Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society

Editors’ note: It takes a village to fend off predators

Tuomas Tammisto — 2024-02-02

We are once again delighted to bring you a new issue of Suomen antropologi: The Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society. This issue marks our final contribution as your editors-in-chief. Two years ago when we took over the journal, our primary aim was to maintain and develop the independent, community-organised, nonprofit open access publishing ethos started by our predecessors. In addition, we aimed to develop the editorial processes of the journal, making it as easy as possible for new members joining the editorial team.

The Suomen antropologi Ethnographic Reading Challenge

Henni Alava — 2024-02-02

Each year just before the New Year, our hometown library—the Helsinki Metropolitan Area Library Network (Helmet 2024)—issues a curated 50-book reading challenge. To celebrate a new year, Suomen antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, presents an ethnographic reading challenge in a similar style. The challenge is an outcome of one recent Friday evening when we—middle-aged neighbours and colleagues who did not know what else to do with our free time—went for a walk to our local library. Woven into this reading challenge is a bid for something more. The categories in this challenge purposely extend across broad, or ambiguous, categories, at times bordering on the downright silly. Our intention is to encourage thoughtful reading of ethnographies and other books that inspire our ethnographic imaginations.

‘When they’re lying, and they say you’re lying, then there’s no hope’: Asylum-seeking, trauma, and the abusive state

William Wheeler — 2024-02-02

This article explores the story of Sanwar, who fled Bangladesh following persecution for his sexuality, and spent five years struggling for asylum in the UK. Analysing our conversations together with his asylum paperwork, I show how trauma was apprehended in the asylum process, and how the process itself produced more trauma. Taking this trauma as diagnostic of state violence, I advance the notion of ‘the abusive state’: the disbelief Sanwar faced constituted gaslighting, echoing childhood abuse from his father, while the pressure to ‘change his story’, to perform as someone he was not, further figured as the impossible demand of a capricious, false authority. In the final section, I reflect on the moments when things fell apart and Sanwar attempted suicide, pointing to the ways in which suicidal subjectivities emerge in the asylum system. What might it mean to put suicide at the heart of our thinking, and feeling, about asylum?

Keywords: asylum seeking; trauma; abuse; the state; suicide; immigration law

(Not) On Your Bike

Phill Wilcox — 2024-02-02

Laos is a country of seven million people in Southeast Asia, with its largest urban centre having a population of just under one million people. At a time of rising inflation and growing awareness of climate change, this article investigates how urban residents travel, why people do and do not cycle in urban Laos, and how cycling is promoted and crucially, by whom. Drawing on interviews, survey data, and other participant observation, this paper notes that the number of bikes in Laos is increasing, and cycling for fitness is becoming more widespread, which can be linked to aspiration and conspicuous consumption, but that promotion of cycling is driven largely by outsiders as part of broader attempts to develop Laos according to their own agendas. This is demonstrated by a European Union campaign which encouraged people to commute by bike, which was largely unsuccessful in Laos.

Keywords: cycling, Laos, mobilities, development, infrastructure, commuting

Digital Death

Ellen Lapper — 2024-02-02

This paper reflexively unpicks digital ethnographic methods employed during ongoing online fieldwork on ‘digital deaths’. To do so, this research delves into the digital afterlife, exploring the fate of online traces and social media profiles after death, and how social media has changed our relationship with death and grieving. Anthropological studies of online death and grief faced new challenges even before COVID-19 moved research projects online. These include shared vulnerabilities and the ethnographer’s position, online field sites, omnipresent online traces and posthumous personhood, and ethical algorithms and duty to the dead. By transparently detailing my research methods whilst conducting research with Facebook and Instagram users navigating loss, this article contributes an honest and extensive debate on processes, challenges, ethics, and research collaboration. Guided by visual and media anthropology, I advocate for a set of methods rooted in shared anthropology (Rouch 1995) which fosters ongoing dialogue with participants. Thus, this article offers a new perspective on digital death, rooted in collaborative storytelling and reflexive methodologies, facilitating discussions on a still-contentious subject in certain societies. Leveraging the benefits of digital ethnography’s multi-sited nature, the research widens its geographical reach and comments on the sociocultural impacts of digital death.

Keywords: digital afterlife, digital death, digital ethnography, social media, reflexive ethnography, shared anthropology, grief, methodology

Stoetzer, Bettina 2022. Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin.

Eeva Berglund — 2024-02-02

Stoetzer, Bettina. Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin. Duke University Press Books. 2022. 243 p. Part of the book series, Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices, edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit. ISBN 10: 1478018607 (softcover) ISBN 13: 9781478018605 (hardcover).

Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen and Edvard Hviding (eds.) Anthropology in Norway: Directions, Locations, Relations.

Hector Sanchez — 2024-02-02

Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen and Edvard Hviding (eds.) Anthropology in Norway: Directions, Locations, Relations. Canon Pyon, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing. The RAI Country Series, Volume Three. 2021. 152 pp. ISBN: 978-1-912385-30-0 (paperback); ISBN: 978-1-912385-38-6 (E-book); DOI: 10.26581/B.BEND01 (E-book)

Lectio præcursoria—A Bed Behind the Portrait: An Ethnography Around Images in Segregated Los Angeles

Tero Frestadius — 2024-02-02

A lectio præcursoria is a short presentation read out loud by a doctoral candidate at the start of a public thesis examination in Finland. It introduces the key points or central argument of the thesis in a way that should make the ensuing discussion between the examinee and the examiner apprehensible to the audience, many of whom may be unfamiliar with the candidate’s research or even anthropological research in general.

Lectio præcursoria—Economies of care and politics of return: Sustaining life among injivas and their families in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

Saana Hansen — 2024-02-02