Ethnologia Fennica

Forces and Tensions in Cultural Policy

Sanna Karimäki-Nuutinen — 2023-12-20

Living Uncertainty

Päivi Leinonen — 2023-12-20

The Relations and Beyond

Alicja Staniszewska — 2023-12-20

Suomen Antropologisen Seuran Relations and Beyond: Biennaalikonferenssi 2023 oli Lapin yliopiston arktisen antropologian tutkimusryhmän isännöimä tapahtuma Rovaniemellä Suomessa. Konferenssissa tarkasteltiin suhteiden merkitystä antropologiassa, käsitteen lähestyessä eri näkökulmista ja tunnustaen sen monitahoisuutta ja merkitystä alan viimeaikaisen kehityksen edessä. Konferenssi kokosi yhteen antropologeja ja muita tutkijoita eri metodologisista ja teoreettisista koulukunnista pohtimaan ihmisten, eläinten, henkien ja muiden olentojen välistä muuttuvaa dynamiikkaa 32 paneelissa.

Hope beyond Hope

Galina Kallio — 2023-12-20

Hope for a better future has become a survival strategy within contemporary Western societies that are drifting through polycrises. The concept of hope evokes future orientedness, suggests positive emotions and creates spaces for dreaming. But what if, instead of hope, it is hopelessness that moves people to strive for living a better life and leads to, in the words of Macy and Johnstone, the great turning? In this article, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork to bring forth journeys of regeneratively oriented farmers who (have started to) build a radically different life by pursuing livelihoods through diversified small-scale farming. By analysing how hope is manifested in the work and everyday lives of the farmers, I introduce an understanding of hope as action and show how hope in the context of the studied farming practices materialized through cultivating the lands, inspiring others, and reciprocating the hope of other species. I argue that conceptualizing hope as action suggests a different kind of temporality, one that is (literally) grounded in intergenerational farming landscapes: hope as action brings into play both the hope(s) and the hopelessness(es) of the past that impacts the actions of the present and of the future that orients the actions of today. As farmers and (their) soils are being rapidly mobilized into vessels of hope for their potential to sequester atmospheric carbon, understanding the kind of action hope invokes (or doesn’t) is important to better understand whose hopes are being mobilized through regenerative agriculture and how and why these hopes are mobilized.

Landscapes of Hope

Kristiina Korjonen-Kuusipuro — 2023-12-20

Our article aims to offer counter-narratives to the risks and hardships of digital youth by scrutinizing how hope is present in youth’s lives in different online environments and everyday practices. We trace young people’s landscapes of hope by asking what kind of hopes and ideas of the digital future young people have about online environments and how they practice and cherish hope. To achieve these objectives, we draw on both qualitative and quantitative data produced in 2021–2022 among Finnish ninth graders. Our findings emphasize that young people’s online landscapes of hope are oriented toward the future, and they are in a constant state of co-becoming with different kinds of contexts, agencies, practices, and intensities.

Hope in Hopelessness

Pia Olsson — 2023-12-20

The question we address in this article concerns the kind of affective practices that people adopt in order to negotiate the various emotions aroused by global crises, and how these negotiations allow room for hope. In doing so, we focus on two recent major upheavals, namely the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia’s war in Ukraine, and on how they have affected people’s everyday lives. Both crises were documented in two rapid-response questionnaires organised by the Finnish Literature Society. Keeping daily routines as normal as possible, prepping and preparing, sending and receiving memes and other humorous materials via social media, and becoming involved in grass-roots actions and activism were incorporated into the descriptions of everyday life. As such, these actions gave people the feeling that they were doing something and that they had some control over what was happening around them. Here, we discuss these affective practices as a way of allowing room for hope and engendering hopefulness for a better future among those taking the action, and those in their sphere of influence. In acquiring agency, people were negotiating hope for a better future despite the uncertain situation.

‘Memory Talk’ in a Museum in a Contested Land

Neža Čebron Lipovec — 2023-12-20

The article reflects on a participatory research initiative involving place attachment and heritage discourses, carried out in 2012–2014 in the multicultural and ethnically contested city of Koper/Capodistria (Slovenia). The initiative engaged local inhabitants in a set of ‘memory evenings’ dedicated to exploring personal and collective memories and place attachment to sites in the city’s old town. Although it was meant to promote participatory approaches in the conservation of built heritage and stimulate inclusive heritage discourses, it also had a strong psychological effect for local inhabitants. Initially conceived as a combination of the group interview and focus group methods, it evolved into an approach comparable to the discourse of ‘memory talk’ (Degnen 2005). The article analyses the past experience, focusing particularly on its criticalities, and points to how it is currently being developed.

Ilmar Talve, Emigré Ethnologist from Estonia

Marleen Metslaid — 2023-12-20

The article focuses on Ilmar Talve (1919–2007) and his exile in Sweden, 1945–1959. The complex nature of an émigré position in a scholarly field is analysed from several angles. I explore how Talve adapted to the Swedish academic field while he was working at the Institute of Folklife Research, led by Sigurd Erixon. I am also interested in how his understanding of ethnology evolved in Esonia as a student of the WWII era and in Sweden after the war. Talve’s efforts to pursue and develop Estonian ethnology while in exile are then examined in more detail. On the one hand, it shows the influence of the contemporary national discourse on research. In some sense, it was an unrewarding dead end, but even as such, it describes the political and societal conditionality of pursuing science at the time. On the other hand, it raises the question of the influence of Erixon’s theoretical views on Talve, and therefore, on Finnish ethnology. Talve implemented his plans in Finland as a professor at the University of Turku. The article also explores the important role played by Finnish scholars for both exile ethnologists in Sweden and Estonian ethnographers in the Soviet Union, and it reflects on Talve’s place in this relationship.

Affect in Online Hate Speech

Linda Huldén — 2023-12-20

The Old Men and the Sea: Phenomenology and Historical Archive Material

Art Leete — 2023-12-20

Editorial

Viktorija L.A. Čeginskas — 2023-12-20