Paper short abstract:

The paper focus on the usage and experiences of summerhouses as a place and a cultural heritage in the Finnish coastal region and how this can be connected to the protection of the sea.

Paper long abstract:

Generations of summerhouse users create a cultural heritage by upholding old traditions and values in connection to their summerhouses and thereby they also recreate a landscape. In 2019 there were 512 000 summerhouses in Finland, which gives us an idea of the importance and impact of summerhouses in the landscape. The theoretical approaches are 1) sense of place 2) biodiversity and 3) ecosystem services. Through these I want to open up new interdisciplinary perspectives to look at landscapes and open up questions as: How does a summerhouse correlate to the landscape and nature around it? Which values are connected to a place that should be close to nature but still often harms it in many ways? How does making of a cultural heritage like the summerhouse landscape correlate to biodiversity and ecosystem services?

The fact that nature and different landscapes are experienced and valued differently might be problematic, as the way values are understood, admitted and addressed are complex and have a big impact on the decision making. To value ecosystem services, as the ones connected to the usage of summerhouses, is challenging but invaluable for protecting the wellbeing of both nature and people.

Paper short abstract:

How our relationship to non-human fellow creatures in the mire landscapes has transformed? How new recreational uses of mires have affected to conception of animal agency there? My study is based on material of written and recorded memory narratives explored by methods of environmental humanities.

Paper long abstract:

The mire landscapes are lively habitats for many species. Humans encounters them often during recreational activities on the mires. Traditionally, in Finland mires have been places for hard work in the name of agriculture, forestry or peat production, but nowadays uses of mires have changed. The most popular reasons to go to mires nowadays belongs to voluntary outdoor activities. Alongside this change, the relationship to non-human entities of mires has transformed profoundly. For example, former fear of encountering with a bear because it could threat livestock, has dissolved to wishes to see that wild creature as part of spectacular nature experience. The conception of animal agency has transformed and needs to be reconsidered.

My study is based on research material gathered by the inquiry and interviews from people who have personal experiences of mires including affective encounters to non-human living entities. It is part of Mire trend research project, in which our group explores new and unconventional uses of nature that are changing the cultural heritage of mires. There underlies the question of reforming human-nature -relationship from the past to the future. I’ll ask here: what resent highly affective and bodily connections to mires have done to our relationship of non-human fellow creatures in it? It is necessary to include also ethical rethinking of our animal conception as such here. With ethnographic close reading, I apply to my analysis of the written and recorded memory narratives some points of views from environmental humanities as human-animal studies, ecocriticism and environmental aesthetics.

Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with mountain farmers and shepherds, who work in different ways on steep, alpine mountain terrain in close relationship with animals, plants and land(scape). Our focus is on current developments, following the considerable agricultural changes that took place over the last decades.

Paper long abstract:

The focus of our ongoing research in the Trentino-South-Tyrol region are mountain farmers and shepherds, who work in high altitude, steep mountain terrain in an intense relationship with animals, plants and land. The current developments in this small-scale agrarian sector, following the considerable agricultural transformation that took place in the region over the last decades, calls for an ethnological re-consideration.

In our understanding, landscape plays an essential role in the “agrarian worlds”, which we understand, following Galvin (2018), as formative meeting places through the networks and relations from which they re-emerge. Farming practices with and on land are part of a larger network, co-constituted by people, animals, plants and land. We consider landscape as an actor in the social and cultural lives of the people we work with. The contradiction between idealized western concepts of landscape and the realities of everyday working of the land as we see it during our research, is a constant challenge for our work. Local people look from very different perspectives at the landscape and are concerned with current transformations - for reasons of climate change, loss of biodiversity, soil stability and tourism.

In this short paper, we look at landscape, asking how co-sociality, understood as everyday interactions and interrelationships – characterised by care, sociability and intimacy – manifests itself. What is the current state of the co-constituting relationships of humans, animals and grassland and what might it mean for re-creating the landscape and re-thinking research practices?

Paper short abstract:

Steam ploughs, artificial fertiliser and migrant labour are the historical means for the production of a land that never sleeps. The classical ethnological concept of mode of operation (driftsform) will be revisited to analyse industrial landscapes that expand in time and in space.

Paper long abstract:

Through the history of ethnology since Åke Campbell’s pioneering studies, the concept of mode of operation (driftsform) has been mobilised to analyse the relations between the practices of people and formation of certain cultural landscapes.

This paper departs from my dissertation project on the “black transition” of agriculture that accompanied the introduction of sugar beet production in Southern Scandinavia in the last decades of the 19th century. With the arrival of sugar beet cultivation, steam ploughing, artificial fertilisers and migrant labour found its way to the fields of Lolland and Scania in this period, intensifying landscapes beyond fallow.

Through empirical examples from specific Scandinavian sugar producing estates, I will explore some cultural landscapes of the plantationocene by looking at how they were produced by certain forms of practices of operation. We will begin to understand the landscapes that surround us as fossil ecologies that are born with the historical introduction of agricultural machinery and new crops. Artificial fertilisers and steam ploughs became the medicine that wrestled the land out of its ecological state of sleeplessness.

Under the fossil mode of operation, a sleepless land becomes a field of battle between migrating labour, regimes of optimisation and the planty agency of the multi-germinating seeds of the sugar beet. Today, Nordzucker is Denmark’s second largest emitter of CO2: But how did sugar production transform our landscapes into fossil modernity?