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Written by leading Nordic historians, this analysis discusses postwar memory and war historiographies from the perspectives of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden vis-à-vis the Second World War. Focusing on the relationship between scholarly and public understandings of the war, this book presents the overarching themes that set apart the Nordic experience while remaining attentive to the distinctive characteristics of war time in each of the five different countries. A major contribution to the international debate on postwar memory, this fascinating account speaks to all those who have an interest in the modern European history.
This book is about the mundane, local, every day practices that constitutes democracy. Focusing on France and Finland, the book defines politicization as the key process in understanding democracy in different cultural contexts and shows a nuanced picture of two opposite models of European politics.
Finland's Holocaust considers antisemitism and the figure of the Holocaust in today's Finland. Taking up a range of issues - from cultural history, folklore, and sports, to the interpretation of military and national history - this collection examines how the writing of history has engaged and evaded the figure of the Holocaust.
This book comprises a number of cultural-historical and ethnographic studies of the history of sport in the Nordic countries. The studies examine the contribution made by sport to the development of Scandinavian nationalism in the nineteenth century, and analyze the ways in which sport became interwoven with the social life of citizens in the various Scandinavian countries in the twentieth century. The main focus of this volume, therefore, is not on the organizational history of sport, nor is it on society vis-a-vis sport - i.e., sport as a reflection of a certain societal constellation. Rather, what is of interest is sport in society, and therefore the book aims to illustrate the ways in which sport has been used and has served to help explain and understand Scandinavian society types.
Spanning two centuries and five Nordic countries, this book questions the view that political lawyers are required for the development of a liberal political regime. It combines cross-disciplinary theory and careful empirical case studies by country experts whose regional insights are brought to bear on wider global contexts. The theory of the legal complex posits that lawyers will not simply mobilize collectively for material self-interest; instead they will organize and struggle for the limited goal of political liberalism. Constituted by a moderate state, core civil rights, and civil society freedoms, political liberalism is presented as a discrete but professionally valued good to which ...
Resistance to German-led Axis occupation occurred all the way across the European continent during the Second World War. It took a wide range of forms – non-cooperation and disinformation, sabotage, espionage, armed opposition and full-scale partisan warfare. It is an important element in the experience and the national memory of the peoples who found themselves under Axis government and control. For over thirty years there has been no systematic attempt to give readers a panoramic yet detailed view of the make-up, actions and impact of resistance movements from Scandinavia down to Greece and from France through to Russia. This authoritative and accessible survey, written by a group of the...
Welfare policies and the ideas of well-being are linked with the ideas of good life. However, the meaning of good life, i.e. what is considered as ‘good life’ gets its meanings contextually. This means that we need to study the ideas of good life in time. The ideas of good life express social and political values and they are articulated in particular terms in particular time and place. The changing ideas of welfare and the ideas of changing approaches on welfare, well-being and knowledge production related to them have been discussed widely in international and Finnish research contexts. This volume is the second – and last – part of publications which stem from the 20th Anniversary Seminar of the Research Unit on Disability at University of Eastern Finland. It offers a multivoiced collection of research discussions from research in the fields of welfare and inclusion.
Untimely Sacrifices questions why individuals may give their time and energy to the collective against their own self-interest. Turning to Finland where public health officials named occupational burnout as a "new hazard" of the new economy, Daena Funahashi asks: What moves people to work to the point of pathological stress? Contrary to health experts who highlight the importance of self-management and energetic conservation, Funahashi questions the very economic premise of cognitive psychology that one could "economize" one's energy and thus save oneself. By pitting anthropological takes on sacrifice next to the clinical discourses on pressure, work, and coping, Funahashi offers ways to rethink what drives stress. Untimely Sacrifices also provides a compelling critique of state welfare and political economy, contesting the tendency to treat the gift economy as something separate from the force that makes redistributive mechanisms of state welfare work. It is a book essential to those interested in how forces unassimilable to conventional economy come to matter in issues of labor, stress, and welfare.
The ‘open society’ has become a watchword of liberal democracy and the market system in the modern globalized world. Openness stands for individual opportunity and collective reason, as well as bottom-up empowerment and top-down transparency. It has become a cherished value, despite its vagueness and the connotation of vulnerability that surrounds it. Scandinavia has long considered itself a model of openness, citing traditions of freedom of information and inclusive policy making. This collection of essays traces the conceptual origins, development, and diverse challenges of openness in the Nordic countries and Austria. It examines some of the many paradoxes that openness encounters and...
In the mid-19th century, letters to newspapers in Finland began to condemn a practice known as home thievery, in which farm mistresses pilfered goods from their farms to sell behind the farm master’s back. Why did farm mistresses engage home thievery and why were writers so harsh in their disapproval of it? Why did many men in their letters nonetheless sympathize with women’s pilfering? What opinions did farm daughters express? This book explores theoretical concepts of agency and power applied to the 19th-century context and takes a closer look at the family patriarch, resistance to patriarchal power by farm mistresses and their daughters, and the identities of those Finnish men who already in the 1850s and 1860s sought to defend the rights of rural farm women.