Living (with) Things: Relational Ontology and Material Culture in Early Modern Northern Finland

Herva, Vesa-Pekka

doi:10.1017/s0959774309000572

Cited by 25 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…These matters are covered in the following, which shares many aspects with recent Finnish archaeological studies and their lively and necessary discussion contradicting conventional views about material culture and its essence. In addition to this they also draw heavily on domestic folk beliefs, and many points made in these studies are in accordance with the observations presented here (see for example Hukantaival 2007;Herva 2009;Herva 2010;Herva & Ylimaunu 2009;Herva et al 2010).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Things in Culture, Culture in Things

Kannike¹,

Laviolette²

2013

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Aims & scopeThe Approaches to Culture Theory book series focuses on various aspects of analysis, modelling, and theoretical understanding of culture. Culture theory as a set of complementary theories is seen to include and combine the approaches of different sciences, among them semiotics of culture, archaeology, environmental history, ethnology, cultural ecology, cultural and social anthropology, human geography, sociology and the psychology of culture, folklore, media and communication studies. Series editorsKalevi Kull Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics, University of Tartu Introduction. Storing and storying the serendipity of objects . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Patrick Laviolette Soft objectsThe natural order is decay: the home as an ephemeral art project . Notes on editors and contributorsMaria Cristache (Maria.Cristache@gcsc.uni-giessen.de) completed a Master's degree in sociology and social anthropology at the Central European University, Hungary. She is currently a doctoral student at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus Liebig University, Giessen. Her research interests include material culture, post-socialism, sociology and the anthropology of consumption, including patterns of taste and consumption of domestic objects in communist and post-communist Romania.Carlo A. Cubero (carlo.cubero@gmail.com) is associate professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Estonian Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia. His research focuses on ethnographic filmmaking methodology, migration, transnationalism and post-colonial identities.Brigitte Glaser (Brigitte.Glaser@phil.uni-goettingen.de) is professor of English literature and cultural studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany. She has published two monographs, one on 18th-century fiction and the other on 17th-century autobiographical writing. During the last few years her research focus and publications have been on colonial and postcolonial literature as well as transnational writing. A co-edited volume of essays The Canadian Mosaic in the Age of Transnationalism appeared in 2010.Remo Gramigna (gramigna@ut.ee) is a doctoral student in semiotics at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He gained a Master's degree in science of communication at Rome's Sapienza University with a dissertation entitled Culture Jamming: Phenomenology of Creative Destruction (2006). He completed a second Master's degree in semiotics at the University of Tartu with a thesis entitled Augustine on Lying: A Semiotic Analysis (2011). His main research area is the semiotics of lying and deception.Visa Immonen (visa.immonen@helsinki.fi) is a fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, and adjunct professor of archaeology at the University of Turku, Finland. He is an archaeologist specialising in the Middle Ages and the Modern period. Meripeni Ngully (meripeni55@gmail.com) is associate professor at the Department of History, Dimapur Government College, India. She is a doctoral candida...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Things in Culture, Culture in Things

Kannike¹,

Laviolette²

2013

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“…It can be proposed that household spirits were not originally conceived of as autonomous beings, but that the buildings themselves were perceived of as living and person-like beings in certain situations. This view, of course, is in harmony with the 'traditional' northern animistic-shamanistic cosmology preserved into the early modern period, as reflected in folklore, and the idea that folk beliefs about the extraordinary properties of ordinary things make sense in terms of the relational understanding of the world (see further Herva 2009;Herva & Ylimaunu 2009). It can be speculated that the transformation of household spirits from buildings with special properties into autonomous non-humans reflects the influence of modernist thinking and dissociation of 'spiritual' properties from the material world.…”

Section: Living (With) Buildingsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Buildings as persons: relationality and the life of buildings in a northern periphery of early modern Sweden

Herva¹

2010

Antiquity

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The author shows how houses in the northern Baltic were constructed using two realities: the reality of timber and the equally potent reality of spirits supporting and controlling the fate of structures. Excavations in seventeenthcentury Tornio (now in modern-day Finland) showed that houses were furnished with special offerings when founded and refurbished, while evidence from living folklore suggested that the houses themselves were originally given spiritual personalities and were treated as members of the family. As more modern thinking took hold, this spirituality was transferred to the more mobile and skittish household sprites.

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“…Ya que las cualidades que estos cuerpos incorporan están distribuidas en otros, estos cuerpos pueden entenderse también como distribuidos, compartiendo atributos con distintos seres, estableciendo referencias a través del continuum de cuerpos, independiente del material que los constituya (madera, en el caso de los objetos acá estudiados, piedra o, incluso, cuerpos humanos de carne y hueso), generando un atado o conjunto (bundle, sensu Pauketat 2013) particular. Estos cuerpos de madera participaron así en redes relacionales (Latour 2005, Herva 2009, Fowler 2013a) creando un campo experiencial particular.…”

Section: Cuerpos Y Sus Cualidadesunclassified

Cuerpos de madera. Diversidad y relacionalidad en objetos antropo/zoomorfos de Rapa Nui obtenidos entre los siglos XVIII y XX

Armstrong

2019

Bol. Mus. Chil. Arte Precolomb.

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En este artículo se cuestionan las categorías utilizadas hasta ahora para estudiar las estatuillas de madera producidas en Rapa Nui antes e inmediatamente después del contacto con Europa (1722), con el fin de visibilizar un conjunto de objetos que no cumplen con los estándares normativos de dichas categorías. Utilizando una perspectiva metodológica basada en la teoría queer, así como enfoques relacionales, se indaga en las formas en las que este diverso conjunto de cuerpos en madera puede dar cuenta de la manera en que la población rapanuí pre-contacto conceptualizó sus propios cuerpos, y, de manera más general, su mundo. Así, los cuerpos de madera sugieren una fluidez de cualidades que hace difícil la aplicación de modelos cartesianos rígidos sobre el cuerpo y los objetos, a la vez que apuntan a un mundo construido sobre la combinación de atributos y cualidades.

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Living (with) Things: Relational Ontology and Material Culture in Early Modern Northern Finland

Cited by 25 publications

References 22 publications

Things in Culture, Culture in Things

Things in Culture, Culture in Things

Buildings as persons: relationality and the life of buildings in a northern periphery of early modern Sweden

Cuerpos de madera. Diversidad y relacionalidad en objetos antropo/zoomorfos de Rapa Nui obtenidos entre los siglos XVIII y XX

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