Ethnologia Fennica

Culture as Rules

Eeva Berglund — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

In Search of Ethnological Research on Sustainable Foodways

Håkan Jönsson — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Obituary

Blanka Henriksson, Lena Marander-Eklund, Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, Tytti Steel — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Ethnological Fieldwork. New Fields and Forms.

Jenni Rinne — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

An Intellectually Bold Volume on Ethnography with a Twist

Ida Tolgensbakk — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

The Definition, Preserving and Guarding of Cultural Property and Heritage during the Second World War

Niklas Huldén — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Kirjaarvostelu teoksesta

Legnér, Mattias. 2022. Värden Att Värna : Kulturminnesvård som statsintresse i Norden vid tiden för Andra världskriget. Göteborg ; Stockholm: Makadam förlag. urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-462299

Cultural Knowledge in a Changing World – Research, Teaching and Cultural Encounters

Helena Laukkoski — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

RE:22 35th Nordic Ethnology and Folklore Conference in Reykjavík 13-16 June 2022

Inés Matres, Shikoh Shiraiwa — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Negotiating Sustainabilities

Alexandra Hammer — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Organic agriculture aims at enabling sustainable food economies. But agricultural temporalities and practices do not necessarily align with demands and schedules posed by packers, processors, or retailers – a detachment that complicates the actors’ pursuits of sustainability. This paper builds on participant observation during nine workshops with actors along the German organic food supply chain. Viewing these events through an ethnographic lens reveals the complex web of agricultural, political, and economic constraints that needs to be navigated from farm to supermarket. Situated at the intersection of more-than-human anthropology and anthropology of time, this article asks how actors involved in the production, distribution, and marketing of organic foods negotiate and (re)imagine sustainability. What obstacles do they see, and whose agencies and fates do they consider within their negotiations? How do these narrations and practices point to possible reconfigurations of sustainability? The analysis sheds light on sustainability’s emergent nature and its relations to prevailing (global) power imbalances and wealth gaps. Looking at the organic food supply chain through the lens of time frames and rhythms allows for a conceptualization of sustainability as a situated endeavor, variable across time and space and deeply dependent on nonhuman agencies and specific situational contexts. Following globalized connections further demonstrates how sustainability must include disadvantaged and exploited people within and across national borders.

Transforming Foodways

Jessica Jungell-Michelsson, Minna Autio — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Food companies are central actors in driving sustainability transformations at the interface of production and consumption. Still, only limited attention has been directed to how sustainability-related meanings are being created within various food industry organizations. In this article, we explore the characteristics of the sustainability sensemaking and -giving processes among food companies and analyze how these processes influence sustainability-related transformations of current foodways. Our analysis is based on qualitative data (transcripts and notes) from interviews with managers from 15 Finnish food companies. By using organizational sensemaking literature, we shed light on the companies’ cultural talk and social meaning creations of sustainability. Our findings indicate that food companies’ sustainability sensemaking is an intra- and inter-organizational, social process occurring between the individual and organizational spheres of the organizations. Food companies act as sensegivers, as they actively communicate with stakeholders to achieve the position of a knowledgeable sustainability forerunner. Sustainability has been normalized in the talk and action of food companies, but the discursive space offered by them is limited to weak sustainability perspectives. While socio-material transgressions of current foodways may emerge, we argue that a shift from communicating and commercializing sustainability to a focus on ecological material aspects and ecological sensemaking is essential for transforming foodways towards strong sustainability.

Storying Sensuous Atmospheres of Peaches and Wheat

Will LaFleur — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Policy initiatives, research, and professional advice concerned with sustainable food systems remain largely stuck conceptualising individual consumers as rational subjects in need of technocratic interventions to induce behaviour change. While critical approaches do account for the relevance of socio-ecological, political, and economic circumstances, the affective, sensuous, and im/material relations — sensuous atmospheres — that are indissoluble from everyday life are either left out, or effectively conceptualised as the inert, given background on which life plays out. Taking the imagination as a key political participant in the struggle for a more just and sustainable world, this article aims to ‘story’ the sensuous atmospheres of everyday life in agricultural practice, making sensuous atmospheres visible as the sensory-material substance that socio-ecological, political, and economic formations take. Drawing from sensuous (auto)ethnographic encounters on a farm in northern Italy, I ask: what kinds of stories are the sensuous atmospheres of techno-industrial and alternative agricultural practices made of, what kinds of stories do they tell, and how might they help to imagine new horizons of possibility in the making of more sustainable food systems? I begin the article with a discussion problematising food systems and the inadequate approaches often used to render them sustainable. I then conceptualise the notion of ‘storying sensuous atmospheres’, presenting the sensory ethnographic material in the style of ‘sensuous scholarship’ in which the fieldwork is simultaneously analysed and evocatively storied. I conclude the article by suggesting that the storying of sensuous atmospheres is one strategy to precipitate new horizons of imagining — in food systems and beyond — a more sustainable world.

Enough Fish in the Sea?

Karin Sandell — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Fish farming is a hot topic in the local press of the Jakobstad region on the west coast of Finland. In 2017, a local fisher established an open sea fish farming company to produce locally farmed fish with the aim of meeting the increasing demand for domestically produced fish. Open sea fish farming is debated due to its environmental impact. The establishment of the fish farm has been challenged and defended in several readers’ letters from local politicians and officials, local activists, researchers, and the company’s founder himself. The debate letters are filled with data on the environmental impact from nutrient emissions, and other measurable factors. However, the debate is not just about feed pellets, fish faeces, and the organic enrichment of bottom sediments—it is about the emotional relationship to the sea in a region forged by the Gulf of Bothnia. With affect theory as a starting point, I aim to analyse how notions of sustainability and sustainable foodways are expressed in a local newspaper debate about fish farming. How do the two sides of the debate present their views of sustainability?

“Ha! Suck on that Corona, I Found Something to Do”

Inés Matres — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

In the spring of 2020 young people were living in an exceptional period of isolation, messiness and emotional turmoil. The pandemic situation in Finland serves as the background of this study, which focuses on participation and the voice of adolescents in times of crisis. My inquiry is based on 75 diaries collected by diverse museums and archives and originally created by 11- to 18-year-olds during remote schooling, and my aim is to ascertain how they were invited in and responded to making the stuff of history. Combining oral history and media ethnographic methods, I provide an analysis of the diaries focusing on the emotional resilience attached to hobbies, the echo that the narrators’ information habits generate, and the media ecologies that resulted from the crafting and writing of diaries. My main argument is that although the diaries capture the narrators’ reactions to the crisis, the strong presence of their ordinary lives exposes shared generational traits that are worth preserving beyond this strange time. The students were writing in and about the immediate environment in which they lived their lives, which resulted in an uncommon and rich form of oral history that raised new questions about young people’s experiences during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Students of an International Degree Programme Go Local

Päivi Granö, Teija Koskela, Brita Somerkoski — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This study examines the interactions and communication between a group of African university students and a local Finnish community, as discussed by local friendship family members. Studies show that ensuring the well-being of international students and their study success is challenging in a foreign country. Students tend to remain in their own groups, and interaction with native students and local society may be minimal. To support international students’ adjustment, the university unit in question organised volunteer family support. The data consist of interviews with eleven participants. Interpretation of the data is based on the applied theoretical framework of cultural communication and various types of social and emotional support. The findings reveal that the local friendship families and adult friends had international backgrounds and were interested in international issues. The interaction was an evolving process with some difficulties in communication. The process included three main approaches: accepting the students as family members, introducing them to Finnish culture and providing them with emotional and instrumental support. When asked about communication with members of the local community, most participants described the students’ encounters with local residents as friendly and beneficial, but some also used the words ‘racism’ or ‘racist’ when describing certain situations. A local network is a flexible and versatile resource for supporting international students. The results indicate that friendship families could be used more effectively and better organised as part of the support programme for international students.

Editorial

Kirsi Sonck-Rautio, Riikka Aro , Liia-Maria Raippalinna, Maija Mäki — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200