Chapter 7
In: Landscapes of Affect and Emotion
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Abstract
Seasons have a natural rhythm caused by Earth’s rotational axis, but they are lived in embodied, material encounters, and interpreted, understood and shared culturally. Knowledge about seasons and the skills needed for living with them are formed differently in various parts of the world. Even cultures at the same parallels of latitude have created different words, artefacts and practices for living with seasonal change. This chapter concentrates on writing practices and seasonal change in 19th century Finland, with a case study of a personal notebook written by Eva Christina Lindström (1823–1895). The period is particularly interesting, because the emerging natural sciences were affecting ways of understanding seasons, and at the same time writing skills were becoming increasingly common. Fishers and farmers were observing the weather and the changing seasons in their everyday landscape, but at the same time, more and more government officials, including medical doctors, were observing nature in a systematic way. Scientific observation methods were used side by side with a traditional, agrarian understanding of nature and seasons. In addition, surviving the seasonal change and especially the winter was a common theme in art and literature. In everyday life, these different ways of interpreting and making meaning of seasonal change merged when people were trying to predict the weather and understand the possibilities of living and surviving with the harsh conditions of northern nature.