Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society

Towards More-Than-Human Negotiation

2024-12-09T12:46:07+02:00

Scholars from all disciplines are becoming increasingly conscious of the co-dependence between humans and more-than-humans. This special collection engages these debates, guided by a question both practical and theoretical: What makes good relationships between humans and nonhumans in societies under strain? The essays collected in this issue explore this question through different cases of more-than-human relationality. In this introduction, we briefly present these contributions, placing them in dialogue with the concept of the contact zone. The contact zone, we argue, provides a powerful conceptual tool for thinking about the how as well as the why in human–more-than-human encounters, as it highlights the materiality and constructedness of more-than-human affects and ethics. Thus, the first part of this introduction highlights how the different contributions to the special issue further the conceptual work ushered by the concept of the contact zone. Furthermore, we make a contribution to the growing literature on more-than-human contact zones by drawing attention to the tensions and frictions that necessarily appear within these. What may be helpful in understanding and navigating these tensions, we argue, is the concept of more than-human negotiation. We believe that this ecological view of contact zones opens up an exciting new arena for more-than-human research.

Keywords: more-than-human, contact zones, negotiation, entanglements, relationality, special issue

Ethical Striving with Other-Than-Humans in Contemporary Improvised Music

2024-05-28T13:07:10+03:00

This article presents an ethnographic analysis of the care and attention between other-than humans and musicians in the contemporary improvised music scene. From dominant Western perspectives, ethical relations are considered in anthropocentric terms: only persons with the capacity for self-awareness, autonomy, and rational judgment are considered able to engage in ethical practice. Even though there are increasing instances in Western contexts of attempts to expand definitions of personhood to other-than-humans, these retain an anthropocentric core. The improvising musicians with whom I worked question such a hegemonic narrative, and, coming from the understanding that the music they make emerges from a dense web of interconnected agencies, make music together with other-than humans. In other words, these musicians strive to relate with other-than-humans in mutual ethical relations of care. Second, even though the trope of improvisation features prominently in the philosophy of ethics, and even though ethical striving in recent anthropological studies of ethics has all the characteristics of improvisation, there is a surprising absence of discussion about improvisation itself. This article begins to address this gap by attending to the practices of skilled improvisers, and offers insights into how people ethically negotiate as yet unknown situations to them, in this case how to relate with other-than-humans. The focus on improvisation itself shows how ethical striving can be generative of ethical possibilities in intercultural and changing circumstances.

Keywords: ethics, improvisation, contemporary improvised music, other-than-human, ethics and the politics of care, normative perception

(Re-)Learning to Relate to the More-Than-Human

2024-05-27T21:17:29+03:00

The lack of concerted action by the majority of the population in the face of the global ecological catastrophe compels us to ponder the deeper cause of inaction: a troubled relationship with the more-than-human world. Redressing this relationship and (re-)learning to relate to the more-than-human calls for a critical analysis of current modes of relation, as well as a quest for different, more ecological (ethical, responsible, reciprocal, affective) ways to relate. This article engages with these two processes through three interrelated perspectives: conceptual, affective, and practice-based.

On a conceptual level, I propose to rethink how we relate to the more-than-human through the lenses of kinship. I suggest that, when these reformed relationalities are imbued with affect and ecological awareness (through the affective and relational perspectives of biophilia and correspondence), specific forms of attention emerge, as we are no longer dispassionate observers but affectively engaged participants. I call this ‘empathetic attention’.

I explore the ways in which these conceptual stances and affective intensities can come together in enactments and practice—such as mourning ceremonies for ecological losses. I argue that these enactments constitute ‘ecological practices’ as they substantiate relationalities based on care, and more sustainable ways of thinking, feeling, and acting towards the more-than-human world.

Keywords: relationship, affect, emotions, practice, attention, ecology, kinship

Editorial Note: On Hope

2025-04-14T16:19:23+03:00

Lately, our daily news is engulfed with billowing clouds of despair as democracy slips away and is replaced with emboldened form of authoritarianism. We live in dark times. Global disasters are multiplying with no end in sight. Powerful institutions get away with hypocrisy unchecked. And, history is being rewritten with a force that disrupts the societal and political imaginaries that hold on to the conviction that peace, profound goodness, and care are possible. As this overwhelming feeling of deep despair occupies our attention and affective state of being, instances of real change and hope unfurling in this moment are easily missed. One such example can be found in Serbia, where students have peacefully and fearlessly risen up, calling for revolutionary change. We on the editorial team of Suomen antropologi stand in solidarity with the students and university personnel in Serbia, who in recent months have taken courageous action. As a scholarly journal, we recognise that the demands of the subordinate cannot be sidelined, marginalised, ignored, or silenced. We hear the voices from the ongoing protests, and they are deafening. This is an historic moment and a much-needed reminder of the spark of hope that this world so desperately needs right now.

On Hesitation

2023-12-15T04:00:36+02:00

What does it mean to die well? How does assuming responsibility for killing an animal feel?Who gets to decide who dies, who lives, and who kills? While orienting oneself to regenerating life is typical among small-scale diversified farmers, killing and dying equally present themselves within the everyday cycles of farm life. This essay reflects upon my encounters with animal death and shares experiences from observing and participating in animal slaughter taking the form of a photo-poetic intervention. As a selective collection of field notes, personal reflections, and photographs generated between 2019 and 2023, in this essay I aim to capture the affective side of scholarship and bring forth an alternative way of inquiring into and representing research, one that explicitly invites the reader to sense, feel, and contemplate. Data for this research were generated as part of my ethnographic fieldwork among regeneratively oriented smallholders, small-scale diversified farms, and farming communities in Finland (excluding Sapmi Lapland) and on the colonised lands of Australia. The first part of this essay lays out deadly scenes, the second asks questions, and the third presents a reflection which arose as a result of exchanges with the editorial team of this journal. The fourth part consists of a poem to close the essay. This essay may contain seemingly unpleasant, disturbing, or shocking content. However, beyond simple provocation, I invite the reader to share their bewilderment with me. Because I wish to make visible other ways of knowing through poetic inquiry that extends beyond the impersonalised and distanced (re)presentation of polished evidence, my words fail to hit exact targets as they travel searching for meaning. But I do not use irony nor withhold information. I hesitate: my essay is an invitation to hesitation.

Keywords: field notes, ethnography, poetic inquiry, photo-essay, death, killing, reflection, representation, hesitation

The Value of Common Bracken Revisited

2023-11-23T18:11:18+02:00

Based on a walking ethnography, this photo essay employs sensory ethnography to explore multispecies relationality in steljniki, plots of land traditionally used for grazing and the harvesting of common bracken. Through work in subsistence-based extensive farming, humans have formed multispecies relationality, and, beyond use value, have attributed aesthetic value to the cultivated landscape. This essay presents the micro-processes of relational, affective, and material entanglements of humans with more-than-human worlds in steljniki, particularly with common bracken.

Keywords: walking ethnography, multispecies ethnography, landscape, work, extensive farming

Book Review: Alava, Henni 2020. Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda: There is Confusion

2024-12-10T14:43:30+02:00

Alava, Henni. Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda: There is Confusion. Bloomsbury. 2022. 288 pp. ISBN: 978-1-3501-7580-8 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-3501-7583-9, ISBN: 978-1-3501-7582-2 (ebook).

Book Review: Huttunen, Laura and Gerhild Perls (eds) 2023. An Anthropology of Disappearance: Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing

2024-12-10T15:05:15+02:00

Huttunen, Laura and Gerhild Perls (eds). An Anthropology of Disappearance: Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing. Berghahn. 2023. 298 pp. ISBN: 978-1-80539-072-5 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-80539-364-1 (ebook).

Book Review: Routray, Sanjeev 2022. The Right to be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi

2025-04-14T16:13:44+03:00

Sanjeev Routray The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2022. 347 pp. ISBN: 9781503630840 (cloth); ISBN: 9781503632134 (paperback); ISBN: 9781503632141 (E-book)

Through the Eyes of an Anthropologist

2025-02-07T15:09:01+02:00

On a cold December evening, in the thick cloud of cigarette smoke and clatter of the cocktail shaker, two women, Suvi Rautio and He Beili tell stories of what it means to see through the eyes of an anthropologist. Speaking to a crowded room of seventy people, mainly young Beijingers in their twenties and thirties, the event is part of Beijing's “Late Night Sessions” (yetan), a platform for thinkers to come together and share their work in an informal setting at nightfall. In this essay, I provide a brief overview of the presentations and discussions that unfolded.

Errata 48 (3)

2025-04-14T16:17:36+03:00

In Volume 48, Issue 3 of Suomen Antropologi, we published a Lectio Praecursoria by Ioana Țîștea, entitled ‘Creolising Nordic Migration Research: Entangled Knowledges, Migratisations, and Reflexivities’. In the lectio, Țîștea was drawing direct attention to Bruno Lefort’s Finnish Research Council fellowship project entitled ‘Rethinking Co-existence From the Margins’ without citing or referencing his work.