ABSTRACT
Forests are regarded as culturally and economically significant emblems of Finnishness, especially in public speech. Finns have been described as having “a special relation to the forests and nature,” and the Finnish national identities, identity politics and society/space relations have been constructed, expressed and renewed through representations of forests. For example, the seemingly untouched lake-and-forest landscape has been at the very core of the Finnish national imagery for over 150 years despite the extensive and ongoing commercial exploitation of forests.
In the chapter, we analyse the multi-layered interplay between the politics of the past, nation-space and forest environments, and examine the ways in which Northern forests are utilised and represented in the contemporary institutional heritagisation practices in Finland. We concentrate on the Wiki-Inventory for Living Heritage (WLH, 2016–), an open-access participatory inventory platform administrated by the Finnish Heritage Agency. The WLH is a part of the Finnish implementation of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. We ask 1) how and why is a nation-state and/or nationality spatialised in forests in the heritagisation processes?; and 2) what kinds of (understandings of) temporal dimensions are being utilised and produced, and which political narratives do they serve?
We suggest that the relations between heritagisation and forests are brought forth through three inseparable narratives that interrelate the forest space, economic networks, people's bodies and heritagised understandings of Finnishness. These narratives perform 1) “mythic-ness,” 2) “modernity,” and 3) “new spiritual” and “well-being” dimensions of forests. Drawing from the studies on critical heritage, landscapes and banal nationalism, we claim that forest-related heritage practices constantly produce social and spatial hierarchies of nations, functioning also as vehicles for exclusion, oppression and cultural elitism. Furthermore, our study reveals that the intertwining of heritage and politics creates new contexts and spatialities in which the mundane forms of national identities and human-environmental relations are being utilised, reshaped and reinforced by the transnational flows of neoliberal meaning-making.
