Voices of Folklore

In this #FinallyFriday episode, host Matilda Siebrecht dives into the world of folklore with guests Colleen Deatherage and Ieva Pīgozne. Colleen, from the University of Alberta, combines her background in healthcare and social work with her expertise as a folklorist to explore how folklore aids in meaning-making, especially through material culture like textiles. Ieva, based at the Institute of Latvian History, is a dress historian whose work bridges archaeology and cultural anthropology to uncover the social and symbolic meanings of traditional dress and folklore.

The guests explore the complexities of interpreting folklore, noting how historical biases and modern politics shape its study. Ieva warns of folklore’s misuse in nationalist agendas, while Colleen highlights the need for caution in collecting and analyzing folklore to ensure respectful and accurate representation. They discuss overlaps with disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, underscoring folklore’s role in giving voice to marginalized histories.

Both share compelling examples: Ieva recounts insights gained from reenactment projects and folklore texts explaining archaeological anomalies, while Colleen describes using historical textiles to support patients’ legacy-making in modern healthcare. Their projects reflect the versatility of folklore in understanding human experiences across time.

This episode concludes the #FinallyFriday podcast series. The podcast’s format will evolve, but it remains a vital platform for exploring cultural heritage.

Transcript

Matilda: Hello and welcome to #FinallyFriday. My name is Matilda Siebrecht, and today I am joined by two specialists from our EXARC community focussing on folklore. 

Colleen Deatherage is based in Canada at the University of Alberta, St. Stephen's College. Having retrained as a folklorist in her doctorate, she combines that training with her experience in healthcare and social work to investigate the role of folklore in both the present and the past. Her current work focuses on meaning-making and how that is represented in material culture, with a particular interest in textiles and domestic arts lore. 

Ieva Pīgozne is a dress historian based in Latvia, where her current research at the Institute of Latvian History focusses on traditional dress of the 18th and 19th century. She completed a PhD in archaeology, where her thesis looked at colours and their meanings in 3rd to the 13th century Baltic dress. She has also always been interested in the way that cultural history and social anthropology can use folklore as a source for better understanding past material culture. 
 
So welcome both. Thank you so much for joining me today. I have a very quick question to start you off, which might seem quite simple, but I guess might have a very complicated answer. So folklore as a topic is quite a broad topic. So perhaps a good place to start would be by asking how you personally would define folklore. Maybe Ieva, you'd like to go first? 

Ieva: That's a very broad topic and there are so many definitions, but I would say that it's the whole body of customs and understanding of how life was and how it is for former people, the stories they tell, the things they believe in, and so on. 

Matilda: Fair enough. That's a lot simpler than I was expecting the answer to be. Would you agree, Colleen? 

Colleen: I think so, and to that I would add that it's really about the informal parts of culture and how we communicate that. So, a lot of my work, even though I am looking at the historical record, I'm also working a lot on how people use folklore to communicate in the present. 

Matilda: So it's one of those things that is the perfect link, one might argue, between the past and the present in that respect. 

Colleen: I would, yes.

Matilda: Sounds good. Then the perfect topic for this podcast. So how did you both become involved in this study of folklore? What was it that first drew you to it? 

Ieva: Well, as to me, I grew up with a lot of folklore. I grew up in a family who did lots of folklore, like singing and telling tales and using beliefs and sayings and proverbs in everyday life - and still does. So I've been in all that from very early on, but at the same time, I didn't study it as a topic of my research and only when I came to the university and I learned much more about folklore and its theoretical part, then I became interested in it as a subject of research. 

Colleen: Ieva, you couldn't see it, but I was nodding. I thought it was the same. I think it's just a part of all of our lives and our culture, even if we don't see it. I came to it really late. I didn't even know folklore was an academic discipline. I actually just associated it with, like, folktales more and so I actually went into my doctorate to study spirituality, and sort of how non-spiritual, non-religious people do things that look like spiritual practices when they're dealing with health precarity because of my work in hospital social work. I was looking at all these terms like ancestral knowledge and how people, you know, maybe they would have a cancer diagnosis, and the first thing they would want is like the pie that their grandma used to make, or something like that. And so, coincidentally, I heard Marion Bowman, who was the, maybe even at the time, she was the head of the Folklore Society in the UK. She was in an interview on the Religious Studies Project podcast, and she was talking about folklore, and I literally had to pull my car over, because I was like, oh my gosh, there's a whole bunch of people who like this stuff. So as soon as I had the name, then I knew what I was looking for. So I ended up meeting Natalie Kononenko, who's the Slavic folklorist at the University of Alberta at that time. She agreed to take me on and give me a crash course in all things folklore. That was in 2017 or 2016. And so for three years, I was immersed in this really intensive study with her and yeah, I owe her a lot for taking me on and being so generous with her knowledge when I literally didn't even know it was a discipline. 

Matilda: So Ieva, you mentioned that you actually did sort of study it as a discipline. Is it more of a standalone topic, would you say, in, for example, European countries or Baltic countries? Because Colleen, you mentioned that you also were kind of mentored by someone from that region as well. Is it very regional in that respect, the sort of depth of folklore and how seriously it's taken academically? 

Ieva: Well, I would say that yes, our Baltic situation is quite special. First of all, maybe because we have lots of folkloric material that is gathered and stored in the archives. For example, the Latvian Folklore Archives store over 3 million units, and that's really one of the biggest bodies of folkloric material in the world, although our population is less than 3 million,

it's half of it. We have lots of things that have been collected. At the same time, our history is that the Latvian people used to be the local, the simple, the uneducated and so on. And we had lots of other people coming here, being the upper classes, but not Latvians. So the Latvians were very conservative, and they had their knowledge in families, in tribes probably in the beginning, that was passed on in this oral tradition and it survived for much longer time than probably many other places in Europe. And therefore there was very much to collect when people started to collect it in the18th,19th and 20th century. So probably all this goes together in that, yes, it's very popular here to use folklore. Like Colleen says, nobody is so much aware that they really do that, but they do that. We not only use it in daily life, we also study it. And there is a very strong tradition of studying folklore in Latvia. It's close to 150 years and I would say it has come quite far. So we have lots of good studies that we can base our research on now as well. 

Matilda: Do you want to add anything, Colleen? 

Colleen: Well, I was really just enjoying listening to Ieva, actually. I think that's one of the things in Western Canada we are really missing out on. Like I said, I didn't even know it was an academic discipline and I have been to three different Canadian institutions and none of them had a folklore department or folklore studies program. And then as I got more involved in the folklore community, I started realising you actually have to go into history or English to actually study it. It's sort of an adjunct to other disciplines. For me, I went into a spiritually-based…, like, it's a doctorate of ministry. I wanted to study spirituality. I didn't have any clue that folklore had anything to do with that in a non-pejorative way. Sometimes people will think all spirituality and all spiritual practices are fictitious and kind of that becomes sort of a pejorative for them. But it was really exciting to me to just get to marry those things. But I think, Ieva, it's exactly like you say, it's such a part of our lives in all these different ways and I think it's really cool that in Latvia it's acknowledged as this academic place of investigation as well as this lived place of investigation. A little bit in North America we think we're beyond folklore and we're definitely not. 

Ieva: But that's the exciting part, that you can find lots of ancient knowledge still in use. And that's really exciting for a researcher when you see that, oh my goodness, there's using sayings that really make sense only if you think about archaeology. 

Colleen: I agree. I think that's my favourite thing for my part where, like I was saying, how people have comfort in these family traditions that carry across generations and how important that is to us, to our identity, to our culture and to understanding ourselves. 

Ieva: Well, I have a very simple but interesting example. One of the beliefs we have is ‘Do not hit the spoon against the side of the pot and if you do so, you're going to be starving’. In modern days it doesn't make any sense because we all have metal pots, but if you think of the first pots that used to be ceramic pots, then it suddenly starts making sense. There are so many interesting things that you can discover like that. 

Matilda: And in terms of the kind of overlap then between folklore and sort of archaeology and cultural heritage, what sort of evidence can folklore actually provide, for example, for experimental archaeologists or for heritage interpreters or that sort of thing? What has your experience with that been? 

Ieva: Well, we in Latvia have one very, very famous example, and that is an archaeologist who is deceased now, Jānis Apals, and in the 1960s, he discovered there were some kinds of logs under the water in some of the lakes in Latvia. And he started to listen to what people living in the area around those lakes were telling. And then he discovered that there were tales about castles that had been sinking because of lots of flooding or lots of rain. And then he dived in the lakes and he found ten lakes with remains of lake castles or lake dwellings. And one of them has been reconstructed and that's one of the biggest archaeological reconstruction projects that we have in Latvia. So it's literally something like finding Troy according to the folkloric material. 

Colleen: That's amazing!

Matilda: Which you could argue finding Troy was also sort of based on folklore, I suppose, yeah, really interesting!

Ieva: And that dwelling dates back to the 9th century, so we can see that those stories have been living on for a very long time. 

Colleen: That's part of it, too. I think that sometimes we can dismiss those tales, you know, as part of, I think, Ieva, you were kind of talking about this, it's just the rural peasant person, didn't know anything. It's just part of their stories and we sort of forget that they may actually be signposts to other parts of our history… or like that find was because he was listening to the people of the area and was able to uncover this really important part of Latvian history. 

Ieva: I would say that the folkloric material explains a lot of things that we find in archaeological material, but don't have anyone to talk about it, because those people are gone and have been gone for a very long time. And suddenly it gives the voice to those people, because if you read through lots of folkloric material, there is a big chance that you're going to find at least something that's going to cast more light on that, and you're going to understand it better. 

Colleen: I think so. And then what I like too is on the other side where we have, say, an archaeological record. One of the areas I've really enjoyed working in is really old textiles. That's where the experimental archaeology part comes in for me, that we don't have a written record of some of these really ancient finds and we don't know what the people were thinking and feeling. But when you engage in the experimental archaeology part and you're doing some recreating or you're just really engaging with a parallel practice - because of course we don't necessarily know exactly what people were doing or how - we can extrapolate how people were doing it. There's certain things we can extrapolate in terms of weaving cloth, because we know weaving has to be done a certain way for it to work, or it just won't work and we have enough finds related to looms and textile fragments. Being grounded in folklore gives us an opportunity to do that perspective-taking. Like for me, the experimental archaeology part isn't the recreation so much of the actual material as the recreation of the experience. And then what can I learn about what life might have been like for those people at that particular point in time? And then what does that mean for us today? Like how does that carry forward through to the present? 

Ieva: I would agree, because I think that it sort of brings us closer to what people were thinking. Not only what they were doing. 

Colleen: Yeah, that's what I think too. 

Matilda: So in terms of telling the story of the people behind it and how they were thinking about things and how they were feeling about the things that they were doing, would you say that folklore is often associated - I'm just thinking back to what you said at the beginning, Ieva, in terms of, for example, in Latvia, that it was very much the sort of downtrodden groups and the sort of lower classes, the poorer folk where the folklore was the richest, almost? Would you say that that's often the case, that it's usually associated with more kind of minority groups, or how do you see that working in the past and in the present?

Ieva: Well, I would say that folklore affects and is created by every single person of a society. As to our traditional folklore, it was mostly preserved by these poorer people because they were the only ones who survived after all the invasions. The local higher society was just killed and therefore these legends that usually belong to the higher society didn't survive. We have just very, very few examples that have been collected. But everyday life of the peasants, however, has been documented in folklore like nothing else. We have lots and lots of information about that. 

Colleen: And, you know Matilda, that's where the term really came from, right? It was this sort of romanticization of the common person and the folk, and that they were to be pejorative about it, more primitive, and therefore closer to the original essence of humanity, and closer, therefore, to the Garden of Eden…

Ieva: The safekeepers of the tradition, yeah… 

Colleen: That's exactly it, like they were the guardians of the tradition and guardians of this pure culture and so there was this real romanticization that really was the origin story of folklore as a discipline and something to be gathered and collected. 

Ieva: Yeah, but as we agree that folklore belongs to every member of the society, actually, and there is probably nobody in the world who lives without folklore, even if they don't know that. 

Colleen: Absolutely and wouldn't it be interesting to go back and collect the lore of the people who thought that they were above folklore? I just think about the more aristocratic people who weren’t engaging in this kind of pastoralization, romanticization of the folk, thinking that somehow this was something outside of their experience, that they didn't have folklore. These other poor people had folklore... 

Ieva: Of course, the evidence has always been collected by certain people, and these people influence the evidence and how they interpret it, because they were the first ones, and what they collected and what they chose not to collect. That plays an important role in all that. At the same time, there is probably no place in the world where the folklore was started to be collected by people who are not educated and not interested in that. Those who were interested in that, they were educated and they were the higher society. That's how it worked in the very beginning. Even today, those who are collecting folklore are the scholars, not everyday people. 

Colleen: The formalised collectors are definitely, yeah... I think especially historically… a lot of my work is around the British Isles and I'll tell you the Victorians have a lot to answer for with how they collected it. The Grimm's as well, right? There's so much discourse around fairy tale lore and the collection of that particular type of lore and how that was used as part of a nationalist agenda. That's always one thing I worry about because I am looking at meaning-making and how that impacts identity and then how we turn that into material culture. I'm always worried about, exactly like you're saying, Ieva, that ultimately there's almost like a power difference… we still do collect certain types of lore and not other types of lore and we have to be really conscious of our power as people in the academy who are representing other people's stories. We're not neutral in our engagement with it. And that's one thing where I see sometimes folklore has actually been almost problematic really, like where it's been used for those nationalist aims. Right now I think we're really seeing a resurgence of folklore and symbolism as part of that kind of blood and soil... pure blood nonsense that is sort of in that alt-right white supremacist frame. It's been fascinating to dive into studying that a little bit, but also it's kind of disappointing, actually, that we're not doing better than the Victorians in that regard. 

Ieva: I can say the same because I have been studying lots of folk costumes, which are based on historical clothing and that is also sort of a tradition, but at the same time, it's so much politics. We can see that folklore and also folk costumes are very powerful things, which mean a lot of things for people. And therefore, they are very good to be used for any kinds of purposes. And if your purposes are political, then of course you find it very easy and useful to use it. Therefore we have to be very careful when we are reading what people have written about it. I would always try to look behind everything that's been written about it, just to look at those folklore units that have been collected and to try to understand what's in there, myself, with the question: what were they doing, thinking, saying, and so on. Not with what sense it makes to me today or in what way it can be used today, because that comes only after that. 

Colleen: There's so many parallels with archaeology in this regard as well and just as we're saying that you have to be really careful about what you're reinforcing. Even some traditions and things that can seem really benign… then you find out that it's come from kind of a dark place. When there's discourse about higher education, archaeology, folklore, sociology, all of these disciplines that maybe aren't very clear to a person who's not working in that field, it could seem like it's kind of frivolous. I think about fairy tale lore. So a perfect example for me with fairy tale lore, I really didn't know much about it and to be honest, even as a folklorist, I was a little bit dismissive until I started learning more about it and I started learning about the way nationalism is reinforced through the collection of fairy tales and the repeating of fairy tales and looked at all the bigger political things, just as you're saying, Ieva, with costumes as well, it can be really easy to be dismissive or uncautious about collecting and transmitting lore. The analysis piece is super, super important, partly just so that we have some language for the conversations that we need to have around it. Say, something like Grimm fairy tales, just because they had a nationalist kind of lens doesn't mean no one should ever repeat a fairy tale again, but especially as academics, it's important for us to always be mindful of when we're engaging with any of those texts. 

Matilda: You mentioned that it's easy to be uncautious about collecting lore and interpreting lore as well, perhaps? What kind of caution do you have to take, how careful do you have to be about collecting and interpreting lore?

Colleen: There's two sides to it. There's both the concern of being the outsider, observing a community that's not your own… there's always concerns about appropriation and objectification and making sure that you're really clear about your perspective and what you're there to do. The other side of it, especially around interpretation, is, again, knowing your positionality and your social location and how that's going to inform the lens that you're viewing your interpretation through. 

Ieva: I can only add that I'm always paying attention to how many sources there are telling the thing that I'm interested in. For example, if there is a bunch of sources from different genres of folklore mentioning the same thing, I'm pretty sure they know what they're talking about. But if it's a very rare example and it's a very big exception… It's the same as with a very exceptional find of archaeology. You  have to be cautious making decisions or interpretations if that's something typical of the time of the people who lived there. There are, for example, some very rare texts in Latvia where we can find European bison. We know that they went extinct in the 16th century and they were living in flocks up to the 13th century and they were hunted then. And then we know that probably these songs are okay to be just a few because that was a very long time ago and it's okay that they didn't survive in many examples. But if you have something that you can not prove in any other way, like here in biology, you have to be very cautious.

Matilda: So it's sort of essential to know the context of it, it can't be interpreted alone?

Ieva: Well, you can always try!  

Colleen: I thought you made such a good point because part of it is that about, say, family lore, there might be some lore about a community within a family that you don't necessarily find echoes of in other places…. Or circumstance, you might have a circumstance where the community says ‘this happened on this day’, but the historical records says something else. I would never want to be in a position where you're telling someone that what they're recording or reporting isn't accurate, because I'm privileging the historical record over the vernacular record. But at the same time, if I were writing a paper on it, I would want to be sure to include that this is this personal lore or community lore, but this is what the historical record says. Unless there was a potential reason for the difference or discrepancy, I don't think I would want to interpret a reason for that or or even I would just put those two things out there that this is the one thing and this is the other, because you never want to disrespect or minimise the folklore. That's what we're here to do. You don't need it to be verified by the historical record, but if there's a discrepancy, you don't want to make it look like you are unaware of that at the same time. So, I feel like it's treading a very fine line to be sure that you're respectful. People are gifting you with a story, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. You never would want to be disrespectful, but you also don't want to seem unaware of maybe a historical context.  

Matilda: The things that you're saying remind me a lot of…  in a lot of my work, I had to read up a lot on ethnographies and ethnographic histories and that side of anthropology, archaeological research. It does sound very similar. Is there a lot of overlap? What would you say would be the difference between, I guess, collecting folklore and potentially ethno-historical analysis, or is it very similar? 

Ieva: I would say they're very close and mostly they are. For example, in Latvia we have so many similar stories collected by different institutions and then they are stored in different institutions and one of them are called folklore and the others are called ethnological material, but they are the same.   

Colleen: I totally agree that there's more similar than difference. Ethno-history, I guess, would cleave more tightly to the historical record where, like we're talking about folklore can deviate from the historical record. I mean - this is way out in left field - if there's some community lore around something to do with the crowning of Queen Victoria and the whole community has the timeline wrong, you wouldn't dismiss that. You would say it doesn't match the historical record, but it is very much still legitimate folklore in that community. Do you know what I mean? Historically you would say, well, this is just kind of a mismatch. So I think folklore, because of the nature of it, because there's such an emphasis on the informal, has a little bit more wiggle room... I guess it privileges the lore over the timeline or something. I'm not really sure how to articulate it.

Ieva: And it also thinks that the stories that are unrealistic are equally okay with the stories that are realistic. Because, when we talk with each other today, we also think that, for example, if we mention some superheroes that everyone knows about we don't think that they really exist, but we still talk about them like they existed. And if someone would come from very far abroad or a different time, they would think that we believe that they really exist. This is also the case with the stories that people used to tell hundreds of years ago. That they were quite aware of the fact that, for example, it wasn't possible to do some mythological things, but at the same time, they had this story alive and it was realistic in that sense to them. 

Matilda: I like the idea of Marvel being used as folklore!  

Colleen: It's a whole field of study, though, right? I couldn't agree more with Ieva. I think that's part of it, too, that there is a reverence for the unreal or just an openness. If people have stories about a bog witch in their neighborhood, you wouldn't have to engage in some psychological analysis about why people need to have this story, so much as just honouring that they do have this story and it's important to them. That's one of my favourite parts of folklore, that we get to honour the experience of the person who's relating without necessarily fact-check it against the historical record, or ‘are there really UFOs?’, or any of those sorts of things. You just receive a story as a gift from someone and there's something really special about that. I think especially in this day and age. 

Matilda: Yeah, indeed. I like this idea - and we mentioned it throughout the whole of the episode so far really - that idea of personal connection and seeing how people actually lived day to day in terms of how they interacted with the world on a more, I guess, symbolic level. On that note, you've talked about a few practical examples, but we've been talking a lot about the kind of theoretical side of folklore recently, but do you have maybe a kind of favourite or a most interesting example of a result, if one can have a result in folklore analysis?

Ieva: Oh, I have a few that I would like to tell. One of them is, I was a member of a reenactment group - a very serious one - and we built a reconstruction of a settlement for ourselves, not for tourists. It was about sixty meters in diameter and we also built a fence around it. We built two gates, one was facing the road and the other was facing the river. And after some time - we went there every summer for ten years, for several weeks - we found out that we actually would need to have a third gate, because it's too far to walk with some heavy stuff or something that you were carrying from the forest. That reminded me so much about the folklore texts, where they mention so many times that the settlement or the farm or whatever has three gates and three gates in particular. And then I thought that, hmm, maybe that has an explanation, because the real-life situation showed that this was the most practical one. I'm sure that in the excavations we could find settlements which really do have these three gates. Settlements of the same size, or maybe even bigger. Another one which I would like to mention that's a bone chilling explanation of … we have parts in Latvia where it's very strange that there are many more male burials than female burials in graveyards. For example, from the 10th to 12th century, it's quite usual there are no female burials anywhere else around, so you wouldn't say that they were exported somewhere or something. There are folklore texts which I found, which say that ‘Dear mom, if you don't need me, don't throw me in the water. Give me to someone else, I will serve as a shepherd for them’. These texts are several, so I have to believe them, more than one, that could actually explain what happened to the girls. 

Matilda: That's really fascinating! Using multiple sources to find the things. Do you have any examples, Colleen, or results?

Colleen: Ieva and I kind of work at opposite ends of the spectrum. I don't have anything quite as exciting as that. I use the archaeological and historical record to understand personal sanctuary, meaning-making, and all that kind of stuff. And then I try to apply it to the modern day. So, one of the things that's interesting for me is, you know, I work as a hospital social worker when I'm not being a folklorist, and being able to take some of what we found, say, in the historical textile record around ways people have been self memorialised, especially at the end of life, and being able to communicate that kind of engagement, with patients who I'm supporting at the end of their life. And so looking at things like the prison embroideries of Mary Queen of Scots or other sort of representation like that in the record. And of course, to some degree, we're extrapolating, right? They aren't detailed histories. We don't have, say, a diary that goes with every textile piece, but there are ways that we can see people memorialising themselves in the historical record. My favourite ones are some of the  Greenlandic and Icelandic textile finds, where we can see just little embellishments and things. Even when people were in this horrible precarity and it would have been really tough to eke out a living, they were still able to take some time to add some colour or add some different stitching or change up the weaving pattern. So being able to just share that with people in this day and age and help them find ways to self-memorialise. What I love about that is it is using this historical, archaeological, experimental archaeology, folkloric engagement to provide a tangible result for someone in the modern day. I've supported people to stitch a little project or create something that they want to leave behind. It's really important for them to be remembered outside of their illness or their disability. From my perspective, that's kind of a result. 

Matilda: Oh, it's so nice to see that there's such a range though, that's really fascinating, even just with two guests, there's already so much difference and so much variation, so I can imagine that the realms of folklore are even more varied, in themselves. Thank you so much for that really, really interesting discussion and for sharing those examples. I have two final questions to wrap up the episode. First of all, what are your plans for the future in terms of folklore research? Do you have any exciting projects coming up, anything you would like to research further?   

Ieva: I have an idea and I'm working on it already for some time and I want to develop it into a research proposal that would be about studying badly documented groups of society by  their folklore and their clothing. I would mostly be interested in the modern period and early modern period, but I am quite open to join forces with people who also do research on earlier periods. So, maybe it's worth mentioning here that there could be some people who are interested in joining this project proposal in the future. 

Matilda: Please do indeed, anyone listening, if you are interested in learning anything more. As you can tell, I think both our guests are very keen on the topic, so you'll definitely have an enthusiastic listener. 

Colleen: We'll talk more about this project, I think…  I am trying to decide if I want to do some more training perhaps in experimental archaeology. I definitely also want to look back into the historical record and I'm thinking sort of later medieval and early modern what the experiences of women at that time can tell us that would be useful information today. So kind of marrying some experimental archaeology, some of the historical record and then also  how do their experiences get translated into textiles, right? All those little embellishments and things, I think that people take for granted… but there's a whole wide world. It's hard actually just picking one thing to focus on, to be perfectly honest.  

Matilda: I definitely understand that. Every time I hear a new episode of this show even I just think oh, that's also a really interesting topic, maybe I should look into that more... Sounds exciting. Hopefully, the proposal is successful and hopefully you manage to also find some more research topics to look at then, Colleen. So a final question that I ask at the end of every episode: how can the EXARC community or those listening in help to make a difference in terms of the points that we've discussed today. We've covered quite a wide range of topics, but what sort of advice would you give people? What activism would you encourage people to pursue, in terms of this topic?

Ieva: Well, I would, first of all, encourage people not to be afraid to use folklore material and not to use also ethnological material from later periods, because there is a lot of data from that time. I have studied both archaeology and later periods and I find it very useful to use them as archaeology has much fewer data, but much more developed methods in researching it. And if we would join forces… Regarding folklore, you never know what you find there. It's just reading through a lot of text and then finally you see, oh my goodness, this is something and this explains it. I can only encourage not be afraid of researching into folklore, also if you are doing archaeology. 

Colleen: I would say the exact same thing. I feel a little bit like our academic disciplines get a bit siloed and it's in nature of you do your first degree with honours and then you go into  the equivalent, master's degree, and you stay on this track and it makes us afraid to branch out and try new things. I just feel like my professional life, but also my personal life, has been really enriched by - not even interdisciplinary - it's like transdisciplinary, like this wild…, I don't even know how I would describe it, but just engaging, and it does take more work because you want to do it thoroughly, but just like Ieva's saying, there's so much to learn when we look at things from another disciplinary lens, there's so much more richness and more to learn. When we can create interdisciplinary teams, then you don't have to be an expert in three or four different fields, but you can all work together. It makes our methodology richer and it makes the findings richer. And it just makes it more fun.

Matilda: Which is also always good!

Ieva: Very well said, yeah.

Matilda: Thank you very, very much to Ieva and Colleen for joining us today and for sharing your experience and expertise. I have to say double thanks, by the way, because hopefully those listening in didn't pick it up. But I feel I should say just in case. We had to do this episode in two parts because we stupidly recorded our first one during the full moon and as any good folklorist knows, that means that technology will not have any good things happen to it. So we had to re-record a little bit at the end. So I'm especially grateful to both of our guests today for taking the time to come and talk to me, not just once, but two times. I'm sure our listeners appreciated it as well. So thank you so much to both of you. 

Ieva: Thank you for this double pleasure!  

Colleen: Exactly, it was great fun! It was no hardship at all. 

Matilda: Great, well, and thank you to everyone else for listening in to this episode of #FinallyFriday by EXARC. The reason why we didn't have a December #FinallyFriday episode is because of the aforesaid technical difficulties. So this will be released in January. This will, however, be our last #FinallyFriday. We're changing up the format a little bit of the EXARC show and of how we're going to be doing things. We will still have guests on, we will still be chatting with our EXARC community, so don't worry. It's not going to be radically different, but keep an eye out on things. Make sure to subscribe and follow the podcast, et cetera, wherever you're listening to it. And we look forward to seeing you for the rest of our  podcasting journey. And don't forget as well, coming up soon is the EXARC conference. Make sure to check the website for more on that. We've also been mentioning a lot about textiles in this particular podcast episode. If you're interested in that topic, you are very welcome to join the Textiles Working Group, which can be found on the EXARC Discord server.