them (Paasi 2002a) and that it takes 139 emotional and often performative work to identify with them (Vainikka 2014b), then the struggle of Sisyphus becomes illustrative. Sisyphus struggled with his own existence in a way analogous to individuals who have to perform their identities for them to become meaningful. In the metaphor, there is also another resemblance. The description of past and the absurdity of the present are analogous to our knowledge of regions. The characterization by Tacitus (1868) of the Fenni, free from control and ‘needing not even a wish’60 relates to the freedom Sisyphus enjoyed before the gods banished him to lift the boulder. The struggle with the rock characterizes the inescapability of space and the control and power associated with space. We remain to be bounded to space in terms of both the collective power relations structured around space and our own memories of space. These four excursions into the nature of accumulation, difference, geographical research and free will, are not arguments or results, but they provide the philosophical framework through which the papers and the research results are constructed or filtered. As a whole, the dissertation goes further than explicating the meaning of regions as cultural, geographical or social labels. Such endeavour is always context-based, relating to the regional legacies people want to draw from and is bound to other spatial structures that condition the importance of the region between the local and wider collective constructs. The undercurrent through each of the research articles is the relationship between the personal choice and the imagined collective norms, the freedom of identification in relation to social expectations and an understanding the ways in which individuals piece together their own imaginaries of different territorial articulations with the perceived social. The research has had three basic premises: 1) people have a need to identify with space and such identification draws from life-paths and from the ability to reflect on past experiences, 2) identification with space can take place in multiple scales and people construct their identities by piecing together and negotiating different spatial ideas and representations, 3) while regions might form a solid source of identification for identity narratives, the ways people relate to regions, their histories, symbols, institutions and discourses, is relational to the individual and his or her social connections. Following these three premises means that regions cannot be taken-for-granted or imagined as social structures that exist outside the imaginations of people. Rather the reproduction of their meaning takes place between people, which means that our research methods should promote an idea of ‘seeing what they see’. Still, regions are often used as labels with which to frame the identities of others. Even though identification with regions and territories has a reflexive element to them, such territorial articulations can be used as ways to profile other people, friends and strangers. Naming people according to places or regions is often the most simple form of identity construction. Another major issue that I have tried to raise is the importance of time to identification. People do not construct their identities anew in every unique moment they might ponder issues of identity. Identities are constructed over long periods of time, they can fluctuate 60 See also Hoskins (1959: 15) in relation to Bronze Age Devon: “In those happy days there were no politi- cians to set men against each other”. 140 and they can adopt new meanings, but whether we understand identity as pearled or as a set of experiences (Vainikka 2013), the elements of identity cannot be easily replaced since the urge to replace something is itself driven by an earlier experience. While this accumulation is important for the individual also the ways regions themselves are evolved through time and leave legacies for the future times to be openly interpreted is a significant realization. Regions of different times might seem as contingent if we observe them from the present but the ways in which meanings were given to them and new borders and names were designed reflect the times of their contemporaries. Thus, decisions and acts that created different legacies must be understood as conscious and deliberate in the time of their making, choices that were responsive to the circumstances of their times not as heritage planned to attribute current identities (see also Egberts 2015). In this sense, I find that the idea of Lefebvre (1991) that every generation must create its own social structure worth addressing, since regional structures have fluctuated according to political circumstances before. Creating ‘new’ spatial structures is not only a contemporary political problem since the very need for anything new must first address people and different generations and then, and only then, can it become a meaningful political issue. Culturally thick constructions, such as regions, can be important categories and sources of collective identities, especially if knowledge of them has been deeply internalized in youth (Vainikka 2012). Yet, even if such categories seem important they should not be taken as given discourses. The main lesson behind the rather long historical section on provinces in Finland is the realization that tunes with a quotation of J.D.Y Peel (1971) that “traditions of thought are continually remade, not merely by new circumstances, but by self-reflexion. Up to a point, at least, we can choose our ancestors.” The beauty of regions is that they are alive as long as someone believes in a regional construct, and to paint a picture of a historically extendable region must face the limits of its own recognition. For instance, the historicity of the ‘historical provinces’ was an invention or a form of synchronized tradition of the 1850s. Surely there are legacies within territorial frames but if such legacies are thought of as territorial then the territorial history can only be extended to the territorial boundary making or the institutionalization of its name and not to previous times. In this respect, the English experience is different. While in both countries city-regionalism and regional development issues have found an echo in relational and territorial imaginaries and while the national histories were romanticized in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the way the regions of local government, county councils and regional councils or counties and provinces, have been structured in the long run differ significantly. For this reason it is perhaps purposeful to scrutinize the question: What implications does an analysis of Finnish and English spatial experiences entail for the conceptualization of the term ‘region’? What the comparative study between Finland and England does? 141 6.2 Lessons from a parallel analysis Comparisons work only if we are comparing different entities, ideas or processes that can be conceptualized within a common category. Making sense how differences are manifested, created and put into motion is what drives comparative studies (Wright et al. 2013). As Jennifer Mason (2006: 16) notes the “qualitative comparative logic works by seeking to understand the distinctive dynamics, mechanics and particularity of each case holistically.” The national contexts of this dissertation provide two contrasting but in a sense similar examples. Section 3 illustrates how the territorial histories of England and Finland have run at different speeds but through some similar processes. In both countries, territorial ideas existed before Christianity brought its territorial logic, but these ideas were reimagined and romanticized during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the time when especially southern England was charted in the Domesday Book with a lot of still surviving counties, the territory we now call Finland was occupied by sparse settlements distinguished by a handful of literary sources. The issues that relate to the (in)stability of territorial articulations and the burdens of time are an issue that I hope Section 3 highlights. In England, counties appear as inescapable parts of regional life. They have been politically regrouped and de-grouped, jostled around in state regional imaginaries but most often boundary changes confront objections based on historical grounds.61 In Finland, regions have been suited for contemporary ideologies more effectively. The colonialist policies towards Finland and within Finland from the twelfth to seventeenth century created new sets of regions alongside the Christianized terras. The forceful synchronization of provinces in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries created their own legacies up against which the nation was imagined. Added with a strong belief in the functional region with an urban core and rural periphery, makes the regional histories of these two countries drastically different. As I show in the third article, differences in histories are no reason not to compare countries especially since the cultural divides within these countries seem to speak of an antecedent otherness that the national practices have attempted to patch together (Vainikka 2014a). Another issue related to comparisons is the terminologies. I was for a long time troubled with the term ‘province’ for maakunta since the Regional Councils refer themselves as regions and the Ministry of the Interior, albeit unofficially, translates the maakunta as a region. For example, the Maakuntajakolaki (1159/1997), translated into Division into Regions Act, states that: “for regional development and land use planning, the country is divided into regions.” Yet, it is conceptually clearer if we talk about provinces rather than regions since the term ‘region’ works better as an analytical and scalable term if it is not designated directly at one regional level (see note 1 in Vainikka 2012; and note 4 61 The case of Lyme Regis in the border of Devon and Dorset is a good example. In the words of Eric, 81, from a Local Heritage Association “back in the 1960s the government decided they would put Lyme Regis into Devon, because it was near to Devon that would be quite a logical thing to do. The outcry from Dorset and Lyme Regis, there was almost a revolution. And that was quite quickly snapped on the head that was.” 142 in Vainikka 2013). Häkli (2002) also goes to lengths explicating the etymology of the province. Whether or not it is a military term or a sphere of duty, is not the issue here, but the tradition of translating maakunta as province and to illustrate that provinces were not invented during the 1990s, rather they are ways to divide the land into separate divisions, where the centre and its periphery form a somewhat recognizable and historically conditioned whole. The practice of terming nearly everything within Finland as a region or alue in Finland, from everyday speech to legislation, becomes more interesting when contrasted with the English practice. From 1997 onwards, the term ‘region’ has nearly exclusively been used for the regions of the Regional Development Agencies or for the NUTS 1 level regions. Geographers especially took on a rather unilateral understanding about the region and applied the institutionalization of the regions idea to RDA regions without reflecting if the counties, often dubbed as sub-regions, might have similar and even more prudent processes and qualities that might allow their conceptualization as regions. Another troubling issue while writing the last two articles has been the regional NUTS classification of the European Union. The technocratic arrangement of the three different levels is applicable to existing regions in Finland only at the NUTS3 level. The continental Finland at the NUTS 1 level and the cardinal divide at the NUTS 2 level are rather useless for comparing identification with regions. The standard region or RDA regions in England are located at the NUTS 1 level and counties and county or city councils or unitaries at the NUTS 2 and the NUTS 3 levels, respectfully. For understanding the somewhat historically constructed and identifiable regions that do not separate urban areas from their surrounding rural areas the NUTS 2 areas work better. Based on population numbers at different ranges, these classifications typically do not refer to any established ideas of regionalism. The discourses of (in)stability and the imaginaries of a relative age of the regions and the variegated use of regional terms are exactly why a comparison becomes important. Hijacking a term to describe a specific political agenda of an era or using the term in various ways should not impede the theoretical use of the term. The variances of legacies and administrative practices should not take away the conceptual purchase for the term. It is not only the categories of analysis to which the region should be bound to, rather regions should also be understood as categories of practice that allow people to define what the region means for them (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). In addition, bringing together the British (Tomaney 2002) and the Finnish/Nordic (Olwig and Jones 2008) traditions, puts to test the recent geographical imagination on regions since it seems to draw heavily on these two areas although there are notable examples regarding Dutch, German and Polish regions, for instance. Drawing together especially the English and Finnish traditions has been an important conjunctive element for this dissertation that renders national particularities visible. It should, however, be pointed out that articles three and four are not ‘like-for-like’ national comparisons, and that I use the comparative setting in two rather different ways. As I state in the third article “rigorous cross-national comparative studies give more 143 purchase to conceptualizations of regions, especially when they draw on varied examples” (Vainikka 2014a: 12). This relates to similar processes in the making of a national space, state-driven nationalism and historical differences within the countries – the fact that territorial divides existed before nationalism that tried to patch together the ideas of a national community often through regions. Thus, the synchronization of traditions refers to the power structures from where the countries were idealized. In the fourth article (Vainikka 2014b), I approach the comparative setting from another angle. It explicitly lets go of the geohistorical idea and leaves more room for similar types of mind-set, local or more universal, and what similarities can be found regardless of their national contexts. The article argues that we can use scale to conceptualize different forms of belonging and identification without taking-for-granted the ‘levels’ associated with scale. The trick is to find similar types of people or people who might think in a certain way about the world around them. Such a setting renders possible a parallel analysis. Rather than comparing differences, it highlights commonalities in perceptions, attitudes and understandings. The combining idea behind both of the aforementioned articles is letting the participants define how they understand their spatial identities, regions and how regions and collective discourses of regions provide signposts for their personal, sharable identity narratives. In addition, using more than one example of one country as well as more than one country allows more generalizations to be made that do not assume that one example could represent a national system but also scrutinizes the differences between different countries. 6.3 Revisiting the focus group perceptions and conceptualizations As the main results of the research were deliberated in the previous section, this is perhaps a good place to revisit the theoretical ideas behind the selection of the organization types for the focus groups and how their perceptions revealed in the discussions help to conceptualize processes and practices related to identification. First, the particular- universal discussion is a question that has attracted the imaginaries of social scientist for a long time (Entrikin 1999; Swyngedouw 2011). While the distinction between locally- orientated and universally-orientated groups is here used as a category of analysis it, for the most part, describes the interests of the participants associated with different groups and functions as an ‘explanatory variable’. The rationale behind this selection was to understand social categories as more chosen than as performances of given categories. In relation to Judith Butler’s ideas of performativity, it is the actions that the participants were embedded in that created their identities not their location within socially mediated categories (Nelson 1999). Another issue is that the selection of Local Heritage Associations and Youth Societies in one end and Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth/Transition on the other organizes the mind-sets, interests and causes. The 144 participant’s interests can be placed on an imaginary scale where parochial or provincial interests can be contrasted with an anxiety over human rights around the world or the succession of nature values into the future. The interest in the local can, of course, be a universal phenomenon. In addition, concerns about globally ideologized values reflect freedoms and the abilities for change in the local environment. Thus the local and the universal are not separate ideas. They support each other (Sheppard 2002; Leitner and Miller 2007). The argument is that if similar ideas and understandings across the groups are found, then there is a chance for wider generalization. The trick is how the discourses of a region are understood as something that both groups can share. The main finding along these categories is that not all people feel confident entitling themselves to regional discourses, but some felt it as an obligation to use the regional terms. The practices of entitlement and obligation are a pair that I have been developing and using throughout the four articles. In short, entitlement refers to the process in which individuals feel free to contextualize their identities and obligation refers to the perceived expectations of the surrounding social environment. The distinction between these two concepts draw from the basic separation between Self and Other (Giddens 1991; Rose 1997; Antonsich 2010c; Yuval-Davis 2010), and the ways ‘we’, on the one hand, narrate our own identities partly irrespective of other and are free to do so, but, on the other hand, might be extremely careful in claiming membership along the lines we think ‘others’ might profile us. The distinction between entitlement and obligation has two main applications that relate to time and distance. First, when people move to a region, they might not in the same instant entitle themselves to the space and obligate others within the region as the ‘citizens’ of the region. Due time, the same person might entitle oneself to the regional discourses. People who have lived longer or people who have sedentary life-paths might feel as their obligation to be part of the regional discourse. From a distance people who state that they live in a certain region can be profiled as ‘citizens’ of that region regardless of the experiences of the person, as a form of ex situ obligation. Durations or meaningful memories of some places can also enable people to entitle themselves or their identity narratives to different locales and regions even though the relationship with the space was a relatively short one. The term ‘palimpsest’ appears in the articles frequently as a reminder that regional boundaries, while being the instruments of control, are also expressions of social practices that can live in collective discourses long after the boundary has been redefined. Palimpsest can be defined as traces of previous ‘scripts’ in the place (Schein 1997; Vainikka 2013) that gradually lose their meaning but can be observed in some shared narratives. The idea of the palimpsest is related to the conceptualization of regional legacies. With the term ‘legacies’, I have tried to deconstruct the uniform ideas of a national heritage, which too easily turns into a celebration of present ideas in relation to a ‘prototype’ instead of clarifying how the ideas of the prototype carry baggage of the definition from later times that add to the ideological changes of the original idea (cf. Deleuze 1994 [1968]: 1). With the term, I underscore the transition and loops that have influenced regions that 145 show that national histories are anything but coherent. The reason I wanted to make a distinction between heritage and legacies relates to the idea of the palimpsest. If regions have somewhat stable territorial histories, then there is no problem in conceptualizing heritage as a vision from the present that tries to understand regional processes that have happened in the same ‘frame’, but when the territorial histories become more complicated or when the regional structures have ‘meandered’, then constructing a heritage has a danger of anachronism. Regions name multiple meanings and with them entire historical universes can be described, but who has the legitimacy to include histories in present-day regional frames or within the nationally-embedded understandings of regions? While heritage usually means that there is some powerful agent defining (Graham et al. 2000) or synchronizing it, legacies give more room for people to highlight historical divides, events or processes that make sense for them without resorting to any given historical or national story. The interplay between generational and regional differences and the freedom to interpret is why understanding the history of different territories and territorial terms as a palimpsest and through regional legacies are important. The concepts of ‘splintered region’ and ‘antecedent otherness’ also relate to the idea that contemporary regions are historically mediated. The ‘splintered region’ in reference to Päijät-Häme in the second article illustrates how former divides and cultural fault lines can cut across current functional regions. While regions structure around larger cities, especially in Finland, this functionality cannot always hide a sense of difference in different parts of the region. Antecedent otherness, on the other hand, reminds us that nations are constructed from territories and regions that make claims of primordialism rather redundant. Cornwall is often associated with ethno-national claims, a revived language, a distinct mining history are also present-day practices that contribute to a sense of otherness. In addition, North Karelia with its rather late annexation to the Swedish realm as part of Kexholm, strong orthodox culture, Kalevalan landscapes and sense of peculiarity used as ‘production value’ in numerous domestic films, tell a somewhat similar story. Such sense of peculiarity is often used as a ‘production value’ in numerous tv-series and films from Poldark to Pölönen or from About Time to Kulman pojat. Both regions are integral to a sense of nationhood, or they have been used to reimagine the nation, but both carry a sense of antecedent otherness especially in relation to what could be called more archetypal national regions. The conceptualization of scale in the fourth article resonates with the idea of a spatial identity described in the first article. Like identity, scale has gathered conceptual baggage and the political-economy and post-structuralist approaches treat scale in significantly different ways. Some of the most thought-provoking discussions in human geography for the past decade have revolved around the concept of scale. Marston et al. (2005) denounce scale as a dispensable concept ripe to be replaced by site and flat ontologies. While their treatment of scale effectively expurgates the past conceptions of scale through privileging the moment as more specific than previous times, it also reduces the significance of the subject understanding sites and spaces. The theoretical part of this synopsis is quite explicit about the importance of multiple visions painting the reality (see also Sheppard 146 2008). Thus, the way I conceptualize scale, starts from the focus group participant and the emotional responses to the discussions participants had in the research situation with other participants. Like Richard Howitt (2003), I am rather bewildered by the efforts to divorce scale from its geographical and empirical contexts. Scale comes forth in the ways individuals organize the world around them and in the ways they read space and use different vocabularies of the surrounding social relationships. It is also a way to find commonality between people or to seek assurance against a phenomenon that might seem out of their control. Yet, different scales cannot be shut out from a sense of belonging since people must contemplate the relationships they have to the spectrum of spatial scales as these all condition each other while remaining their own making (Latour 2005). 6.4 Why ‘we’ (still) need region-building? As a whole, this dissertation has argued for the freedom to define time and scale in support of a spatial identity that gives focus to the individual in relation to other people. Regional identity, when taken to the interpersonal level, is a matter of belief, projecting and profiling, accumulation and discourses of legacies. While much of this dissertation has centred around the question of how individuals narrate regions and space in their identity narratives and the elements that influence such identities, this does not mean that region-building would be redundant, on the contrary. In late modern societies, people have a need to belong somewhere, but cannot always articulate where they belong. In Europe, the region increasingly signifies regional policies. Yet regions cannot be sorted out only as the instruments of competitiveness and social cohesion (Brenner 2004; Bristow 2010) they are also cultural constructs. Sometimes these cultural values are used to emphasize the strength of the regions ‘local states’ capable of competing in global markets without relying on state subsidies. It must be asked, however, what happens when every region bolster around with similar qualities. Regions are not instruments to apply cohesion through a ‘template vision’, they are as Benno Werlen (2009) notes the ‘thought-and-practiced’ elements of everyday lives, always contextual and always place-based imaginaries. While place-promotion of regions often reflects the idea that the identification with regions could be manipulated through projects, the institutionalization of such imaginaries that renders strong identification possible takes time. People have different identity narratives, they are reflexive about their own past but nevertheless often show interest in the wider regional community around them. There is an ‘audience’ for region-building, but in some more recently institutionalized regions assuring such an audience might take time. Probably the worst thing for regional actors to do is to adopt a regional symbol without any consent from the wider public living in the region. While for example the Vellamo figure of Päijät-Häme has a story associated with it, the children’s book version (Luova 2002) was for the most part unknown to the majority of participants members of the civic organizations and regional actors alike. Still, people have a need to believe in regional 147 stories, emblems and symbolic landscapes that make them part of the local texture. Hilary’s comment in a Transition focus group in Cornwall that “I don’t think I had a personal or collective identity until I came here” exemplifies the position that regions, as ideas, can engender identification. Of course, many of the regions in Europe do not have rich textures of distinctiveness in the landscape and in public discourses, but every region has a history. More importantly regions have people with ideas and hopes what the future of that region might look like. Regions need regeneration. Their discourses cannot remain fastened to one era. If they did, we would only reify that era and gradually forget all that had happened before that. One of the intentions of the rather lengthy chapter on the evolution of Finnish regions was to show that there were no solid or unchanged regional divides for Finland, not along county lines and especially not along provincial lines. Thus, instead of repeating truisms that inform more about nation-building than different regional legacies, region- building should respect the idea that regions change and balance between the needs of the contemporary time and the imaginaries accumulated from the pasts. Anssi Paasi has paraphrased George Orwell’s idea that “the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them” to tease out the ideas that scholars should “defy and develop new ones” (Paasi 2011: 161) and to be open about how we can interpret keywords and their contexts in different ways. For me, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to the ideas behind them without an effort to rethink their meaning in different contexts. After all, different generations understand things in different ways. If Heraclitus is claimed to have said that “you cannot step in the same river twice”, it goes to indicate that different generations have learned to read space differently and region-building practices cannot be simply repetitious. To keep a region alive and interesting, it needs fresh ideas that build on from the previous ones. From another angle, region-building also relates to social justice. While the articles and this synopsis make only tangential references to spatial or social justice, it is worth to recognize that there is a point in applying imaginaries of regions through rose-coloured marketing material as they illustrate perhaps the most idealized visions of the region (Syssner 2009; Boisen et al. 2011; Eshuis and Edwards 2012). With the neoliberal interest in metropolizing city networks, region-building can, in fact, delay this process or at least give time for better metropolitan planning. In Finland for example, a popular expectation is that the Helsinki metropolitan region would by the year 2050 be home to one-thirds of the country’s population (see for example Moisio 2012). While this process seems inevitable for most, the question of what will happen to socio-spatial justice in the long- run is a prudent question. Is the sense of nationhood enough to support the rest of the two-thirds whose age structure will inevitably be more biased? Will the metropolis have the interest in looking over the more and more sparsely populated areas if more energy is concentrated on the improvement of infrastructures of a limited number of city- regions? What will happen to identification with non-urban areas and will regions become redundant or an opposing force to the metropolis as happened in the 1980s in Northern 148 England (Pike and Tomaney 2009)? Luring in businesses and new citizens into ‘provincial’ centres could balance the centralization of the state space since nothing is more destructive than competing against other metropolitan cities with cashing in the potential or existing infrastructures in other cities within the same country. Region-building can comfort and create new regional discourses for the existing citizens and attract potential citizens and companies. Nevertheless, it cannot detach from the realities shared by the citizens. It has to push forward the hopes and visions actors have for the space in a progressive way. In the end and going back to Figure 1, there has to be the statue that makes the space meaningful and an object of emotional identification. 6.5 Transforming regions: Openings and future avenues The novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004) is one reason I gave time such a strong role in this synopsis. The interlinked stories of different times Mitchell details seemed to resonate with my thinking on how people narrate and practice their identities by creating small legacies that spur on new sets of ideas. Another idea that resonates with the novel is the understanding that individuals are free to create their identities and hope for recognition for their narratives and expression regardless of the order one could imagine gathering from a state politics or inherited moral orders. While bound to others or imitating others as Tarde might have put it and continuing the fabric of time while creating their own durations as Bergson would have understood, people entitle themselves to identity categories and negotiate their obligations to others. During the process of this dissertation, I have thought through several ideas for future study. Four quite different themes could provide future avenues for research. The first one is methodological. While the focus group method emphasizes interactions between the participants and the discussions are most often analysed with linguistic means, perhaps more could be done to analyse how affects are played out in these settings. While in the fourth article I use categories that engendered the most emotional responses across different scales, there were a lot of non-verbal affects played out in the research situations, from being reserved to laughter and from a sense of self-realization to anxiety, that did not always make to the ‘final cuts’ of the articles. What these affective moments tell about identities could be worth reflecting more. Another idea bounces off from the idea of the palimpsest. As identities can be eclectic due to different life-paths it would be beneficial to study more how this situation is different in localities where regional boundaries have fluctuated considerably over time in contrast to more stable regions? In the material, there were a few of localities that the participants at times located in different regions, but the contextualities of such shifts and what they mean for contemporary identification could be scrutinized more. The third prospect relates to art and how different spatial ideas represented through art find an echo only later. For example, in the late nineteenth century a lot of Finnish artists focused on depicting romantic ideas and the imaginaries 149 of Kalevala. At the same time, Helene Schjerfbeck painted one of the most loved paintings today in St Ives portraying rural Cornwall. The interest in representing space as experienced and realist seems to have a wider resonance today than some of the nationally symbolic legacies. The differences in these trends interestingly have a similarity in with the 1890s debates of how the social is comprised. Lastly, since the start of this project, I have been interested in the interplay of mobility and regions and how the representations of place-based products feed the spaces of mobility such as airports. 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(Table QS501EW). 24.1.2015. <http://www.ons.gov.uk/> Tilastokeskus (2014). 15 vuotta täyttänyt väestö koulutusasteen, maakunnan ja kuntaryhmän mukaan kunnittain 2007-2011. 24.1.2015. <http://193.166.171.75/database/StatFin/kou/vkour/vkour_fi.asp> 172 Appendix 1. Interview questions in Finland 1. Nimi, Ikä, ammatti/koulutus? 2. Kertokaa lyhyt paikkakuntahistorianne. Mistä olette kotoisin ja asutteko tällä paikkakunnalla. Asuuko perheenne täällä? 3. Miten luonnehtisitte yhdistyksenne toimintaa? 4. Kuinka laajalla alueella teillä on toimintaa? Saako järjestönne paikalliset ihmiset mukaan tapahtumiinne? Osallistuminen ja yhdistystoiminta 5. Onko paikallistoiminnassanne jotain omaa tai omaperäistä jota ei muilla ole? Miten hyvin tunnette muiden paikkakuntien vastaavia järjestöjä? Oletteko verkostoituneet muihin järjestöihin? 6. Minkä vuoksi olette mukana järjestössä? (Aate, kaverit, toiminta) Oletteko mukana muissa järjestöissä? 7. Miten järjestöön tullaan mukaan? 8. Jos asuisitte muualla osallistuisitteko vastaavaan toimintaan jos siihen olisi siellä mahdollisuus? 9. Mille alueelle tai alueille tunnette kuuluvan? Minkä alueen koette omaksenne? 10. Miten alueenne voi määritellä? Minkälaiset asiat, paikat, maisemat tai henkilöt (ruuat, tavat) symboloivat tai edustavat aluettanne? Mitkä asiat yhdistävät ja mitkä erottavat muista? ’Alue’ 11. Mitä ajattelette identiteetistä? Mitä sana identiteetti tuo mieleen? 12. Onko alue tärkeä osa ihmisen identiteettiä? Millaiseksi koette alueellisen identiteettinne? 13. Millä tavalla Suomi jakautuu alueellisesti ja onko Suomessa selkeästi toisistaan erottuvia alueita? 14. Mitä maakunnan vaakuna tuo mieleen? Tunnetteko muita maakunnan vaakunoita? Onko maakunnan symboleilla merkitystä? 15. Onko maakunta läsnä arjessa ja käytännöissä? 16. Mikä on mielipiteenne, tunnetaanko täällä samaistuvan maakuntaan? Onko maakunnassa me-tunnetta tai maakuntalaisuutta? Maakunnat 17. Mikä merkitys keskuskaupungilla on maakunnalle? 18. Kartta Onko maakunta oikein rajattu (toiminnallisuus, tunnesiteet, kulttuuri, talous)? Onko maakuntarajoilla merkitystä? Voisiko oman maakunnan liittää johonkin toiseen maakuntaan? 19. Entä seutukunta? Onko seutukunta läheisempi kuin maakunta? 20. Oletteko seuranneet aluehallintouudistuskeskustelua? Onko teille väliä mihin hallintoalueeseen (lääni, TE-keskus, ympäristökeskus, tiepiiri) kuuluu? 21. Mitä mieltä olette kuntaliitoksista? Hyväksyisittekö oman kunnan liittämisen? 1 Appendix 1. Interview questions in Finland 22. Onko juurilla merkitystä? Haluaisitteko muuttaa pois nykyiseltä paikkakunnaltanne? Missä haluaisitte Liikkuminen ja media asua tai työskennellä ja missä ei? 23. Miten suhtaudutte matkustamiseen ja uusiin paikkoihin? Oletteko asuneet ulkomailla? 24. Miten matkustelu Suomessa tai ulkomaanmatkat vaikuttavat näkemyksiinne maakunnasta tai omasta alueestanne? 25. Mitä Sanomalehtiä luette? Minkälaisen kuvan paikallisesta lehdistöstä/ alueellisista uutisista ja valtakunnan mediasta saa alueestanne? 26. Oletteko kiinnostuneita muista kulttuureista ja kansainvälistymisestä? Jostain erityisestä? 27. Miten suhtaudutte globalisaatioon (talous, kulttuuri, tietoisuus)? Mitä se merkitsee? Ilmeneekö Globalisaatiosta valtioon globalisaatio Suomessa ja täällä? 28. Oletteko huolissanne maapallosta? Heijastuuko ”maailmanmeno” alueellenne? 29. Onko liittyminen Euroopan unioniin muuttanut suhtautumistanne Suomeen tai alueeseenne/ suomalaisuuteen, alueellisuuteen? Mitä eurooppalaisuus tarkoittaa teille? Onko eurooppalaisuus huono vai hyvä asia? 30. Mikä merkitys on valtiolla nykyään tai kansalaisuudella? Ovatko merkitykset muuttuneet? 31. Mihin aluetasoon samaistutte eniten? Kysely 32. Olisivatko keskustelu ollut samanlaista jos muut jäsenenne olisivat keskustelleet näistä asioista? 2 Appendix 2. Interview questions in England 1. Could you in turns tell your first name, age, profession, education? 2. Could you all tell your locality biography shortly? Where are you from (originally) and do you live here? Does your family still live here? 3. How would you characterize the activities of your association or group? Associations and attendance 4. In how extensive area do you operate in? Does your association get local people involved? 5. Do you have something unique in your local activities compared with other similar groups? How well do you know other similar associations? Are you networked with other organizations? 6. What are the reasons for you to take part? (Concept, community, activity) Any other organizations? 7. How do you recruit new participants? Do you have incomers? 8. If you lived somewhere else, do you think that you would participate in corresponding activity if there was a chance for that? 9. Into which geographical area or areas do you feel you belong to or attached to? Why? 10. How would you define your area? What kind of things, places, landscapes, conventions or people symbolize and represent your area? (What things combine or disassociate from others?) What do you ’’Area’ appreciate the most in your region? 11. What do you think of the word ‘identity’, what does it in your opinion mean? 12. Are places and regions integral parts of your identity? Does your regional identity define everyday life? 13. How would you divide England into regions? Are there distinctive regions or regional cultures? 14. What does this flag represent to you? Are regional symbols important? Do you recognize the other flags? 15. Is the County present in your daily lives? (Or is it a product of media and administration?) Regions / Counties 16. What is your opinion, is here a clear attachment to counties and regions? Does Devon /Cornwall have a sense of community or a we? 17. What do you think about the South West Region? Have you been in contact with the RDA? Is there a centre for the region? 18. Is the county demarcated properly (functionality, cultural attachments, economy)? Do county or regional borders have a meaning? Could Devon or Cornwall be annexed to some other region? MAP 19. Is the district closer to you than the county? Do you think that districts as local units are stable (merging)? 20. Is it meaningful to you to have roots in some place? What is your relation to Celtic ideas? Do you see yourselves as Celt? Mobility and media 21. Of all the places in the world, where would you like to live? Where you would not want to live in? 22. Have you lived abroad and do you like travelling and seeing new places? 23. Does travelling effect on your views on your locality or region? What kind of feelings does coming back home invoke? 24. What newspapers do you read? Do you think you get a good coverage of the region or locality? 25. Do you think your region is tolerant and liberal towards foreigners? Are there any ‘global spaces’? 1 Appendix 2. Interview questions in England 26. What do you think about or how do you see globalization (economy, culture, awareness)? Globalization and states What does it mean? How does globalization appear in the UK, in different regions? 27. Are you worried about the Earth? Do global issues reflect in your daily lives? 28. Do you see yourselves as a European? Have the effects of the membership in the European Union influenced your territorial identity? 29. How would you see the meaning of the state nowadays? Which one do you prefer English or British? 30. To which areal level do you identify the most? MAP 31. Do you think that the discussion would had been similar if other members of your group would have discussed these issues? 2 Appendix 3. Interview questions with regional actors in Päijät-Häme 1. Nimi, Ikä, koulutus? Organisaatio ja 2. Kertokaa paikkakuntahistorianne lyhyesti? tausta 3. Miten luonnehtisitte organisaationne toimintaa? 4. Miten alueen ihmiset tuntevat organisaatioon? 5. Mille alueelle tai alueille tunnette kuuluvan? Minkä alueen koette omaksenne? 6. Miten alueenne voi määritellä? Minkälaiset paikat, maisemat tai henkilöt symboloivat tai edustavat aluettanne? ’Alue’ 7. Voisitteko kuvitella kehittävänne jotain muuta aluetta? 8. Millä tavalla Suomi jakautuu alueellisesti ja onko Suomessa selkeästi toisistaan erottuvia alueita? 9. Mitä Päijät-Hämeen vaakuna tuo mieleen? 10. Onko mielestänne Päijät-Häme asukkaiden maakunta? Onko päijäthämäläisyys vakiintunut termi? Onko kulttuurisilla tekijöillä ja tunnesiteillä sijaa nykypäivän aluekehittämisessä? Maakunnta 11. Millaiseksi arvioit maakuntien merkityksen alueina? Muuttuko maakuntien rooli? 12. Jos maakuntaa ajattelee kulttuurisesti, niin kuuluuko Päijät-Hämeeseen oikeat kunnat? Voisiko maakunta olla suurempi kokonaisuus kuin se nyt on? 13. Mikä merkitys Lahdella on Päijät-Hämeelle? 14. Milla tavalla edustuksellisuus ja kansainvaltaisuus maakuntien osalta toimivat? 15. Mitä vaikutuksia aluehallinnon uudistamisella on Päijät-Hämeeseen tai Hämeeseen? Ja olivatko nämä muutokset tarpeellisia? 16. Mitä konkreettisia odotuksia uudistuksesta on? 17. Olisiko maakuntia pitänyt rajata uudelleen? 18. Usein puhutaan alueiden välisestä kilpailusta, miten alueiden välinen kilpailu tulisi ymmärtää? 19. Tulisiko Päijät-Hämeen olla kansainvälisempi? 20. Aluehallinto Miten Suomen liittyminen Euroopan unioniin muutti maakuntien asemaa valtakunnan aluejärjestelmässä? 21. EU:n koheesiopolitiikassa on korostettu alueellisen identiteetin merkitystä alueiden kehityksen kannalta. Millaiseksi arvioitte identiteetin merkityksen tämän päivän globalisoituvassa maailmassa? 22. Mitä alueellinen identiteetti mielestänne tarkoittaa? Mistä se koostuu? 23. Onko se alueiden vai ihmisten identiteetti vai voiko näitä erottaa? 24. Millaiset seikat tai tekijät voivat saada aikaan alueellista identiteettiä tai ylläpitää sitä? 25. Onko (Päijät)-Häme panostanut identiteetti-kysymyksiin? Kuuluuko tämä aluekehittäjän rooliin? 1 Appendix 4 Appendix 4. The birth places of the focus group participants in Finland and the boundaries of provinces. 1 Appendix 5 Appendix 5. The birth places of the focus group participants in England and the boundaries of ceremonial counties. 1 1 Appendix 6. Places that are mentioned in the text in and around Finland. Appendix 6 Appendix 7 Appendix 7. Places that are mentioned in the text in England. 1

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Vainikka, J. (2015) Identities and regions: Exploring spatial narratives, legacies and practices with civic organizations in England and Finland. Nordia Geographical Publications 44(3): 1-172.

Vainikka, J. (2015) Identities and regions: Exploring spatial narratives, legacies and practices with civic organizations in England and Finland. Nordia Geographical Publications 44(3): 1-172.

Vainikka, J. (2015) Identities and regions: Exploring spatial narratives, legacies and practices with civic organizations in England and Finland. Nordia Geographical Publications 44(3): 1-172.

Vainikka, J. (2015) Identities and regions: Exploring spatial narratives, legacies and practices with civic organizations in England and Finland. Nordia Geographical Publications 44(3): 1-172.

Vainikka, J. (2015) Identities and regions: Exploring spatial narratives, legacies and practices with civic organizations in England and Finland. Nordia Geographical Publications 44(3): 1-172.

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