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‘A citizen of all the different bits’: emotional scaling of identity

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Abstract

Scale is a debatable term in the humanities and social sciences. Conceptualized in human geography as spatial categories of thought, as the arenas where social processes occur, as bounded political-economic frames or as unhelpful binaries privileging either the local or the global, scale intersects a significant body of geographical research. The unfolding and intermeshing of topological connections that help to share moments and experiences are important sources for the differentiation, renewal and recalibration of individual identities, but they often work as co-components to scalar identifications. Engaging with the recent discussion on scale and the upsurge of emotional geographies, I seek to understand how people contextualize space through situated scalar perspectives and how they realign and recognize their identities through embodied emotions. The analysis of the empirical material, that comprises 23 focus groups with locally and universally-orientated civic organizations in Finland and England, focuses on the ways people use landscapes and communities as emotional signposts in their scalar identification. I argue that scale is a situated category, whose spectrum individuals negotiate through the performance of social discourses and cultural practices. In such negotiation, people scale their identity narratives to overcome or emphasize the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘others’.

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Notes

  1. The selection of the regions is part of a project that studied the meaning of identity, how individual identities develop and how institutional identities are constructed in Finland and England at sub- and supranational levels.

  2. These organizations thrive to influence the society, but they do this through established ways and not always through ‘contentious politics´ (Leitner et al. 2008). The majority of these civic organizations can be regarded as social movements that, citing DeLanda (2006, pp. 33–34), have given ‘rise to one or more organizations to stabilize it and perform specialized functions.’

  3. I arranged the interviews with the groups by contacting the association’s key person. I requested them to form a group of four to six people. Six requests to English groups were unanswered. In South West England, I replaced Friends of the Earth with a similar Transition movement. One focus group in North Karelia consisted of two groups, hence 23 groups.

  4. The first three Finnish regions resonate with the idea of three tribal territories – Finland, Tavastia (Häme) and Karelia – to which the Swedes arranged their high mediaeval rule. Ostrobothnia emerged as a significant territory after additional colonization in the fourteenth century. Southwest Finland and North Karelia are perhaps the two most contrasting regions in Finland. The former used to connect the entire Finnish ‘province’ to Swedish power through ecclesiastical, legal and educational institutions. The latter, annexed as part of Kexholm Karelia in 1617, remained more peripheral, unchanged and became a source of national reimagination for nineteenth century romantic artists (Meinander 2006). Päijät-Häme, a self-declared part of Helsinki-metropolitan region (Vainikka 2013), and North Ostrobothnia, the innovative centre of the Finnish north, both juggle between Eastern and Western Finnish traditions.

  5. Numerous examples in the literature exemplify the specific or mystified nature of Cornwall. Many claim it to be a Celtic region (Deacon and Schwartz 2007; Laviolette 2012; Knight and Harrison 2013) whereas Devon - the county east of the millennia-old boundary river Tamar—often connotes quintessential and timeless Englishness, especially, in the works of leading English local historian, Hoskins (1985).

  6. The research focuses on Finland and England, partly because of the researcher’s ability to conduct all stages of the research in both countries. More importantly, citizens in these countries have fairly strong national imaginaries and sense of distinctiveness, especially as their contrary ‘scalar legacies’, as imperial or dependent entities, have cluttered salient regionalism. For a reasonable comparison, it could also be argued that their relations to Europe are fairly noncentral as they are positioned, roughly speaking, between ‘the west’ and Europe or Europe and ‘the east’.

  7. The participants were often the core members of the local groups, white and mainly middle class. They did not receive compensation for attendance. There is a slight overrepresentation of white-collar occupations in the material, especially in the universally-orientated groups. In relation to age, the Finnish sample with 66 participants (30 W/36 M) is representative of the wider populations – the average age of the Finnish participants was 47. The English sample with 28 participants (17 W/11 M) is older than the wider population with an average age of 59.

  8. All names are pseudonyms.

  9. I conceptualize both English counties and Finnish provinces as regions ‘associated with the geographical patterns of everyday life and the claims made in praise and defence of such patterns’ (Nicholls et al. 2013, p. 6; see also Paasi 1991; Vainikka 2013).

  10. Many English counties, Devon included, have mimicked the Cornish St. Piran’s flag. Attitudes towards the Devon flag are convoluted as the born-and-bred Devonians resent it and the more recently moved state that people have ‘welcomed it’ or are unaware of it. In Cornwall, the use of the St. Piran can become ‘inflammatory’. While the Cornish use it frequently, incomers can find it against their sense of Englishness. No regional flags exist in Finland, but people fly their provincial pennants. Some of them are based on the sixteenth century coats of arms, whose symbolic value was accentuated in the national romanticism era. Some more recently invented symbols do not hold similar emotional status.

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Acknowledgments

The research was supported by the Academy of Finland (Grant Number 121992). I am grateful to the University of Exeter and David C. Harvey for hospitality during my stay in 2010. I thank the editor, Daniel Sui, the anonymous referees, and Lauren Martin, Maaria Niskala, Anssi Paasi and Vilhelmiina Vainikka for their constructive and supportive comments.

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Vainikka, J.T. ‘A citizen of all the different bits’: emotional scaling of identity. GeoJournal 81, 5–22 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-014-9596-0

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