Lauri Honko

Lauri Olavi Honko (born in Hanko 6 March 1932, died in Turku 15 July 2002) was a professor of folklore studies and comparative religion.

Life and work

Honko was a disciple of Martti Haavio. The title of his doctoral dissertation was Krankheitsprojektile. Untersuchung über eine urtümliche Krankheitserklärung (Disease Projectiles: A Study of the Primitive Explanation of Disease, 1959) at the University of Helsinki and developed a special typology for the analysis of ethnographic data in folk medicine. Here he put the Finnish folk tradition explanation of illness and healing into a global perspective and found distinct features and differences in geographical regions.

Honko’s seminal work, Geisterglaube in Ingermanland (Belief in Spirits in Ingria) was very influential for Finnish folklorists because it set apart the old and new science of religion. In this work he used new insights from social anthropology, phenomenology of religion, social psychology and sociology. Honko also interpreted the experience of guardian spirits in Ingrian peasant society by developing a genre-analytic and role-model theory.