Scribd
Upload
106 views2 pages

Lauri Honko - Wikipedia

Lauri Honko was a Finnish professor of folklore studies and comparative religion. He studied under Martti Haavio and received his doctorate in 1959 for his dissertation on the primitive explanation of disease. Honko analyzed folk traditions from a global perspective and developed new methodologies for studying folklore. He became a professor at the University of Turku and headed the Nordic Institute of Folklore, making significant contributions to the fields of folklore studies and comparative religion.

Uploaded by

Yatin Batra
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
106 views2 pages

Lauri Honko - Wikipedia

Lauri Honko was a Finnish professor of folklore studies and comparative religion. He studied under Martti Haavio and received his doctorate in 1959 for his dissertation on the primitive explanation of disease. Honko analyzed folk traditions from a global perspective and developed new methodologies for studying folklore. He became a professor at the University of Turku and headed the Nordic Institute of Folklore, making significant contributions to the fields of folklore studies and comparative religion.

Uploaded by

Yatin Batra
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Lauri Honko

Lauri Olavi Honko (born in Hanko 6 March 1932, died in Turku 15 July
2002) was a Finnish professor of folklore studies and comparative religion.

Life and work


Honko was a disciple of Martti Haavio. His 1959 doctoral dissertation at the
University of Helsinki was titled Krankheitsprojektile. Untersuchung über
eine urtümliche Krankheitserklärung (Disease Projectiles: A Study of the
Primitive Explanation of Disease) and developed a special typology for the
analysis of ethnographic data in folk medicine. Here he put the Finnish folk
tradition explanation of illness and healing into a global perspective and
found distinct features and differences in geographical regions.

Honko's seminal work, Geisterglaube in Ingermanland (Belief in Spirits in


Ingria) was very influential for Finnish folklorists because it set apart the old
and new science of religion. In this work he used new insights from social
Lauri Honko in his student years,
anthropology, phenomenology of religion, social psychology and sociology.
1955.
Honko also interpreted the experience of guardian spirits in Ingrian peasant
society by developing a genre-analytic and role-model theory.

In Geisterglaube in Ingermanland he classified rituals into three main categories: rites of passage, calendrical
rites, and crisis rites. Honko even stresses the importance of analyzing rituals within cultural context and the
need to differentiate between small-scale and complex systems of belief.

In 1961 Honko became an assistant professor in folklore studies and comparative religion. In 1963 he was an
associate professor in both subjects at the University of Turku. In 1971 he received a special seat. In 1996 he was
named professor emeritus.

Lauri Honko also became the head of the Nordic Institute of Folklore (NIF) in Turku in 1972. From 1974 to 1989
he was president of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research and then also the editor of Folklore
Fellows’ Communications. He was the editor of Temenos from 1965 to 1969 and from 1975 to 1990, of NIF
Newsletters from 1972 onwards, and of Studia Fennica from 1981 to 1989.

During the 1980s and 1970s, Honko compared popular traditions and developed a research methodology.

Bibliography
Krankheitsprojektile: Untersuchung über eine urtümliche Krankheitserklärung. Helsinki 1959. (Folklore
Fellows' communications. 178.)
Geisterglaube in Ingermanland. Helsinki 1962. (Folklore Fellows' communications, 185.)
Textualising the Siri epic. Helsinki 1998. (Folklore Fellows' communications, 264. Vol. 118.)

Contributions
Siikala, Anna-Leena: Honko, Lauri. In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Vol. 6 (1990), Sp. 1236-1239.

Relevant literature
Honko, Lauri. 2013. Theoretical Milestones: Selected Writings of Lauri Honko. Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia,
Academia Scientiarum Fennica.

External links
From May 2003 (https://web.archive.org/web/20070927002643/http://www.folklorefellows.fi/netw/ffn24/lauri_h
onko.html)
Anttonen, Veikko. "Comparative Religion at the University of Turku and the University of Helsinki: a Brief
Survey." (https://web.archive.org/web/20070823101157/http://www.hum.utu.fi/oppiaineet/uskontotiede/en/res
earch/history/) Department of Comparative Religion. University of Turku.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lauri_Honko&oldid=1133138334"

You might also like