Constitutional Landmarks: Revered Sites of South-West Finnish Folklore and Social Space-Making

Finnish folklore archives contain a wealth of information about revered or sacred sites of folk belief, the locations of which have not been thoroughly studied before. This article, based on the locations and lore of 120 revered sites in south-west Finland, explores how vernacular rituals, beliefs, and legends about revered places have been used performatively by social groups to claim and reclaim space as well as to maintain social and moral order. The article proposes that using revered sites in such performative space-making grants authority and constitutional power to the performances. Old village maps from south-west Finland reveal that the locations of revered natural sites often coincide with community boundaries and that these sites have been used by corresponding social groups to signal their boundaries to each other, as well as to contest each other’s space. They have also been used for internal contestation of the social order within a society by subgroups, especially the young.