Ethnologia Fennica

Renovating Traditional Craft

Linn Sigrid Bratland — 2024-09-17

This review article evaluates theories and on the entanglement of matter and meaning, elaborating and exploring the potential outcomes of craft in research processes. Exemplified through a collaborative exploration between me as a silversmith and programmers at the Mechatronic Innovation Lab (MIL) in Grimstad, Norway, I explore, through these theories, how renovation work served as a diffraction apparatus in exploring the relation between traditional craft and emerging mechatronic technologies in light of the concept of sustainability. Renovation work is, in this setting, understood as cutting, filing, grinding and polishing, often the final but nevertheless essential step in a production process. This type of surface work accentuates here how it is possible to not only see traditional crafts as carriers of intangible value linked to identity but also as a type of knowledge powerful of providing insights into the entanglement of matter and meaning. Through uniting different knowledge systems, like the subjective knowledge in the situated understanding of material, tools, setting and processes, and more objective knowledge, typically for observation, readings and purely cognitive activities, renovation work exposed, in this case, some of the limitations of automation and provided unexpected findings on the relationship between body and machine.

Materialities of ‘Mushroom-Leather’

Stefanie Mallon — 2024-09-17

The ever more apparent unsustainable and unethical effects of the garment industry have caused consumers to face the dilemma of reconciling their interest in consumption with acting responsibly. The use of new materials in production, for example garments made from fungi, offers one way for consumers to resolve this. Fungi are being imbued with almost mythical attributes as a beneficial organism with transformative powers in many narratives – including ones from the fashion industry. Products are being promoted as if they were already widely available. However, the available information is ambivalent and might raise some doubt as to the material’s market readiness and/or its overall sustainable effect. For this paper, I will analyse the information economy, celebratory narratives and mushroom materials from experimental fungus-growing experiments. I will examine closely the range of materialities around the phenomenon of fungus ‘leather’.

A Life-story of a Professorship

Ulla Kallberg — 2024-09-17

A Comprehensive Toolkit to Qualitative Research in Cultural Studies

Elisa Kurtti — 2024-09-17

Family life within the making of a welfare state

Lina Metsämäki — 2024-09-17

New study explores the formation of vernacular garden culture in province of Kainuu in northeastern Finland

Kati Maria Henriikka Mikkola — 2024-09-17

A much-needed handbook on university pedagogy in ethnology, anthropology, and related fields

Arja Turunen — 2024-09-17

Editorial

Maija Johanna Mäki — 2024-09-17

Dyeing with Natural Colorants

Anete Karlsone — 2024-09-17

This paper explores the use of dyeing with natural dyes in research, as well as a tool for retaining normality of life in crisis situations. Nowadays craftsmanship skills, and especially traditional crafts can double as a research object and a research tool. Dyeing fabrics with natural dyes is a traditional crafts skill which entails a high potential for creativity, and which is still practised in Latvia today. In the past, this skill often became a creative way for retaining the quality of daily life during wars and other crisis situations. Nowadays natural dyeing is not only a means of creative self-expression through traditional crafts, but the process also helps to study the value of colours, through understanding the complexity or simplicity of obtaining a particular colour, as well as the resulting colour palette, etc. The author of this paper has used her dyeing skills in researching various ethnographic sources from the 18th – 20th centuries. Dyeing experiments help to adequately assess descriptions of fabric colours in written sources from various historical periods, and to interpret historical guides about ancient dyeing techniques and methods.

Co-crafting the Meaning of Potter’s Craft

Ewa Klekot — 2024-09-17

The article is based on ethnography and the autoethnography of making. It presents an anthropological reflection on pottery craft as a way of life in a 21st-century village in Poland. The individual case of a village pottery shop in the region of Masuria is in focus, a place located in the north of the country. The exchange of knowledge and a participatory mode characterised the ethnographic enterprise. The author’s approach combines critical reflections on the social construction of folk art and craft in Poland with discursive renderings of craft-related bodily knowledge and the embodied recognition of materials and their affordances. Highlighting the alienating potential of the folk representation of the rural, it follows the meanings of pottery craft having been accommodated in the lifeworld of a modern village potter. The pottery workshop is presented both as an environment where skills and techniques are mastered as well as where experimentation happens and knowledge is built. The author focuses on recognising features of the world that are only made available through practicing the potter’s craft. The craft is also a way of establishing meaningful links with the local environment of the potter.

Voices and Practices in Research

Aino Laiho — 2024-09-17