“Strong Ones Manage Alone, Weak Ones on Each Other's Laps”. Love and the Finnish Touching Culture

“Strong ones manage alone, weak ones on each other’s laps”. Love and the Finnish touching culture

The quoted phrase is an old Finnish saying which represents the traditional virtue of managing alone. The “lap” is not only a metaphorical expression; instead, it refers to the widely shared attitude to the sense of touch in human relationships. In Finland, the touch is saturated with prohibitions, fears and taboos, even in childcare. This was noticed in touch life narratives written by Finns of different generations that were gathered for the project under discussion. In particular, writers born just before or during the war years in 1939-1945, hardly remember to have experienced any caring touch by their parents. Many of them had suffered from the lack of caressing and loving touch throughout their lives.

The paper asks whether the touch as the most archaic human sense and vitally important for the child’s development is inevitable for the human love bonds (cf. Ashley Montagu 1979). How could “love” excluded from touch even be conceptualized (cf. Luce Irigaray 1996)? How is the inevitability of touch reconciled with the fact that touch is the most politicized sense in many (northern) western cultures today whose material and symbolic power has only preliminarily been discussed in academic research (cf. Constance Classen 2005; Erin Manning 2009; Anthony Synnott 1997)?

Even the feminist theorization of affects has neglected the sense of touch although it, to me, represents an embodied reaction and act where (social) emotions and (physical) affects merge into each others (cf. Sara Ahmed 2005). By utilizing the empirical material of the Finnish cultural context, my presentation gives an example how the socio-cultural research of senses and feminist affect theory can be utilized when studying the tactile conditions of love.