University of Helsinki Anthropology
Goings-on of the discipline
“Beyond the Horizon: Essays on Myth, History, Travel and Society”, originally published in 2008, is now available online at https://oa.finlit.fi/site/books/10.21435/sfa.2/
The book was edited by Clifford Sather and Timo Kaartinen, and includes essays by several prominent anthropologists writing about cosmologies, or schemes in terms of which people “locate themselves … in constantly changing circumstances of life”. It is dedicated to Jukka Siikala in celebration of his 60th birthday in 2007.
In the beginning of March 2018, Angie Heo gave a talk in our visiting seminar and we used this great opportunity to speak about her research. The interview, which is presented to you here in an audio form, was conducted in a collaboration with the LSE Religion and Global Society, and you can find its written version on their website.
Angie Heo is Assistant Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at the University of Chicago. Her first book is The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (University of California Press, 2018).
Tenhunen, Sirpa 2018. A Village Goes Mobile: Telephony, Mediation, and Social Change in Rural India. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780190630270.
In A Village Goes Mobile: Telephony, Mediation and Social Change in Rural India, Sirpa Tenhunen examines how the mobile telephone has contributed to social change in rural India. Tenhunen’s long-term ethnographic fieldwork in West Bengal began before the village had a phone system in place and continued through the introduction and proliferation of the smartphone. She here analyzes how mobile telephones emerged as multidimensional objects which, in addition to enabling telephone conversations, facilitated status aspirations, internet access, and entertainment practices. She explores how this multifaceted use of mobile phones has affected agency and power dynamics in economic, political, and social relationships, and how these new social constellations relate to culture and development.
In eight chapters, Tenhunen asks such questions as: Who benefits from mobile telephony and how? Can people use mobile phones to change their lives, or does phone use merely amplify existing social patterns and power relationships? Can mobile telephony induce development? Going beyond the case of West Bengal, Tenhunen develops a framework to understand how new media mediates social processes within interrelated social spheres and local hierarchies by relating, mediasaturated forms of interaction to pre-existing contexts.
The book is also available as an e-book.
If you are interested in reviewing the book, please, contact Sirpa Tenhunen (sirpa.tenhunen(a)helsinki.fi).
Order the book through Oxford University Press .
If the lecture does not stream properly or you want to listen to it offline, download the audio file here.
Melissa Demian (University of St. Andrews) gave a talk titled “The gender of the minibus: Women and the navigation of urban space in Papua New Guinea” on the 14th of April 2018.
Continue reading “Melissa Demian: The gender of the minibus”
If the lecture does not stream properly or you want to listen to it offline, download the audio file here.
Joel Robbins (University of Cambridge) gave a talk titled “Anthropology between Europe and the Pacific: Values and the Prospects for a Relationship Beyond Relativism” on 16 March 2018.
Continue reading “Joel Robbins: Anthropology between Europe and the Pacific”
On March 2, 2018 Angie Heo delivered a talk in our visiting seminar titled “The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt”. We later conducted a brief interview with her.
Photo: Angie Heo
Continue reading “Angie Heo: The Political Lives of Saints. Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt”
If the lecture does not stream properly or you want to listen to it offline, download the audio file here.
Susanne Brandtstädter (University of Cologne) gave a talk titled “Rising Above the Ordinary: Justice, Virtue, and Normative Change in the Chinese Countryside” in our visiting seminar on February 16th, 2018.
