14. Nostalgia as a Perspective on Past Dance Culture in Finland

This chapter bases its study on an archive of manuscripts collected by the National Museum of Finland, featuring the recollections of elderly people about their dancing habits earlier in life. It explores the organic beginnings of pavilion dances and the way rural working-class people adopted and arranged these as an expression of a new, autonomous youth culture, a new romantic idea of marriage, and a new kind of leisure culture, or popular culture. Besides nostalgia, which can be considered the dominant discourse defining much of the research subject under ethnological inquiry, the study also reveals an alternative and complementary discourse of cultural heritage.