The two rhetorical approaches to Finnish Lapland are the mythical and the miserable produced inthe realms of tourism and politics respectively. The locals comply with neither. In this research thenotion of beauty is used in seeking to understand how life is perceived as good-enough byparticular villagers of a remote northern village. The scope of this research is novel theoreticallyand methodologically. The combination of everyday life aesthetics and education outside ofinstitutional art education is rare and the method of data collection, collective correspondence, iscreated for the purposes of this research. Education is approached in this research as our perpetualgrowing in everyday life. Education and aesthetics receive support from sociology and humangeography as well as environmental ethics.
The theoretical frame leans on Ludwig Wittgenstein's notions of language use: language iswoven into the actions of ordinary life, used not only to describe but to act on and transform theworld. The objectives of this research in brief are to 1)complement art-centered definitions of thenotion of beauty, 2)argue for the significance of diversity of habitable places, and 3)to contributepositively to the prevailingly negative research rhetoric on life in northern Finnish villages. Theseobjectives are tackled with research tasks unfolding as descriptive, interpretative andmethodological respectively: 1)of what kind is perceived beauty in everyday life led in a smallnorthern village? 2)What is the significance of considering beauty in everyday life? 3)What kindof data does correspondence yield on perceived beauty?
There are four women participating in this research. They exchanged letters on the topic ofeveryday beauty once a month for a year. Together they comprise a group that varies in ages,education, employment, family structures and the length of stay in the village. What they share isa view of their home village as a good-enough place to live in. The main data consists of 44 letterssupplemented by 10 interviews.
The letters have been read as one correspondence and as four individual sets of letters.Recurring themes, the temporal and spatial evolving of them as well as the performative aspectsof writing have been addressed. Beauty has been found to reside in an iterative linguistic processrather than fixed in objects or even themes. Beauty articulates condensations of significantrelations the perceiving individual holds in her life. As such beauty in everyday life is relational,active and pertains to steering of one's life.
The ability to relate to the environment in which you live in a personally meaningful andcreative way is found to be facilitated by an environment of diversity. Rather than keeping therural North habited I argue for ensuring that it is habitable for those who wish to live there. Thismeans realizing that people craft good-enough lives in different ways relative to their everydaylife environments.
