Ethnologia Fennica

Editorial

Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto — 2023-06-08

Towards New Forms of Engagement

Coppélie Cocq — 2023-06-08

Birth of the Sleepless Land

Simon Halberg — 2023-06-08

In this paper, I track the arrival of the sugar beet in Scandinavia and explore the technical changes, ecological implications and new social arrangements that followed in its wake. Based on ethnographic records and other historical material dealing with agricultural practices, I argue that an ethnological view that takes the agrarian landscape and the organisation of social life together as one analytical totality may be useful for addressing an important question: What are the implications in everyday life of an energy transition into—and out of—fossil-fuelled food production? The analysis demonstrates that the sugar beet arrived along with fossil fuels, steam ploughing, commercial fertiliser, migrant labour and agricultural consultants in a large infrastructural complex that significantly impacted the landscape. These material elements mirrored the historical victory of bourgeois industrial logic over peasant forms of life whose ecological cornerstone was the fallow land. Agricultural land became sleepless in the Anthropocene—and rural life became fossilised.

Experiencing a Lament Performance in a Mire

Pauliina Latvala-Harvilahti — 2023-06-08

The article addresses the topical issue of environmental emotions from the perspective of individual experiences of environmental art reception. The research focuses on how the audience experienced lament performances by singer and musician Noora Kauppila in natural mires in Finland, and it asks the research question: What kinds of environmental emotions have laments in the mire provoked, and how are emotions contextualised in audience interviews? Art performances in the mire have become part of a growing international mire trend in the 21st century. I understand mires as a living heritage that reflects the diversity and inter-connectedness of heritage elements (e.g. practices and knowledge concerning nature) experienced by community members and individuals. The effectiveness of art (lament performances) is linked to reception research, which has not previously been applied to mire art performances. In the debate on the impact of art, the experiential perspective has been marginal. In the interview material, individuals’ experiences reveal strong emotions about the endangered environment. The lament performance transformed a mire into a culturally appropriated space for the collective and individual processing of emotions regarding a fragile natural environment. The interviewees reported unwanted changes in their own surroundings, and their feelings about the changes were reflected in the observed decline in the habitats of birds and other mire animals. In a broad sense, the article offers insights into the meanings and changes of an individual’s relationship with nature. The research evidence suggests that a communal context is needed to deal with environmental emotions, especially negative emotions like sorrow, hatred and grief. Likewise, the individual accounts reveal a need for a communal change in abandoning unsustainable lifestyles. The article is based on research that has been undertaken as part of the ‘Mire Trend’ research project at the University of Eastern Finland.

The Material Agency of Crystals in New Spirituality

Tenno Teidearu — 2023-06-08

This paper studies crystals in New Spirituality in Estonia not only as things, or objects, used in certain practices, but also as agentive materials. My research participants, who wear crystals, take their material properties seriously, finding the properties to have supportive qualities, according to esoteric interpretation. Nevertheless, things and materials, objects and minerals, are never permanent; they have material lives of their own. Sometimes minerals lose their gloss, crack, break or just become lost. Physical decay and displacement, which are the focus of this paper, have meaning-making potential, which my interlocutors interpret within the framework of the esoteric. Their perception of these minerals can be understood in posthumanist and new materialist terms. The paper uses the concept of material agency to demonstrate how natural processes of decay acquire cultural meaning by connecting material properties and human interpretation.

_{This work was supported by an Estonian Research Council grant (PUT number PRG670), ‘Vernacular Interpretations of the Incomprehensible: Folkloristic Perspectives Towards Uncertainty’.}

Multiple Worlds of Sámi Research

Sanna Valkonen — 2023-06-08

In this text I discuss how Sámi ways of knowing could be woven into the practices of Sámi research. I introduce three stories of three research projects as examples of attempts to overcome the complex and multifaceted challenges that Sámi society is currently facing. These examples place the Sámi perception of the world and its ontological and epistemological premises and practices at the core of knowledge practices. Sámi knowledge and ways of knowing the world are jointly created and shared in the every-day activities of communicating and acting, being in dialogue with the environment, caring for it, and engaging with the principle that a human being is not the master of nature.

The Fight for Better Rules

Ellen Hertz — 2023-06-08

Rules are a basic property of human societies and yet they occupy a historically contested place in the modern narrative about what makes us human. Rules are infinitely malleable and ambivalent, at the same time a reflection of power inequities, a mechanism for reinforcing these inequities and a means to challenge them. Transgressing them can both create new spaces of freedom and reinforce the norms that they seek to establish. Reframing rules as potentialities helps break this spell. It allows us to ask not what we should do but what we can do, and to take the measure of the limits of our actions, as humans and as social scientists.

Dreaming Cultural Heritage

Pasi Alfred Enges — 2023-06-08

Practicing Museums

Lizette Gradén — 2023-06-08

Rhizomatic LGBTIQ+ Activism in St. Petersburg

Riikka Taavetti — 2023-06-08

Resistance through the Temporality, Placement, and Modification of Street Art in Scotland’s Streets

Nicolas Le Bigre — 2023-06-08

Through a methodology of ethnographic walking and photographic documentation this article considers and redefines street art within the contexts of the disciplines of Ethnology and Folklore. By considering wide-ranging Scottish examples of public-facing interventions through the concepts of temporality, placement and location, and modification and defacement, this article contributes to a wider scholarly and general discussion on the role and importance of street art in our everyday lives. It argues for the significance and usefulness of these conceptual frameworks, which not only link street art in Scotland to street art around the world, but also reveal the common hybrid physical and online nature of much street art. The examples included of public interventions are almost all connected through the theme of resistance, whether personal, local, national, or international. Examples explored relate to the Scottish Independence Referendum, anti-gentrification campaigning, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, trans rights activism, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Cycloactivism in Mexico City

Raúl Acosta García — 2023-06-08

Cycling in Mexico City is dangerous. But over the last two decades it has become less so. New cycleways, a large public bicycle-sharing scheme, various government cycling promotion projects and an abundance of official signalling demanding respect for cyclists have made bicycles visible as worthy vehicles on city streets. For cycloactivists, however, such improvements are not enough. Cyclists are frequently harassed, attacked or run over by motorists. Cycloactivists thus demand more and better cycleways as well as increased measures to address injustices in mobility issues across the city. They do so through protests, information campaigns, public performances and academic debates, and crucially, by cycling through city streets. This means that they use their bodies as symbols, to highlight their vulnerability. Along the way, they often break existing traffic rules to highlight how unfair they are and to draw attention to other demands. I refer to their efforts as experiential cycloactivism, which highlights cyclists making themselves vulnerable as a means of denouncing illegitimate rules and policies that need to be changed. I conclude the analysis by suggesting that their style of rule-breaking is a type of ritual with which they seek to improve the city, not burn it down.