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In their study of social practices deemed traditional, scholars tend to use the concept and idea of tradition as an element of meaning in the practices under investigation. But just whose meaning is it? Is it a meaning generated by those who study tradition or those whose traditions are being studied? In both cases, particular criteria for traditionality are employed, whether these are explicated or not. Individuals and groups will no doubt continue to uphold their traditional practices or refer to their practices as traditional. While they are in no way obliged to explicate in analytical terms their criteria for traditionality, the same cannot be said for those who make the study of traditi...
This collection follows anthropological perspectives on peoples (Canadian Inuit, Norwegian Sámi, Yupiit from Alaska, and Inuit from Greenland), places, and practices in the Circumpolar North from colonial times to our post-modern era. This volume brings together fresh perspectives on theoretical concepts, colonial/imperial descriptions, collaborative work of non-Indigenous and Indigenous researchers, as well as articles written by representatives of Indigenous cultures from an inside perspective. The scope of the book ranges from contributions based on unpublished primary sources, missionary journals, and fairly unknown early Indigenous sources and publications, to those based on more recen...
Society is never just a localized aggregate of people but exists by virtue of its members’ narrative and conceptual awareness of other times and places. In Jukka Siikala’s work this idea evolves into a broad ethnographic and theoretical interest in worlds beyond the horizon, in the double sense of “past” and “abroad.” This book is a tribute to Jukka’s contributions to anthropology by his colleagues and students and marks his 60th birthday in January 2007. By exploring the near, distant, inward and outward horizons towards which societies project their reality, the authors aim at developing a new, productive language for addressing culture as a way of experiencing and engaging the world.
In international research, metafictionality and other metaliterary features have typically been regarded as phenomena related to postmodernist fiction, in particular – Metaliterary Layers in Finnish Literature, however, discusses the metalayers of Finnish literature from the early 20th century to the present. By analyzing different genres of Finnish literature in varying historical contexts Metaliterary Layers in Finnish Literature provides an abundance of new information on Finnish literature and its metaliterary phenomena for everyone interested. In the articles of this book, the metalayers of literature are discussed in experimental prose and poetry as well as in popular fiction and children’s literature.
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.
During the recent decades Conversation Analysis has developed into a distinctive method for analyzing talk in interaction. The method is utilized in several disciplines sharing an interest in social interaction, like anthropology, linguistics, social psychology, and sociology, and it has been applied to a great variety of languages and types of interaction. Conversation Analysis then is coming of age as a truly comparative enterprise. This volume presents and discusses comparative approaches to analyzing interactional practices and structures. The contributors to the volume have their background in sociology, linguistics, and logopedics. They offer comparative analyses of activity types, participant roles and identities, displays of emotion, and design of actions such as questions and corrections. The languages covered by the chapters include English, Finnish, German, and Swedish. This volume is of interest to all those interested in the research of language and social interaction. Because of its methodological nature, the book can also be utilized in teaching and in learning the discovery procedures typical of Conversation Analysis.
Interrogating the multiple ways in which travel was narrated and mediated, by and in response to, nineteenth-century British travelers, this interdisciplinary collection examines to what extent these accounts drew on and developed existing tropes of travel. The three sections take up personal and intimate narratives that were not necessarily designed for public consumption, tales intended for a popular audience, and accounts that were more clearly linked with discourses and institutions of power, such as imperial processes of conquest and governance. Some narratives focus on the things the travelers carried, such as souvenirs from the battlefields of Britain’s imperial wars, while others s...
What happens when UNESCO heritage conventions are ratified by a state? How do UNESCO’s global efforts interact with preexisting local, regional and state efforts to conserve or promote culture? What new institutions emerge to address the mandate? The contributors to this volume focus on the work of translation and interpretation that ensues once heritage conventions are ratified and implemented. With seventeen case studies from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and China, the volume provides comparative evidence for the divergent heritage regimes generated in states that differ in history and political organization. The cases illustrate how UNESCO’s aspiration to honor and celebrate cultural diversity diversifies itself. The very effort to adopt a global heritage regime forces myriad adaptations to particular state and interstate modalities of building and managing heritage.
Why are Khanty shamans still active? What are the folklore collectives of Komi? Why are the rituals of Udmurts performed at cultural festivals? In their insightful ethnographic study Anna-Leena Siikala and Oleg Ulyashev attempt to answer such questions by analysing the recreation of religious traditions, myths, and songs in public and private performances. Their work is based on long term fieldwork undertaken during the 1990s and 2000s in three different places, the Northern Ob region in North West Siberia and in the Komi and Udmurt Republics. It sheds light on how different traditions are favoured and transformed in multicultural Russia today. Siikala and Ulyashev examine rituals, songs, an...
There is no single volume that encompasses an integrated social and cultural history of the Sámi people from the Nordic countries and northwestern Russia. Neil Kent's book fills this lacuna. In the first instance, he considers how the Sámi homeland is defined: its geography, climate, and early contact with other peoples. He then moves on to its early chronicles and the onset of colonisation, which changed Sámi life profoundly over the last millennium. Thereafter, the nature of Sámi ethnicity is examined, in the context of the peoples among whom the Sámi increasingly lived, as well as the growing intrusions of the states who claimed sovereignty over them. The Soviet gulag, the Lapland Wa...