The marginalised and their local communities: thinking about the middle ground in Finnish History by Katariina Parhi

The aim to highlight marginalised voices is nowadays a standard feature in historical research. While bringing these voices to the fore will continue to be important, I have become increasingly intrigued by the group of people caught between the marginalising power holders and the marginalised. In other words, I have become interested in the middle ground, history from the middle rather than history from below. My recent article in Social History considers this overlooked category in relation to the specific Finnish context of correctional labour facilities.

What Might a History of the Middle Look Like?

By history from the middle, I mean people who were in contact with the marginalised, who experienced living with them and who took part in the marginalisation process, but who did not create the marginalising structures, unlike legislators and politicians, and who did not hold important decision-making positions unlike psychiatrists or provincial government officials.

For the past few years, I have researched the history of Finnish correctional labour facilities, which were big farms aimed at solving specific social problems. Individuals were not detained there because of crimes, although crime prevention was one of the reasons for their existence. While the facilities were meant to be a deterrent, they were also a form of social care, especially over time. Based on administrative detention, individuals could be institutionalised if they were unable to pay back the poor relief they had received (from 1923 onwards) or if they did not behave in an expected way in a municipal home (1923); this meant that the staff did not get on with the person being cared for. Later, one could also be institutionalised for vagrancy (1937) and non-payment of child support (1949), although the latter was an already common reason for ending up in the facility in previous decades.

These categories for confinement were defined in legislation that changed over time. I was curious to find out how locals applied the legislation – how they interpreted these categories based on needs they had and if the needs looked different than those defined in the articles of law. I got the opportunity to learn about local decision-making in my home region after finding over one thousand letters from the 1920s until the 1970s in the local archive. Northern Finland, like Eastern Finland, is known as poorer than the rest of the country and services developed slower than in southern parts, so I assumed that local decision-making there might look different from the reality of legislators.

In most of the letters, members of the social boards of the municipalities contacted the director of the correctional labour facility and explained the reasons for their wish to send someone there. In my interpretation, the social boards operated as mediators of the everyday experiences of neighbours, family members, employees and inmates of institutions – the middle level of a marginalisation process. As I had assumed, the poor north adapted the laws to cope with local challenges, such as inadequate mental health services. While the correctional labour facility system was known to be arbitrary at times and criticised even by contemporaries, the letters also revealed the benefits of flexibility of administrative decision-making in solving social problems, including domestic violence and child abuse. More often than not these problems were in connection to alcohol abuse.

Marginalisation and Mediating the Middle Ground

I summarise my experience of researching the letters and the expressed local justifications for detainment in three observations. First, a closer look at marginalisation processes can truly reveal differences in comparison to top-down perspective of laws. In this case, I realised that the facilities were not always used as institutions of correction but rather as a repository for those who could not be placed in elsewhere. Thus, confining people in the correctional labour facility was in correlation with the lack of access to other health and social services.

My second observation is related to methodological choices in analysing the data. There are many ethical conflicts of representation in research on local decision-making. For example, if one emphasises how confinement restricted individual freedom and caused harm to a man who had already experienced hardship in his life, it is easy to overlook how the legislation was intended to improve children’s rights. Or if one focuses solely on how administrative detention could be an arbitrary means to confine someone, less attention may be paid to how locals used it to separate family members in circumstances where their safety and physical integrity could not be ensured. Focusing on the surrounding community of the marginalised complicates ethical representation of them because the surrounding community mediates unfavourable characteristics. It requires constant balancing to decide whose voices count and when.

Third, despite the ethical challenges, to understand the complexity of social problems, it is essential to study local level reactions to the marginalised beside the marginalised voices themselves. Only this way can we truly understand processes of marginalisation and the local conditions in which the processes occur. While the top-down perspective of politicians and legislators is important, the views of ordinary citizens enable interpreting abstract definitions into practical situations for which solutions were sought. Opening up local thinking also helps us to be more understanding of the moral concepts of each era. For example, the letters I studied showed how even the strongest moral arguments were often based on the lack of money in poor municipalities.

My grandfather, long since deceased, used to be a member of a local social board in my home region. When I think of history from the middle, I think of him, a father of seven children in a small village. He was raised in poverty and like many other Finns of his time, he spent his early adulthood in war. His children remember how my grandfather sometimes complained about how ungrateful his position of trust was, how he knew too much about other people’s business and how the villagers sometimes came all the way to his home to complain about their lives and the decisions made by the board. His experience reminds us that the exercise of power is not always easy and pleasing to the user.

 

Katariina Parhi is postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Council of Finland’s Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences in Tampere University, Finland.

 

Images from Finna.fi