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Record W4411707675 · doi:10.1007/978-3-031-87935-7_13

On Finnish Sauna Culture, History and Herstory

2025· book-chapter· en· W4411707675 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Kaarina Kailo

Bibliographic record

VenueSpringer studies on populism, identity politics and social justice · 2025
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicDiversity and Impact of Dance
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHistory

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This chapter concludes the book’s comparative research by focusing on the Finnish sauna in light of its affinities with the ritualistic elements discussed in the context of the other saunas and sweat lodge practices. While the sauna culture does not appear to share all of the most archaic aspects of Indigenous North American or Galician saunas of the Castro culture, its rich lore of guardian spirits and sauna goddesses commands attention. The chapter presents the primal elements of the Finnish sauna with its past and present shamanic and animistic elements, its herbs and gifting practices and the idiosyncronies of vihta s, whisks for healing and holistic massage. The focus on saunas as sites of meditation, liminality, imitative magic and ancestor worship serve to inspire other sauna scholars to consider similar notions in other cultures. The chapter includes brief references to sauna and sweat lodge among Canadian Finns, who tend to retain more primitive features of their home country’s culture than Finns back in Finland. As sauna guardian spirits and goddesses have turned out to be important protectors of the sauna and sweat institutions, and they have previously not received attention apart from my own books, I list them here, followed by a brief description of their spheres of activity. As one example, we can reconstruct the pre-Christian role of Hongatar/Hongotar with her slightly different names through cross-cultural mythology with a focus on Bear Goddesses elsewhere. The figure also takes us far back into Greek and Roman mythology where there are similar Goddesses linked with rebirth (Artemis, the Mistress of Animals, for example). As we learn from the Greeks, the story of bear Goddesses in their dens, such as Callisto, has been compared to tale of the sun that spends the winter in the depths of the Earth only to give new life to hibernating animals.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.049
Threshold uncertainty score0.098

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.004
Science and technology studies0.0220.014
Scholarly communication0.0080.004
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0090.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.053
GPT teacher head0.326
Teacher spread0.273 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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