FINLAND & PALESTINE Proceedings of a Joint Workshop

earlier. This connection manifested itself as frequent contacts
between Finnish and German scholars in the 1920s and the
1930s (see e.g. Aalto 1971 and Karttunen 1990; Isotalo 1994 on
structures of interpretation). It is also worth keeping in mind
that it was to Berlin that Landtman sent Granqvist for the archives.
If one looks at the Finnish classical Orientalism of the era
through Edward Said's criticism of Orientalism, Finnish classical
Orientalism seems structurally uniform with Euroean discourse.
In Said's study, however, his choice of material restricts
the European Orientalist discourse to British and French Orientalism
only. The discourse formations of Finnish Orientalism,
the origin of which is mainly in German Orientalism, produced
diverse information relying on diverse premises, structures of
interpretation and methodological solutions (lsotalo 1994).
This allows one further to conclude that Orientalist discourse
in Germany was not unified. A careful study of Orienta list discourse
in Finland gives reason to further criticize Said's delimitation
of material in Orientalism (1978) - criticism that Edward
Said responded to in works that followed the book which can,
from a modern-day viewpoint, be considered a classic. The
view on German Orientalism opened up by Granqvist's study of
Palestine shows that European Orienta list discourse was not
monolithic.
Granqvist returned to Helsinki after her research period in Artas.
She was soon to find out that Gunnar Landtman and the
other 'Sirs of the Senate' did not approve of her new topic and
her methodological solutions. Landtman suggested that
Granqvist's topic and problem-setting were 'against common
research norms' (Widen 1989, 27-9). Since Granqvist was denied
the doctoral degree under Gunnar Landtman's supervision
at the University of Helsinki, she resorted to Edward Westermarck,
Professor of Philosophy at Abo Akademi.
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