Rereading Finno-Ugrian religion from a gender point of view

The male "normal subject" underlying the prior religious descriptions has been constructed in two intertwining processes. Firstly, the scholar, by focusing on men's ideas and practices in the culture he has studied, has created concepts, models and a classificatory system forreligious phenomena, which tends to exclude and distort the phenomena which are based on women's perhaps differing ideas and practices. Secondly, these ideas and practices have been filtered through the male scholar's frame of reference. His ethnocentrism and preconceived ideas as well as the tendency to view his object of study in hierarchical terms has coloured the phenomena studied as well as his overall religious constructs. The challenge of the gender perspective on religious studies is to deconstruct the male normal subject and to elaborate more nuanced and comprehensive models and classificatory systems which also would encompass women's religious ideas and practices. The author illustrates the issue at hand by analysing the overviews in some central handbooks and entries in encyclopaedias on the Finno-Ugrian religions as well as the central monographs in the series Suomen suvun uskonnot (The Religions of the Finnic Peoples) on which these overviews are largely based