- Tuomas Tammisto (2024): Hard Work: Producing places, relations and value on a Papua New Guinea resource frontier. Helsinki University Press.
- Sarah Green, Samuli Lähteenaho, Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki, Carl Rommel, Joseph J. Viscomi, Laia Soto Bermant & Patricia Scalco (2024): An Anthropology of Crosslocations. Helsinki University Press.
- Matti Eräsaari (2023): Comparing the Worth of the While in Fiji and Finland. Oxford University Press.
- Carl Rommel, Joseph John Viscomi (toim.) (2022): Locating the Mediterranean: Connections and Separations across Space and Time. Helsinki University Press.
- Henni Alava (2022). Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda: There is Confusion. Bloomsbury.
1. Tuomas Tammisto (2024): Hard Work: Producing places, relations and value on a Papua New Guinea resource frontier. Helsinki University Press.
Kirja on vapaasti luettavissa osoitteessa https://hup.fi/site/books/m/10.33134/HUP-29/.
Kirjan tiivistelmä englanniksi:
For the Mengen people of Papua New Guinea, ‘hard work’ does not refer to drudgery or physically exhausting labour. Instead, it involves creating and recreating social relations through acts of care, marriages, ceremonial events, sharing, and working the land together. ‘Work’ as the Mengen see it, produces value understood as meaningful social relations. This differs significantly from the way colonial officials, loggers, and planters perceived value.
Hard Work examines human-environmental relations, value production, natural resource extraction, and state formation within the context of the Mengen. It delves into how the Mengen engage with their land and outside actors like companies, NGOs, and the state through agriculture, logging, plantation labour, and environmental conservation. These practices have shaped the Mengen’s lived environment, while also sparking debates on what is considered valuable and how value is created.
Tammisto’s monograph explores the complexities of natural resource extraction, looking at both large-scale processes and personal human-environment interactions. It combines a political ecology focus on the connection between environmental issues and power relations with a focus on how value is produced, represented, and materialized.
ENGLANNIKSI
Tuomas Tammisto (2024): Hard Work: Producing Places, Relations and Value on a Papua New Guinea Resource Frontier. Helsinki University Press.
The book is freely available at https://hup.fi/site/books/m/10.33134/HUP-29/.
Summary of the book:
For the Mengen people of Papua New Guinea, ‘hard work’ does not refer to drudgery or physically exhausting labour. Instead, it involves creating and recreating social relations through acts of care, marriages, ceremonial events, sharing, and working the land together. ‘Work’ as the Mengen see it, produces value understood as meaningful social relations. This differs significantly from the way colonial officials, loggers, and planters perceived value.
Hard Work examines human-environmental relations, value production, natural resource extraction, and state formation within the context of the Mengen. It delves into how the Mengen engage with their land and outside actors like companies, NGOs, and the state through agriculture, logging, plantation labour, and environmental conservation. These practices have shaped the Mengen’s lived environment, while also sparking debates on what is considered valuable and how value is created.
Tammisto’s monograph explores the complexities of natural resource extraction, looking at both large-scale processes and personal human-environment interactions. It combines a political ecology focus on the connection between environmental issues and power relations with a focus on how value is produced, represented, and materialized.
2. Sarah Green, Samuli Lähteenaho, Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki, Carl Rommel, Joseph J. Viscomi, Laia Soto Bermant & Patricia Scalco (2024): An Anthropology of Crosslocations. Helsinki University Press.
Kirja on vapaasti luettavissa osoitteessa https://www.hup.fi/site/books/m/10.33134/HUP-23/.
Kirjan tiivistelmä englanniksi:
An Anthropology of Crosslocations introduces a radical new approach to understanding location. The co-authors show that the question of where something is depends on how places are mutually connected and disconnected. The location of a place can be established by different logics, such as national borders, ecosystems, or economic zones. These different ways of classifying the relative value and significance of a place coexist and overlap: for example, national borders are regularly crosscut by ecosystems. By thinking of ’location’ as a process defined by several different coexisting locating regimes, the book showcases a fresh way to think about the multiple and overlapping connections and disconnections between here and elsewhere. This approach can fundamentally revise ethnographic and anthropological views on the importance, value and significance of where people, things and animals are located and, as such, redefines the idea of ‘the field.’
The volume brings together seven anthropologists who have worked together for six years. The chapters take the reader through a series of journeys around the Mediterranean region—to North Africa, the East Mediterranean, and Southern Europe. Each chapter unfolds an ethnographic or historical account of the coexistence of different values and meanings of location in different places.
ENGLANNIKSI
Sarah Green, Samuli Lähteenaho, Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki, Carl Rommel, Joseph J. Viscomi, Laia Soto Bermant & Patricia Scalco (2024): An Anthropology of Crosslocations. Helsinki University Press.
The book is freely available at https://www.hup.fi/site/books/m/10.33134/HUP-23/.
Summary of the book:
An Anthropology of Crosslocations introduces a radical new approach to understanding location. The co-authors show that the question of where something is depends on how places are mutually connected and disconnected. The location of a place can be established by different logics, such as national borders, ecosystems, or economic zones. These different ways of classifying the relative value and significance of a place coexist and overlap: for example, national borders are regularly crosscut by ecosystems. By thinking of ’location’ as a process defined by several different coexisting locating regimes, the book showcases a fresh way to think about the multiple and overlapping connections and disconnections between here and elsewhere. This approach can fundamentally revise ethnographic and anthropological views on the importance, value and significance of where people, things and animals are located and, as such, redefines the idea of ‘the field.’
The volume brings together seven anthropologists who have worked together for six years. The chapters take the reader through a series of journeys around the Mediterranean region—to North Africa, the East Mediterranean, and Southern Europe. Each chapter unfolds an ethnographic or historical account of the coexistence of different values and meanings of location in different places.
3. Matti Eräsaari (2023): Comparing the Worth of the While in Fiji and Finland. Oxford University Press.
Kirja on luettavissa vapaasti osoitteessa https://global.oup.com/academic/product/comparing-the-worth-of-the-while-in-fiji-and-finland-9780197267486.
Kirjan tiivistelmä englanniksi:
’Clock time’, which denotes particular ways of valuing temporal duration, is typically associated with monetary worth or labour. From this follows so-called thrifty attitudes towards the passing of time, which is construed as a resource that can be ’wasted’ or ’saved’.
Comparing the Worth of the While in Fiji and Finland, however, presents comparative case studies of clock time in Fiji and Finland to reconsider the other values that it is capable of expressing, beyond monetary worth. By comparing two such dissimilar case studies – and drawing on examples as diverse as the Fijian hospitality industry and peripheral waiting and Finnish academic time management – Eräsaari foregrounds time’s capacity to act as a sign and measure of other values. By employing a unique anthropological and ethnographic methodology, he reveals the many ways in which clock time is deployed in value projects, as well as the complex conceptual work required to make it a vehicle of valuation.
ENGLANNIKSI
Matti Eräsaari (2023): Comparing the Worth of the While in Fiji and Finland. Oxford University Press.
The book is freely available at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/comparing-the-worth-of-the-while-in-fiji-and-finland-9780197267486.
Summary of the book:
’Clock time’, which denotes particular ways of valuing temporal duration, is typically associated with monetary worth or labour. From this follows so-called thrifty attitudes towards the passing of time, which is construed as a resource that can be ’wasted’ or ’saved’.
Comparing the Worth of the While in Fiji and Finland, however, presents comparative case studies of clock time in Fiji and Finland to reconsider the other values that it is capable of expressing, beyond monetary worth. By comparing two such dissimilar case studies – and drawing on examples as diverse as the Fijian hospitality industry and peripheral waiting and Finnish academic time management – Eräsaari foregrounds time’s capacity to act as a sign and measure of other values. By employing a unique anthropological and ethnographic methodology, he reveals the many ways in which clock time is deployed in value projects, as well as the complex conceptual work required to make it a vehicle of valuation.
4. Carl Rommel, Joseph John Viscomi (toim.) (2022): Locating the Mediterranean: Connections and Separations across Space and Time. Helsinki University Press.
Kirja on vapaasti luettavissa osoitteessa https://hup.fi/site/books/e/10.33134/HUP-18/
Kirjan tiivistelmä englanniksi:
Until today, anthropological studies of locality have taken primary interest in local subjects leading local lives in local communities. Through a shift of conceptual emphasis from locality to location, the present volume departs from previous preoccupations with identity and belonging. Instead, Locating the Mediterranean brings together ethnographic examinations of processes that make locations and render them meaningful. In doing so, it stimulates debates on the interplay between location and region-making in history as well as anthropology.
The volume’s deeply empirical contributions illustrate how historical, material, legal, religious, economic, political, and social connections and separations shape the experience of being located in the geographical space commonly known as the Mediterranean region. Drawing from research in Melilla, Lampedusa, Istanbul, Nefpaktos/Lepanto, Tunisia, Beirut, Marseille, and elsewhere, the volume articulates location through the overlapping and incorporation of multiple social and historical processes.
Individual contributions are linked by the pursuit to rethink the conceptual frames deployed to study the Mediterranean region. Together, the volume’s chapters challenge strict geopolitical renderings of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and suggest how the ‘Mediterranean’ can function as a meaningful anthropological and historical category if the notion of ‘location’ is reinvigorated and conceptualised anew.
ENGLANNIKSI
Carl Rommel, Joseph John Viscomi (eds.) (2022): Locating the Mediterranean: Connections and Separations across Space and Time. Helsinki University Press.
The book is freely available at https://hup.fi/site/books/e/10.33134/HUP-18/
Summary of the book:
Until today, anthropological studies of locality have taken primary interest in local subjects leading local lives in local communities. Through a shift of conceptual emphasis from locality to location, the present volume departs from previous preoccupations with identity and belonging. Instead, Locating the Mediterranean brings together ethnographic examinations of processes that make locations and render them meaningful. In doing so, it stimulates debates on the interplay between location and region-making in history as well as anthropology.
The volume’s deeply empirical contributions illustrate how historical, material, legal, religious, economic, political, and social connections and separations shape the experience of being located in the geographical space commonly known as the Mediterranean region. Drawing from research in Melilla, Lampedusa, Istanbul, Nefpaktos/Lepanto, Tunisia, Beirut, Marseille, and elsewhere, the volume articulates location through the overlapping and incorporation of multiple social and historical processes.
Individual contributions are linked by the pursuit to rethink the conceptual frames deployed to study the Mediterranean region. Together, the volume’s chapters challenge strict geopolitical renderings of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and suggest how the ‘Mediterranean’ can function as a meaningful anthropological and historical category if the notion of ‘location’ is reinvigorated and conceptualised anew.
5. Henni Alava (2022). Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda: There is Confusion. Bloomsbury.
Kunniamaininta: Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion 2023
Kirja on vapaasti luettavissa osoitteessa https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350175815
Kirjan tiivistelmä englanniksi:
This open access booksheds critical light on the complex and unstable relationship between Christianity and politics, and peace and war. Drawing on long-running ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda’s largest religious communities, it maps the tensions and ironies found in the Catholic and Anglican Churches in the wake of war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda. It shows how churches’ responses to the war were enabled by their embeddedness in local communities. Yet churches’ embeddedness in structures of historical violence made their attempts to nurture peace liable to compound conflict.
At the heart of the book is the Acholi concept of anyobanyoba, ’confusion’, which depicts an experienced sense of both ambivalence and uncertainty, a state of mixed-up affairs within community and an essential aspect of politics in a country characterized by the threat of state violence. Foregrounding vulnerability, the book advocates ’confusion’ as an epistemological and ethical device, and employs it to meditate on how religious believers, as well as researchers, can cultivate hope amid memories of suffering and on-going violence.
ENGLANNIKSI
Henni Alava (2022). Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda: There is Confusion. Bloomsbury
Honorable Mention: Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion 2023
The book is freely available at https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350175815
Summary of the book:
This open access booksheds critical light on the complex and unstable relationship between Christianity and politics, and peace and war. Drawing on long-running ethnographic fieldwork in Uganda’s largest religious communities, it maps the tensions and ironies found in the Catholic and Anglican Churches in the wake of war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda. It shows how churches’ responses to the war were enabled by their embeddedness in local communities. Yet churches’ embeddedness in structures of historical violence made their attempts to nurture peace liable to compound conflict.
At the heart of the book is the Acholi concept of anyobanyoba, ’confusion’, which depicts an experienced sense of both ambivalence and uncertainty, a state of mixed-up affairs within community and an essential aspect of politics in a country characterized by the threat of state violence. Foregrounding vulnerability, the book advocates ’confusion’ as an epistemological and ethical device, and employs it to meditate on how religious believers, as well as researchers, can cultivate hope amid memories of suffering and on-going violence.
