As a faculty member, it isn’t easy to get a handle on student culture even in your own country. I’m not sure I’ll ever really understand those sorority events I pass by on my way home from work in Chapel Hill, where hundreds of young women dressed in practically identical (usually skimpy) clothing mill around outside a beautiful old house, chanting or singing or dancing or …what are they doing?? So, seeing Finnish students parade around town in what look like grown-up versions of children’s snow pants covered in patches is bewildering, but in a somewhat familiar way. I have learned that these “coveralls” (haalarit in Finnish) are a tradition of the last 30 or so years. Each “faculty” of each university (what we might call a department or major) has their own color. Students decorate the pants with patches (very similar to girl scout badges) they have either “earned” at various social events, or bought to support a club or a cause. They don’t have college sports teams here, or sororities and fraternities, so all that youthful energy and team spirit is channeled in different ways I guess. It is interesting to note that these (decidedly unsexy, from my point of view) party outfits are exactly the same for men and women—including the way they all tie the arms around their waists; nobody ever seems to wear the top part of the coveralls.
Yesterday I was exploring more of Turku on foot when I noticed that bigger and bigger pods of students in these wacky outfits were streaming up one of the seven hills on which the city is built (like Rome, residents often remark). I decided to follow them, and found myself in the midst of a huge event—thousands of students milling around a prepared snowy slope, where in a little while teams would compete in handmade sleds and costumes. I wanted to stay and watch, but the press of the crowds and the haze of cigarette smoke made me too uncomfortable, so I left and heard the roars later from afar.
Before I left, I talked to one couple about the overalls. The young man explained that each patch “becomes a memory” of a party or an event that you attended during your school years. Unfortunately, to me at least, in order to earn a patch from yesterday’s event, you would have to visit 8-12 bars in town and buy as many drinks. After 8-12 drinks, I’m not sure how much “memory” you’d have left beyond the patch itself! (I couldn’t help myself, I exclaimed that that seemed quite dangerous—I know, I know, I can see the eyes rolling—and they assured me that the rules had changed recently so that one could buy food instead. But it didn’t sound like that was their plan.)
Most of the time academic dress here is quite functional—students and faculty wear boots and shoes meant to prevent slipping on ice; hardly a high heeled shoe to be seen. Finns are known for preferring well-made clothes and goods that will last and be useful in variety of situations. Except for the overalls, the color palette I see around me is pretty limited—most people are dressed in dark neutrals from head to toe. (I wonder, sometimes, what people think when I wear my red corduroy pants or my red wool scarf. I’ve heard several people tell stories that involve “Communist red” – for instance, that was the reason one person’s mother refused to have poinsettias at Christmas when they were growing up.)
However, there is another side, one I’ve only heard about but have not witnessed yet. I noticed that in both Turku and Helsinki there seemed to be an unusual number of formal dress shops with fancy, long gowns on display. Who wears all these dresses, I asked a colleague, and where do they go in them? Apparently there is a tradition of fancy-dress dances, similar to proms, at both the high school and the university level. And there are formal-wear academic events for “grown ups” too, where one would be expected to wear a gown. I may not go to a ball, but I do hope to attend (and report on) a dissertation defense here—just to whet your appetite, these are public events which as many as 100 people attend; there is one “opponent” who asks all the questions in front of this big audience; and there is a huge party afterward in the opponent’s honor, paid for by the newly minted PhD. Sabers are somehow involved. More on that later I hope.
Meanwhile, my favorite way of getting to know about student culture here is by teaching. My students have been wonderful—they are prepared for class, do their assignments on time, write thoughtfully in a language that is not their own, and – despite warning me that it would be hard to get them to talk—actually do participate actively in class discussions. I told them that I wanted it to be a two-way street; I’m teaching them about the history of the U.S. women’s movement, and I want them to teach me about feminism in Finland. It’s been a great exchange; I’ll share more about what they have taught me in a future post. For now, suffice it to say that it’s a fascinating topic in a country known for its emphasis on equality; where there is no word for he or she, only “hän,” a gender-neutral pronoun; and where the first woman president Tarja Halonen, who served from 2000-2012, had a peak popularity rate of 88%. Do the gender-neutral overalls have anything to do with any of this? I have no idea. But I’m looking forward to further explorations of the degree to which clothes make the wo/man.