ABSTRACT
This is a photo of the outside of a typical Finnish sauna. 1 The sauna is located in Jyv ä skyl ä , Finland. Saunas are an integral part of Finnish culture, and a place to socialize as a family, do business, and relax. Saunas date back hundreds of years in Finland. In a nation with roughly 5 million people, there are more than 2 million saunas, going to show just how significant the sauna is to the Finnish people. When Stephen first moved to Finland, he had to learn very quickly about Finnish sauna culture. He had to culturally adapt to this one element of Finnish life. Other scholars have commented on the need to understand and adapt to Finnish sauna life. Edelsward (1991) described how the sauna is an important part of becoming Finnish, learning about Finnish culture,
Chapter Outline
and being accepted by many Finns. Scholars of cultural adaptation (Croucher, 2008; Kim, 2001; Kramer, 2003) have asserted some important elements of adapting to a new culture include learning about the culture and being accepted by the host culture. When considering the relationship between the Finnish sauna and adapting to Finnish culture, a researcher could ask various questions: 1) how does one learn culturally appropriate communication behaviors related to the Finnish sauna? 2) how does one truly experience a Finnish sauna? (a performance of communication question), and 3) how does one experience Finnish culture through a Finnish sauna? Among the methods one could use to approach this research are: interviews, statistics, and content analysis. The method explored in Chapter 10 is ethnography.
