Gustav Shpet (1879-1937) is one of the most noteworthy thinkers in the history of Russian philosophy. Yet he was executed in Stalin’s Great Terror and removed from philosophy books for nearly half a century. Shpet was rediscovered in the late 1980s, and the scholarship around him has since grown, both in Russia and abroad. Especially strong interest has been directed towards his reading of Husserl’s phenomenology. Shpet was Husserl’s student in Göttingen in 1912–14 and published his own considerations about transcendental phenomenology on his return to Moscow. But while he has come to be seen as a pioneer in Russian phenomenology, Shpet’s unconventional interpretation has also raised concerns. According to many, Shpet’s reading of Husserl was founded on a misinterpretation; he is seen as either unwilling to follow the latter’s idea or incapable of doing so. It is also frequently proposed that Shpet’s unorthodox approach may be explained by a certain Russianness at the foundation of his system. The traditional philosophical standpoint in Russia emphasized ontological questions and the collectiveness of experience. It is suggested that Shpet thereby ‘Russianized’ Husserl by replacing his transcendental subjectivity with a collective consciousness. The dissertation proposes a new reading of Shpet’s interpretation of Husserl. It first discusses the Russian roots of Shpet’s thinking and then presents a novel analysis of his "Iavlenie i smysl" (1914), comparing it not only to Husserl’s "Ideen I" (1913) but also "Logische Untersuchungen" (1900–01) and "Formale und Transzendentale Logik" (1929). The study maintains that Shpet not only followed through the transcendental turn but proposed themes and ideas which Husserl himself arrived at in the 1920s. It is suggested that the similarity between Shpet’s and Husserl’s approaches might be traced back to their discussions in Göttingen. The study’s second principal topic is Shpet’s theory of the inner form of the word. After the October Revolution, his phenomenology evolved into a philosophy of language and art. While his theory was known among the Moscow formalists, it was also deemed archaic and unscientific. The concept of the inner form seemed to carry echoes of Aleksandr Potebnia, against whose romantic theory of the formalists fought. In contrast to this reading, the dissertation suggests that Shpet’s theory was in fact closely related to his earlier phenomenological ideas. It is maintained that especially in his 1922–23 "Esteticheskie fragmenty", the content of Shpet’s concept was in a strict sense phenomenological.

Explanation of terms in nonfiction The thesis examines the explanation of terms in nonfiction, that is, how the meaning of field-specific expressions is constructed with an orientation towards a non-specialist audience. The thesis consists of four sub-studies, and the data comprises mainly popularizations by academic scholars but also includes school textbooks. The sub-studies view the explanation of terms from four different perspectives: 1) the structure of explanation sequences, 2) narratives as tools for illustration, 3) multimodal explanation sequences and 4) social and historical contextualization. The data is approached within the framework of dialogistically oriented discourse analysis and by means of qualitative text analysis. In the first three sub-studies, the organization of term explanations is analyzed with the concept of discourse patterns. Based on the analysis, discourse patterns are categorized into three types according to the strategy of unfolding explanation. In elaboration patterns the writer proceeds from the term to the explanation; in naming patterns the direction is from the description of the term’s referent to the term itself; and in classifying patterns the writer represents a taxonomy as the frame in which terms are introduced. The second sub-study examines how narratives are utilized as means of illustration and how they function as parts of broader term-explanation patterns. The third sub-study analyzes multimodal discourse patterns as the co-ordination of image and written language. In the fourth sub-study, the discursive construction of the socio-historical context for terms is examined from the perspective of critical language awareness. Categories of context construction uncovered in the analysis include, firstly, connecting the term to an individual person or a named community: naming a person, positioning the term inside a discipline, delineating a group of people defined by a specific viewpoint, stance or opinion, or linking the term to a colloquial label. Secondly, the term can be anchored in time and space through demarcating a geographical or cultural context or describing a temporal trajectory for the term and its development. The term’s social context can, however, also be dismissed altogether. On the other hand, a social context can be implicitly visible in the text, via, among other linguistic resources, passive verb forms. The specialization of semiotic resources in the explanation of terms becomes evident. Story genres and naturally oriented image types, for example, have specialized to perform an illustrative and exemplifying function, whereas description and explanation genres as well as scientifically and technologically oriented image types function as resources for constructing conceptual knowledge as parts of term-explanation patterns. The thesis exhibits a discourse analytic approach to examining and theorizing the use of terminology. A text analysis of terms makes visible the strategies with which the meanings of terms are constructed in nonfiction texts and thus produces linguistic insight about the popularized representation of specialized knowledge.

This study is an ethnography of human-nonhuman relationships in the Sayan and Altay Mountains of Inner Asia. It is an outcome of research that I conducted in collaboration with horsemen from my patrilineal Soyan clan, who live in the Tes-Xem province of the Tyva Republic (the Russian Federation). In this study, I explore phenomena related to the role of horses in post-Soviet Tyva—in particular, the horse’s participation in the moral economy of human-nonhuman relationships, its contribution to postsocialist identities, and its imbrication in politics. This research contributes to ongoing anthropological debates on animism and “the ontological turn” by focusing on Inner Asian steppe pastoralists’ understandings of their relationships with sentient nonhumans—homelands and horses. I argue that the communities with whom I work are inherently more than human. By this I mean that, first, more than human communities are comprised of a herding family and domesticated animals; pastoralists adjust their transhumance time and routes to the needs of their livestock. Second, the relationships between pastoralists and domesticates are embedded in relationships with their homelands, which are understood as sentient and superordinate to the interspecies communities inhabiting them. The horse holds a special position among domesticated animals by virtue of living simultaneously in proximity to humans and the superordinate homelands. The ambiguity of the horse characterizes its high status and the understanding that it serves as a communicative bridge between homelands and human-nonhuman communities. I theorize the inter-relations between homelands and their various inhabitants as a form of land-based, human-nonhuman kinship. By doing so, I expand on the Tyvan concept of “land-based kinship” (čer törel). I frame customary regulations, which apply to relationships within human-nonhuman kinship systems, as “guesting” (aaldaar). Aaldaar, the Tyvan practice of asking for help among kin. This allows me to define my research with Indigenous communities as responsible guesting (aaldaar), where a researcher and communities engage in sharing gift-knowledge. My emic experience as a Soyan with a background in herding life in Tyva has impacted the theoretical and methodological frameworks of my study and helped me to bridge the gap between academic and Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. The relational epistemology of Indigenous research has allowed me to employ storying with my kin, horses, and our homelands as a way of acquiring and sharing knowledge in this study. Storying has been especially helpful in analyzing the post-Soviet rise of the horse’s importance in Tyvan politics and identity negotiations among the pastoralists. It has revealed how a human-nonhuman community experiences sociopolitical and ecological transformations, and jointly responds to changes and threats. Storying allows me to show how various agents in human-nonhuman communities depend on each other in order to heal from past traumas and ensure resilience and survival. In addition to storying, my main field research method was participant-observation with human-nonhuman communities via photography and audiovisual documentation of pastoralists’ practices. Making, sharing, and discussing audiovisual stories obtained through fieldwork formed an important part of the collaborative methodology with pastoralists and helped to shape the theoretical framework of my study around gift-knowledge sharing.

There are arguably two ways of understanding the fundamental processes of military history. One emphasizes unchanging principles in warfare and that conduct of war is largely dictated by the physical realities. The other claims that the ways of war are more-or-less cultural constructs. I approach this “military culture debate” by analysing the land and naval warfare in the area that surrounded the Aegean Sea, which had belonged to the Byzantine empire in the late twelfth century. The period discussed extends from the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) to the early 1420s. The region and era in question are suitable for testing different understandings of military history. It is a geographical and geopolitical region where two major groups of conquerors arrived in the thirteenth century. The Catholic Christian Latins represent the western European ways of war of the time and the military traditions of the Muslim Turks originated from the steppe and from the east. Both settled in the region and founded realms. Therefore, they had to adjust themselves to the environment. Similarly, local Orthodox Christian, mostly Byzantine, rulers had to adapt to the situation. I compare the composition of armed forces and willingness to engage in battles of the above-mentioned three groups fighting in the region. My study analyses what influence their cultural background had on their conduct in these matters. I provide new information about the warfare of the study era and increase our understanding of why the Ottoman Turks were able to conquer most of the region. I found that the “culturalist” understanding of military history usually had the best explanatory potential in the scope of my research. The belligerents tried to construct their armed forces and fight their wars in a manner guided by their cultural background. To a certain extent they had to adapt to the local conditions, but in the issues dealt with here it was mainly a question of adapting to the social structures and the adversaries, rather than to the climate and geography of the region. The armies shared a growing number of similarities as time went by, but the influx of troops from outside the region and religious doctrines contributed to differences in the composition of armed forces and thus how wars were waged. The Ottomans apparently made the best use of the military potential of regions they controlled. This was probably one of the key reasons why they prevailed in the study area. For cultural reasons, the Christian powers tended to neglect the use of certain groups of people in the military. Thus their forces were more often supplemented with mercenaries and allies whose reliability was uncertain and this had adverse consequences, particularly for Byzantium. As regards engaging in battles, an important issue was how reliable the people living in fortified towns were perceived to be, which influenced how necessary it was to fight in the open. Transporting of siege-equipment, on the other hand, hampered the possibility of avoiding battles. The Latins showed more battle-willingness in their warfare than the other belligerents in the conflicts of the region. There were cultural reasons behind this. It should nevertheless be noted that there was variation in the battle-willingness of the Byzantines depending on commanders, circumstance, period, and adversary. Much of the Turkish and steppe nomad warfare consisted of raids in which battles were usually avoided. However, battle-willingness was more apparent in the conflicts of the great Muslim dynasties, and when the Muslim leaders faced one another, or when they repulsed invasions of Christian powers in their own regions. This battle-willingness of the Turks could come as surprise to the latter.

This dissertation based on five published papers examines the military architecture of the Late Classical and Hellenistic fortifications of Epirus. The sites are scattered all over ancient Epirus, which in today’s geographical terms consists of the northwestern corner of Greece and the southernmost part of Albania. The work consists of the preface, five papers that were published in volumes of the peer-reviewed publication series Papers and Monographs of the Finnish Institute at Athens, plus three appendices. Four articles were published in the final volumes of the Thesprotia Expedition, an interdisciplinary project carried out between 2004 and 2010 with the aim of writing the diachronic history of the Kokytos River Valley in Thesprotia in the northwestern corner of Greek Epirus. Paper IV is an accepted manuscript that is based on a paper given at the Greek Architecture workshop at the Finnish Institute at Athens in May 2014, which is to be published in the proceedings of the workshop. Papers I and II concentrate on two nearby forts in the Kokytos Valley, These papers explore the fortifications and the building date of the enceintes through field observations and excavation results. Paper III examines the walls of Elea, the main ancient settlement of the same valley, with the aim of dating the construction time of the enceinte. The fourth paper examines the coverings of the gates and posterns of Epirote fortified sites, which consisted of either corbelling or self-supporting true arches. The last paper examines the development of different enfilading methods consisting of right-angled offsets of the wall trace known as indented trace, towers, and large catapult batteries. As the papers were written between 2008 and 2016, some of the information within is outdated and erroneous in light of newer research. Thus, the Preface of the work aims to correct those issues. The first chapter offers an overview of the geography, history and research history, both of Epirus and Greek fortifications. The next chapter outlines the various methods of dating fortification walls, and analyzes their problems and suitability for dating Epirote sites. Chapter 3 presents the different fortification types in Epirus, the component parts of wall circuits, as well as masonry and small details. The aim is to provide an up-to-date framework for dating the Epirote fortifications. In Chapter 4 all the sites discussed in the papers are presented, the information is re-evalued using the above-mentioned framework. Chapter 5 is the Conlusion where all is brought together. Appendix I is the Index of Sites, listing all of the site names and aliases mentioned in the text and Papers I–V. Appendix II is a listing of the fortified sites of Epirus and their UTM coordinates, set in accompanying map sheets with a short compilation of the military architecture of the site. Appendix III is a re-evaluation of the reconstruction drawing of the tower of Agios Donatos thirteen years after the original study.

This dissertation investigates personal names attested among Baltic-Finns during the Middle Ages (c. 1200¬−1550 AD). The focus is on pre-Christian anthroponymy, but foreign names, mainly Christian ones, are addressed as well. The names studied are analysed from perspectives of morphology and semantics. The analysis also includes name origins, expansion, decline and distribution in the northern Baltic Sea region. Multidisciplinary approach together with multiple methods and sources are used not only to study the features of Finnic names, but also to shed light on the past of Finnic languages and tribes. Much of the sources used in the study derive from editions of medieval documents that vary in their purpose from taxation censuses to personal letters. They cover areas of contemporary Estonia, Finland and Northwest Russia and are written in multiple languages. The study is conducted mainly by searching personal names with Finnic elements in the source materials and placing them on a map. Furthermore, modern digital methods are used as tools for gathering and analysing the data. The present study demonstrates that names used among Finnic populace during the Middle Ages consisted of various kinds of name elements and forms. Although regional and temporal differences are significant, the general trend in the Finnic naming conventions is obvious: pre-Christian names being superseded by the Christian ones. This applies especially to pre-Christian female names, which are almost completely absent from the sources. Structurally, medieval Finnic personal names may have been composed in many ways. They could consist of one name lexeme (e.g. Lempi), one lexeme together with personal name suffix (Lempoi) or of two name lexemes (Kaukolempi). The most common lexical elements attested within pre-Christian Finnic personal names are Iha, Lempi, Toivo and Vilja. Finnic personal name suffixes attested in pre-Christian names like -oi, -kkV and -nen continued to be used with Christian names as well. Many of the pre-Christian Finnic names were originally descriptive and consisted of attributes that were connected to the hopes and wishes of the name givers. Family traditions had significant impact on the name bestowing as well. The most common name elements attested in pre-Christian Finnic personal names have semantic meanings like hope, enjoyment, favourite, kindness, love, loveliness and rich(ness). Despite the obvious Germanic and Scandinavian (and to some extent Baltic and Slavic as well) influence on the development of Finnic languages, Finnic names seem to be based mostly on different ideologies than those of neighbouring Indo-European peoples. The study illustrates how widely pre-Christian Finnic personal names were used in the medieval northeastern Baltic Sea area: from the coast of Latvia to the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia. Based on medieval sources, the use of Finnic names has been especially evident in following regions: northern, southern, and western Estonia, southwestern Finland, western Latvia and Ingria. If sources from the early modern period are included, the picture expands. Now the names can be found all over Estonia and in eastern Finland, Karelia, and Lake Onega region. At the end of 16th century, Finnic personal names were also common among Sámi people in the north. The present work sheds light on the history of Finnic languages and tribes by comparing name related research results with archaeological and historical information. Studied personal names indicate, for example, how ethnically and linguistically diverse the area of Ingria was at the end of 15th century. This puts previous perceptions regarding the past of Izhorian and Votic languages and ethnicities into question. On the other hand, this work also indicates that personal names were not an integral part of the identity of Baltic-Finns, since they could change more easily than, for example, language or livelihood. The rapid and almost complete disappearance of pre-Christian Finnic personal names during the Middle Ages and simultaneous adoption of Christian names is a good indication of this.

On the syntax and semantics of emotive verbs in present-day Finnish Mari Siiroinen, University of Helsinki (FIN) The thesis deals with the syntax and semantics of emotive verbs in presentday Finnish. In particular, it discusses 198 central emotive verbs. The theoretical framework is that of cognitive linguistics (Langacker, Lakoff). The discussion of verb semantics and syntactic behaviour of verbs owes much to the ideas of William Croft. The thesis is divided into two sections; the first section discusses emotive verbs as lexemes, and the second section examines the usage of selected verbs based on the evidence from machine-readable Finnish text corpora. It is found that Finnish emotive verbs should be classified into four syntactic- semantic types: inchoative verbs, activity verbs, stative verbs and causative verbs. Causative verbs are further subcategorized into those used in the transitive construction and those used in the emotive causative construction. Morphologically, causative verbs are derived from nouns, directly or via inchoative verbs. The emotive causative construction has the special feature of an experiencer argument that is syntactically in between subject and object. In the detailed discussion of the usage of the verbs pelätä (‘fear’) and pelottaa (‘be afraid’) it is noted that pelätä often occurs without an object or with a complement object, while pelottaa has both normal causative usage and emotive causative usage. Journalistic language seems to favour the causative usage of pelottaa, while emotive causative usage is more frequent in literary style. It is found that the factors influencing the choice of pelätä or pelottaa, or intransitive or transitive verb of astonishment, include discourse topic, empathy and vantage-point. The chosen verb will be the one that will take the discourse topic as the subject. An interesting exception is pelottaa, which is used in the emotive causative construction when the discourse topic is the referent who experiences the emotion, whose vantage-point is used and to whom empathy is felt. This is typical when the experiencer is 1st person, or even 3rd person in free indirect style in literary texts.

The topic of this thesis is the competition between the two leading Finnish newspapers and their predecessors occurring especially during the years 1956-76, which were perhaps decisive in their ”hundred years war”. The war began in 1889, when the liberal Päivälehti – the predecessor of Helsingin Sanomat (HS) – was founded. It ended in 1991 with the fall of the conservative Uusi Suomi (US). The author has published studies about earlier and also later periods of the com-petition previously. The thesis comments the theory of the distribution circle by Lars Furhoff (1965). According to it, the newspaper, which has the most readers, will collect the main part of the advertisements. Therefore it can publish more pages, recruit more journalists, invest more in the printing technology etc. – and thus get even more readers and advertisements. The smaller papers must, on the contrary, cut their costs. Therefore, they first lose their readers and then even more advertisements – and in the end they usually have no possibility to continue. Most cities today have only one newspaper – or after the internet revolution no printed paper at all. The distribution circle is, however, not an automatic process. Uusi Suometar, the predecessor of Uusi Suomi and founded back in 1847, was the leading news-paper in the Finnish language until 1911, when Helsingin Sanomat prepassed it in the distribution. In the 1920´s Uusi Suomi succeeded to speed up and shorten the distance, but in the 1930’s Helsingin Sanomat grew again faster. During the WW 2 and the after war period the circulation of Helsingin Sanomat grew three times larger than by Uusi Suomi – largely due to the independent political line and an active news policy of Helsingin Sanomat. In 1956 Uusi Suomi began a counterattack, when Helsingin Sanomat had a weak period – largely because its main owner, Mr. Eljas Erkko became older, but did not want to give his autocratic power to the younger generation. Uusi Suomi recruited a new editor-in-chief, Mr. Eero Petäjäniemi from the team of its compet-itor, and could achieve some success, too. That was the last period, when Uusi Suomi had some possibilities not to win Helsingin Sanomat, but to stabilize its status as ”the good second”. The situation was similar in Sweden between Da-gens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet. The counterattack of Uusi Suomi did not succeed due to to a stop and go-policy and political disputes and as a result, Mr. Petäjäniemi was kicked off. The new editor-in-chief Mr. Pentti Poukka turned the line to the right, when the Finnish society was turning to the left. The distribution decreased even if the Uusi Suomi company tried to hide it. The result of the company turned red in 1966. At the same time the new owner of Helsingin Sanomat, Mr. Aatos Erkko re-formed his company with great success. The distribution of Helsingin Sanomat climbed to half a million, when the real distribution of Uusi Suomi was about 60.000. In 1970 the owners of Uusi Suomi tried to turn the trend, but without re-sult. Only in 1976, when Uusi Suomi was near bankruptcy, the leading Finnish companies decided to save the traditional conservative newspaper as a part of the fight against the radical left movement. Uusi Suomi continued through 1980’s with relative success, but mainly due to the profits of the economic newspaper Kauppalehti. Then a too expensive in-vestment in a printing machine together with a wider economic recession led to the death of Uusi Suomi 1991. The main reason for this was according to the thesis the differences between the competitors in the ownership and leadership. Helsingin Sanomat was owned by the Erkko family and had strong, systematic managers. The main owners of Uusi Suomi -company were many large Finnish companies and their interest in their newspaper was not vital. The managers had limited knowledge in the media business and a stop and go -policy was common. Uusi Suomi was also until 1976 the main organ of the National Coalition Party and after that ”independent bourgeoisie”, while Helsingin Sanomat was inde-pendently liberal. The potential of its distribution was therefore much larger. Uu-si Suomi was relatively more over-regional than Helsingin Sanomat, but Helsingin Sanomat had at least ten times larger distribution than its competitor in the Hel-sinki area. With a market share of 7 percent of the households in the capital area Uusi Suomi had small possibilities to get local advertisement.

This article-based dissertation examines the position and predicament of Finland-Swedish literature in Sweden from several perspectives and aspects. Its main focus is on contemporary literature and its reception, but it also contains historical discounts and comparisons. The compiled thesis as a whole, as well as the introduction chapter and the separate sub-studies presented in the four published scientific articles, is defined by an overall sociological perspective of literature. This means that the thesis adopts several theoretical and methodological approaches – quantitative as well as qualitative – and collects theoretical inspiration and frameworks from numerous traditions and disciplines. The introduction chapter gives a broad overview of the subject and presents the historical background of the problem of the Finland-Swedish literature’s difficulties in Sweden. It raises the question of why this matter is crucial for the Finland-Swedish literature, and, by extension, how the problem is thought to be connected to the survival chance of the minority per se. The introduction chapter also elaborates on the methodological and theoretical points of view of the articles, as well as summarizes and discusses the results of the studies. Following Charlotta af Hällström-Reijonens concept “the Swedish publisher-argument”, I examine in Article 1 and Article 2 how authors Ulla-Lena Lundberg and Lars Sund, respectively, relate to an perceived ignorance in Sweden of the Finland-Swedish minority and of Finland as a bilingual nation in general. In narratological close-readings, using the theoretical findings of Jonathan Culler in his essay “The Novel and the Nation”, I argue that both Lundberg and Sund use this unawareness as themes in their novels, and that the novels addresses not one particular, but different categories of readers – both national and international – at the same time but in different manners. Furthermore, I analyse the reception of the novels in Swedish and Finnish newspapers. While the perspective in Article 1 and Article 2 is qualitative, a quantitative approach is used in Article 3. Here I map the publishing of Finland-Swedish literature in sub-editions by Swedish book publishers during the years 2000–2016. 6 Taking into account a widespread discourse claiming that Finland-Swedish literature has had a hard time passing the threshold to the Swedish market in recent years compared to earlier years, I chart the statistics of the publication year by year and make comparisons with historical numbers. I also map statistics of the actual allocation of genres among the publication in Swedish sub-editions of Finland-Swedish literature. Article 4 combines quantitative and qualitative approaches. Here I investigate the representation of Finland-Swedish literature in literary histories of Swedish literature, by mapping out the actual space and proportion of the Finland-Swedish literature by counting pages and lines. This is followed by close readings to understand how this literature is represented in the works. I examine how “methodological nationalism”, a theoretical concept picked up by the humanities from social sciences, operates explicitly as well as implicitly in the literary histories, and I analyse its implications for the representation of the Finland-Swedish literature. Altogether the dissertation’s findings and conclusions draw a complex and compounded picture of the position and predicament of Finland-Swedish literature in Sweden. It refutes several myths and assumptions in the widespread historical discourse concerning Finland-Swedish literature’s presuppositions and status in Sweden. It shows in reality how certain novels manage to address different kinds of readers at the same time but in different ways, that literary critics in Swedish newspapers tend not to be bothered by the language in the novels which contains fennicisms and other deviations from the Swedish language used in Sweden, that the amount of books published in sub-editions in Sweden seems to not have decreased in recent years, but that Swedish publishers tend to go for authorships that are already established and acknowledged home in Finland, and that the representation of Finland-Swedish literature in literary histories in Sweden is surprisingly good counting the actual space in proportion to the space of the Swedish literature from Sweden, but also that Finland-Swedish literature, while included in the works, also in the same time is excluded from the main Swedish literary canon by being placed in what I call a kind of “cultural preserves”, separated from the Swedish majority literature in the literary histories. Key words: Finland-Swedish literature, the Swedish publisher-argument, Swedish ignorance, sociology of literature, methodological nationalism, literary reception, reception studies

The main task of this doctoral dissertation is to ascertain how museums are practiced and defined through social practices. This has been done in three research articles, in which I have discussed how some people, various tasks and museums have been valued as more or less ‘museal’ than others in the Finnish museum field of the late 20th century. The empirical material included in this study consists of biographical interviews, in which museum professionals reminisced about their careers in the Finnish museum field, and responses to a questionnaire, in which museum visitors shared their museum memories. The former part is larger in size and has also been emphasised more in my analysis. Both parts of the material are products of a Finnish Museum History Project, carried out between 2005 and 2011. The questionnaire ‘Minun museomuistoni’ (My Museum Memories) was produced by the Finnish Literature Archive, and the interviews were carried out by various volunteers from the museum field. The material covers the last decades of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st century. The time period brought many changes to museum work practices and to the ways museums function in a society, the effects of which are still present in today’s museum field. For example, museums adopted marketing and different digital tools, which meant that the professional skills of those working in museums were challenged. The roles and responsibilities of museums were also subjected to new debates. The museum field has and needs shared standards and guidelines, but in this study I recognise the plurality of museum practices and interpret them within practice theory framework as things that people do that have shared meanings. Thus, the things that people do in museums are controlled by official rules, but they are also a part of tradition and have personal meaning in the lives of the people who carry them out. I discovered that the practices and their shared meanings can create hierarchies that define whose work is more ‘museal’, which in turn can influence the professional identity of their practitioners: the ‘real museum people’ are those who do ‘real museum work’. A change in everyday museum practices is also part of something bigger: a change in ideologies and museum views, and a change in the working community and its dynamics. Studying museum practices as social and cultural practices and lived phenomena allows us to examine more critically where our different ideas of museums come from and how they influence the way museums function.