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Session Abstracts

• Paper abstracts (pdf, 20 p.)
• See below for abstracts of individual papers

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• Session 1: Dynamic Union? The challenges of anthropology migrating across the disciplinary divide
• Session 2: Ethnographic fragments, anarchist ideas
• Session 3: Dynamic Perspectives in Identity Politics
• Session 4: India Workgroup / Intia-työryhmä
• Session 5: Crossing boundaries: New emerging fields of research in humanities from the anthropological perspective
• Session 6: Social dynamics of food
• Session 7: Global insecurities, local concerns: the ethnography of the public
• Session 8: Muddled Models and Unruly Realities: The Epistemology of Anthropological Research
• Session 9: Spatial practices and belonging in the contemporary Islamic world

Session 1: Dynamic Union? The challenges of anthropology migrating across the disciplinary divide

Session Organizer: Susanne Ådahl (Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki), sadahl(a)mappi.helsinki.fi

• Session abstracts (pdf)

This panel seeks to explore how anthropologists can work and contribute to interdisciplinary settings. One area of anthropology where inter-disciplinarity is an everyday reality for many researchers is medical anthropology. In the course of their work in clinical and other health and illness related environments medical anthropologists often meet with the challenges of working with researchers that have a different outlook on the questions that research projects seek to answer. By virtue of the fact of viewing medicine, health and illness through an anthropological lens, medical anthropologists need to become acquainted with texts, concepts and practices of medical science and clinical work. They also have to, as “experts” in their own field, work with people who are “experts” in their own field – what does this process of studying-up entail? All this poses challenges in terms of one’s own learning, but also offers a fascinating opportunity to learn new things about complex and captivating worlds. Medical scientists often find it difficult to grasp the fuzziness of social science and the lack of visible data in the form of graphs, diagrams or clear schemes illustrating research results. Anthropologists may find the simplification of complex processes and experiences that medical scientists employ to be unsettling. A feeling of mutual misunderstanding may cloud the endeavour of finding a shared path forward.
So, how may the twain meet? What is needed is a process of translation that often is difficult to grasp – oftentimes one may feel that there is a lack of tools to undertake this kind of bridge-building across the disciplinary divide. In this panel we invite papers that deal with experiences related to working across disciplinary boundaries (be it with the medical sciences or some other scientific field) either in an academic or applied/practice based sense. A main question of interest to explore is:
– How to create a common platform of understanding, a dynamic union over the disciplinary divide? And, additionally;
– What kind of specific advantages can be gained from working outside the box of one’s own discipline?
– What types of special techniques of translation or adaption are used to make anthropological data and concepts more accessible to the representatives of other disciplines?
– How to present the advantages of the ethnographic method to other sciences and the impact it has on consolidating understanding of research results?
– In short, what are useful lessons learnt from working across the disciplinary divide?

Session 2: Ethnographic fragments, anarchist ideas

Session Organizer: Timo Kallinen (Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki), timo.kallinen(a)helsinki.fi

• Session abstracts (pdf)

According to David Graeber, anthropology as a discipline that has studied stateless societies and gift economies all over the globe provides an enormous help and stimulus when thinking about direct democracy, anti-capitalist economic collectives, and other ideas that could be characterized as anarchistic. The vast body of comparative ethnography supplies us with an excess of viable alternatives to contemporary Western models of society. As one commentator put it, for Graeber the classic ethnographic canon is “a potentially endless source of ideas and provocations if we just work hard enough to tease them out”. This design has a liberating quality in two ways. First of all, it suggests that the utopias of egalitarian consensus-based communities in fact already exist(ed). Therefore, finding an alternative to coerced majority democracy, bureaucratic administration, and free market capitalism is not so much a question of imagining and inventing but rather of recapturing something that we already had in our possession. Secondly, it shows a green exit light to those looking for their way out of an intellectualist impasse. Anthropology has great potential for political and economic change on a global scale and it is only up to anthropologists to release it. This way the discipline would actually have a massive relevance in the “real world” outside academia. On a more critical note, however, we should recognize how the ethnographers’ conceptions of order and organization, literary conventions of ethnographic writing, and the colonial or post-colonial settings of fieldwork have inflected the depictions of the societies we turn to as alternative models. Ultimately, going beyond problems of representation, caution is needed in order to avoid treating other peoples’ thoughts and actions as solutions to our own problems.

The workshop invites papers that explore and consider the possibilities ethnography can (or cannot) offer to different kind of alternative political projects and institutions – anarchist, utopian, or other.

Session 3: Dynamic Perspectives in Identity Politics

Session Organizer: Toomas Gross (Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki), toomas.gross(a)helsinki.fi

• Session abstracts (pdf)

This panel brings together papers by scholars working in the fields of anthropology, ethnology and folkloristics, and they all focus on the politics of collective (cultural and/or ethnic) identity, especially the dynamic aspect of collective self-perceptions. Papers from as diverse ethnographic contexts as Estonia, Siberia and Mexico share the common interest in how and by what means individuals or groups belonging to ethnic minorities construct, and especially re-construct and re-negotiate their “collective selves” under the conditions of broader socio-political, economic and cultural changes. As the different case studies discussed in the panel will demonstrate, certain aspects of collective self-perceptions in this process may be reinforced, debilitated, “invented” as well as contested. The panelists so far are co-participants in a joint four-year research project, and the papers constitute work-in-progress to be published in a special issue of Folklore in early 2012. We welcome further participants working in similar fields.

Session 4: India Workgroup / Intia-työryhmä

Session Organisers: Mari Korpela (mari.korpela(a)uta.fi), Jukka Jouhki (jukka.jouhki(a)jyu.fi)

• Session abstracts (pdf)

Tutkitko Intiaa tai intialaisia? Teetkö tutkimusta Intiassa tai intialaisten keskuudessa Intian ulkopuolella? Tämän työryhmän tarkoituksena on koota yhteen suomalaisia tutkijoita, joiden tutkimusaiheet ja -intressit liittyvät Intiaan. Tarkoituksena on luoda suomalaisten Intia tutkijoiden verkosto ja aloittaa vuoropuhelu. Pyydämme työryhmään lyhyitä 15 minuutin esityksiä, joissa osallistujat kertovat omista tutkimuksistaan.

Session 5: Crossing boundaries: New emerging fields of research in humanities from the anthropological perspective

Session Organizers: Magdalena Laine-Zamojska (Department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyvaskyla), magdalena.laine-zamojska(a)jyu.fi, Tiina Suopajärvi, University of Oulu (tiina.suopajarvi(a)oulu.fi)

• Session abstracts (pdf)

The advent of new technologies has brought a number of emerging fields of research in humanities – like digital culture, communication studies, new media studies, digital heritage and participatory design, to mention only a few. New research questions require new methodologies, approaches and theories. Well-grounded methods and theories characteristic to anthropology and ethnology have been adopted by researchers representing these emerging fields. In consequence, there is a growing need for interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and crossdisciplinarity.

In this workshop we would like to discuss how these new fields have been influenced by qualitative research practices and socio-cultural theories from practical, methodological and theoretical perspectives. The scope of this workshop is broad enough to invite to this discussion researchers from different disciplines and fields of studies in order to examine how qualitative research practices and socio-cultural theories have affected our research practices. What methods do we adopt for our research? On what basis do we choose certain methodologies to cope with new research questions? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the chosen methodologies? How do we integrate different perspectives in our research and within the research groups? What can we learn from the other disciplines? What is the role of theory in multidisciplinary research?

The aim of this workshop is to gather researchers representing these emerging fields of studies, whose studies are directly influenced by anthropology from theoretical, practical and methodological perspectives. We would like to discuss the themes and methodologies that stretch beyond the discipline’s boundaries and identify the new approaches. The scope of this workshop is concerned with such topics as technology and anthropology (Tiina Suopajärvi & Johanna Ylipulli), digital identities and digital culture (Stacey Koosel) and participatory design and digital museums (Magdalena Laine-Zamojska). However, we would like to invite to this workshop researchers working in all kinds of multidisciplinary projects with cross-disciplinary topics. We hope to discuss the problems associated with our research.

Session 6: Social dynamics of food

Session organizers: Petra Autio & Katja Uusihakala (Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki), petra.autio(a)helsinki.fi, katja.uusihakala(a)helsinki.fi

• Session abstracts (pdf)

The anthropological study of food and eating has been significant not only because food is obviously a fundamental necessity for nourishing human bodies. Importantly, it is widely recognized, food is also a key symbolic device, exceptionally apt for conveying meanings and elemental for nurturing and sustaining social bodies. The producing, preparing, sharing and consuming of food entwine wide and varied social processes ranging from global to household and individual levels. The study of food, Sidney Mintz suggest, has also been a particularly useful vehicle for debating and advancing anthropological theory and research methods, illuminating, for instance, social processes concerning political and economic value-creation, symbolic value creation and the social construction of memory.

In this session, we want to focus (though not necessarily exclusively) on considering food as a symbolic device which is used to construct and nurture social relationships. Through sharing food solidarities and alliances as well as social differences and distinctions are created, maintained and regulated. Alternatively food can be used to assert autonomy or compete for prestige. Thus food can accomplish and express both commensality and competition.

Food is an apt identity marker especially among ethnic minorities and diaspora communities, in part because of food’s distinct ability to carry memories. For example, in expatriate communities great affective value is often placed on food from home. Reciprocity and hospitality in terms of food build local as well as diasporic communities, mark and maintain identities. By the same token, one might also consider the inverse implications of normative reciprocity: what happens when food is refused, or cannot be reciprocated? As a symbolic device, then, food is both multivocal, and, at times, ambiguous.

For this session, we invite scholars to discuss their empirical data on food in the light of the above theoretical and conceptual themes.

Session 7: Global insecurities, local concerns: the ethnography of the public

Session Organizer: Timo Kaartinen (Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki), timo.kaartinen(a)helsinki.fi

• Session abstracts (pdf)

Anthropologists have increasingly begun to organize their networks and initiatives around issues of global insecurity. We increasingly have to argue for the contemporary relevance of our research with reference to global regimes of security, welfare, good governance and sustainable resource use. From a global perspective such things as terrorism, ethnic violence, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and environmental degradation appear as singular, public issues; at the same time, they are always part of more complicated predicaments which people face locally. The question addressed by this panel is how to respond adequately to issues identified in global, public discourse without losing our ethnographically grounded perspective. One obvious answer is to pay attention to how people respond to globally recognized problems and try to resolve them in their communal worlds. In addition to this, however, there is an effort to turn the notion of the global itself into a theoretical issue for anthropologists. Is it merely a space for global flows and imaginings which serve the local construction of power and agency (Appadurai 1996)? Or should we focus on the class, national and ethnic boundaries across which people fail to acknowledge each other’s humanity (Gregory 1997)? Instead of debating whether the global system is fundamentally a source of possibilities or constraints, recent writers have emphasized creative junctures between local and global publics (Tsing 2005). Aside from recognizing the agency which local people derive from their fleeting encounters with global public discourse, some anthropologists suggest that there are moments at which the entire global system is open for being reshaped when people in an insecure position strive to represent themselves in a new public framework (Kelly and Kaplan 2001).

The aim of the panel is to explore these anthropological arguments about the global process with reference to ethnography focused on internationally recognized public issues. The motivation for this exercise is to allow anthropology to engage social problems without limiting itself to an instrument of solving them. While public issues and interventions are framed from a universalizing perspective, anthropologists are in a privileged position to recognize that their local significance derives from inherently complex social worlds. We invite papers which explore this complexity with the aim of a better understanding of how the global system operates.

Session 8: Muddled Models and Unruly Realities: The Epistemology of Anthropological Research

Session organizers: Marianna Keisalo-Galvan (Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki), marianna.keisalo(a)helsinki.fi and Harri Siikala (department of Anthropology, University of Virginia), harrisiikala(a)gmail.com

• Session abstracts (pdf)

One of the central issues of anthropology has been the tension between the ethnographer’s analytic models and the messy reality he or she faces in the field. The contingencies of people living out their lives and the vicissitudes of history often seem to have a deconstructive effect on the cultural categories anthropologists try to pin down. Dissillusionment with past seemingly monolithic theoretical models has left anthropologists wary of grand narratives. Classic anthropological topics like kinship, hierarchy, and ritual have become increasingly problematized, as have characterizations of culture as a system or a structure.

At the same time, models are vital for any kind of understanding of complex cultural realities. Every anthropologist has to face the central theoretical questions of how do we choose and justify the models we use? How can we ensure that our attempt to understand does not overly simplify or distort? Furthermore it is not only the ethnographer who is preoccupied with the efficacy of models; people are constantly negotiating their own cultural models as they put them to practical use in their daily lives.

In this workshop we invite discussion of the relationship between social life as encountered during fieldwork, ethnographic description, and broader theoretical models from a variety of viewpoints. For example, how can models created in specific ethnographic contexts be applied to others? Is it possible or desirable to develop general theoretical models of events or elements of culture considered to constitute a category, or models for how these ought to be studied? What ought to be the relation between analytical and indigenous models?

Session 9: Spatial practices and belonging in the contemporary Islamic world

Session Organizer: Pekka Tuominen (Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Helsinki), pekka.tuominen(a)helsinki.fi

• Session abstracts (pdf)

This panel explores the changing dynamics of spatial spheres concentrating on the ethnographic studies of the contemporary Islamic world. Discussions of religious, ethnic and political characteristics attributed to specific spaces and their appropriate moral frameworks present fascinating possibilities for cross-cultural comparisons. The shared historical memories and associations, questions of authenticity and foreignness and the negotiated meanings of modernity, secularism and Islam form increasingly complex relations of belonging in the lives of the inhabitants.

In the panel we will concentrate especially on how the issues above are related to practices in particular spaces and contexts ranging from monumental public displays into minutiae of the everyday life, how their significant elements are recognized and valued within different moral frameworks and how they are communicated and acquire specific meanings both locally and globally. In an attempt to establish a fruitful comparative context, it is also necessary to pay attention to the dynamics of the boundaries that both connect and separate people across, as well as within, regional and national spaces.

The panel invites participants who wish to discuss these issues in the light of ethnographic case studies.

Finnish Anthropology Conference 2011 is organized with support from Routledge and Beta Analytic Inc.