Ivar Paulson – eesti religioonietnoloog paguluses

This article treats the life of the ethnologist and historian of religion Ivar Paulson (1922–1966) and his contributions to research. After he graduated from upper secondary school in Estonia, the Second World War cut short his studies in ethnology, archaeology and history at the University of Tartu. In 1944, he fled the second Soviet wave to Germany, where he received a PhD in 1946 from the University of Hamburg for his work on the economic ethnology of the Khanty people. In 1950, he moved to Sweden where he studied ethnology at Stockholm University. Starting in 1952, Paulson studied comparative history of religions at the same school. His supervisor there was the well-regarded Swedish religious historian Ernst Arbman (1891–1959), who exerted a significant influence on Paulson’s development into a scholar. Under Arbman, Paulson began studying spirituality among northern Eurasian peoples, defending his second PhD on that topic in 1958. Paulson would continue to study shamanism and animism of northern European peoples as his main research field. In 1958, Paulson was given tenure as associate professor in the history of religions at Stockholm University. In the 1950s and 1960s, Paulson published many studies analysing how various northern Eurasian peoples conceived of the soul, using Arbman’s dualistic pluralism model. One of Paulson’s favourite topics was religious ideas related to the forest and hunting, and he published numerous specific works devoted to this. Throughout his works, he proceeded from the thesis that a lifestyle shaped in a specific ecological niche influenced the development of the type of religion. Of the peoples of northern Eurasia, he was most interested in Finno-Ugric peoples, publishing thematic and general treatments of their religions. He saw the peoples as a cultural bridge between Siberian and northern European cultures. He was especially intrigued by Permian peoples – the Komi and Udmurts – where he emphasized the importance of large forests and rivers and the relatively weighty role of hunting and fishing in their life up until recently, which is also reflected in their religion. In Paulson’s view, Baltic-Finnic peoples were not well-suited to play the role of such a cultural intermediary due to their early adoption of agriculture and Christianity and other Western (especially Germanic) influences, and he wrote about them mainly in regional religious overviews or comparative religious phenomenology studies. Before his death, he also managed to compete a manuscript on the old Estonian folk religion, which was published in book form in 1966. In it, he builds on his principle, emphasized in previous studies, that religion cannot be separated from culture as a whole. His many comparisons with other Finno-Ugric cultures seem like a breath of fresh air on the backdrop of Estonia’s previous religious studies. Paulson is considered a leading authority and specialist on northern Eurasian religions. At his untimely death, Paulson was also working on a larger work on comparative religious studies, which was not published.