How Finnish Culture Presents Itself - A Content Analysis of Finland: a cultural encyclopedia

Abstract

Finland has experienced many economic miracles in its time that have raised it from the status of a remote undeveloped country to that of one of the most affluent societies in the world, particularly in the past half century. Its history was characterized by cultural and political tensions for centuries, especially in the 19th and 20th ones. Thus the fact that national pride goes hand in hand with identity-searching is the particular cultural phenomenon on which this paper is initiated and developed. This paper is an attempt to examine how Finnish culture is presented from the native perspective, through a content analysis of a guidebook written by Finnish writers, that is, Finland: a cultural encyclopedia (1997). Given the alliance of all the keywords and their contents, both texts and illustrations that have defined Finnish culture, a culture that is both ancient and in its prime, are extensively and intensively analysed.

On the basis of the Onion Model of culture, the contents of all keywords, including both texts and illustrations, are carefully identified, compared, and evaluated. It is found after the quantitative analysis that “national figures” and “artistic expressions” are the two most emphasized cultural elements presented, a factor related to Finnish nationalism. Artistic expressions as “art culture” of varied forms, completed by national writers and artists with lofty ideals, have inspired the cultural consciousness of all Finns. Qualitative analysis leads to the conclusion that in the material there is not much which could not become relevant to national sentiments. The content and vocabulary of Finnish culture have been chosen primarily with this end in view. National sentiments define “culture” as a carrier and emphasize that national heroes and artistic expressions are the dominating factors in the process of Finnish nationalism and national identity construction.