Paper short abstract:

In this poster I discuss art as a media at Science Centre Tuorla, Finland. The site is an astronomical observatory that is transforming to a science centre offering experiential learning. Simultaneously the oral history and the historical equipment of the observatory have been documented.

Paper long abstract:

In this poster, I will present my master's thesis on ethnology. It is a research on the options of how to conjoin art with science and humanities.

Tuorla Observatory (1952-2018) was a well-known astronomical, optical and geodetic research centre of the University of Turku in Piikkiö, Finland. In the spring 2018 the research work was relocated to the campus area in Turku but the buildings, including the telescopes, are still in situ. The place has started its transformation into a public science centre where all faculties in The University of Turku will be represented. For example workshops, courses, class trips and camp schools are arranged. Tuorla is changing from a scientific research place to a touristic and educational arena with a unique history to be cherished.

Documenting the heritage and working at the site has given me a possibility to live the everyday life and the transformation of Tuorla Science Centre. Along I have gained insights and ideas. The observatories and the interdisciplinary premises offer endless possibilities for art influenced exhibitions and events.

Museums are already using art-like presentations in their exhibitions. Videos, sounds, installations, interactive media, performance etc. are essential in a modern museum. Likewise contemporary artists are using science and research as their inspiration and method.

In what traditional or new ways arts can be used as a media in a science centre? Can art make science and cultural research more thought-provoking, interesting or understandable? On the other hand, how does the scientific context influence the art experience?

Paper short abstract:

The chegas de bois, like the Portuguese rural world, have known since the 70s, various changes. Nowadays these are maintained, and are related to the patrimonial ideology and the rights of nonhuman animals, among other criticisms. These are the changes that this paper intends to explain.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decades, especially after the 70s, the reality of the rural world in Portugal underwent through profound changes (here we can note the increase in subsidies and financial capacity of populations), which are manifested in the most diverse economic and symbolic practices, changing the forms of grazing and, as a consequence, also altering the chegas de bois (bullwrestling), a form of animal fighting between two bulls that had hitherto occurred between animals in community possession and now occurring among animals of private owners.

It is also in the 70s, with the work of Peter Singer, that the awareness for the defense of the rights and dignity of nonhuman animals began to generalize.

This leads to greater opposition to practices that undermine the well-being of non-human animals, which are reinforced when these practices present a cultural and patrimonial character and can, nowadays, after the 2003 UNESCO Convention, be safeguarded, even if only at national level.

Based on these three points, it is intended, with this work, mainly resorting to qualitative methods (interviews and observation), to answer the following questions: how were the chegas de bois organized and occur? What is the current state of the chegas de bois and what are the main changes that occurred in this manifestation over the years? what are the criticisms about these combats made by non-human rights defenders? have measures been taken to promote the chegas de bois turistically as well as to safeguard the chegas de bois?

Paper short abstract:

In this poster I will discuss the process of researching attitudes towards Scots language among young people in a high school in Scotland. I use Linguistic Ethnography as a framework to investigate what Scots means to young people as part of their identity, sense of belonging and cultural heritage.

Paper long abstract:

Scots is one of three indigenous languages in Scotland, alongside English and Gaelic, and since 2001 has been protected by the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. Following centuries of stigmatisation, and deliberate suppression within education and public life, the status of Scots is currently improving. Changing legislation has led to a more positive policy environment, and Scots is now taught in some schools. In my PhD research, I am investigating the nature and practice of contemporary Scots use, with a particular focus on the linguistic practices of young people in Banff, a town in northern Aberdeenshire, in the North-East of Scotland. In this poster presentation I discuss how I combine Linguistic Ethnography and Participatory Action Research (PAR) to investigate attitudes towards Scots. I am interested in the intersection between language, culture and education and how they combine to create a sense of community identity. My key question is 'How do you feel about Scots?', and in partnership with the school I am undertaking research which aims to investigate whether Scots language education raises pupil self-esteem and wider achievement in the school community. We are making an exhibition as part of this project, and images from our work can be seen on this poster.

Paper short abstract:

The poster present on select examples, using the cartographic method, the transformation of spiritual and material aspects of religious peregrination in the Czech Republic mainly in the 18th-21th centuries, based on archeological finds, printed and archival sources and field research.

Paper long abstract:

In European contries, the traditional expressions of popular piety always belonged among the basic subjects of anthropologic, ethnologic and ethnocartographic studies. The successful research of popular piety and religious art that started in the Czech Land at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries underwent a major transformation after the year 1948 due to political changes. In the environment where science was oriented toward Marxism and its premises were built on the single "scientific world view", popular religiosity, the research of religious peregrination became taboo in the Communist regime. Interest in this topic was not resurrected until after the year 1989. The poster will present research that has been conducted so far in the Czech Republic on popular piety that represents a rather complicated and hard-to-structure aspect of popular mentality and traditional culture that interlinks popular spiritual and material culture. Peregrination, a type of socio-religious behavior, represents a very specific researched expression of popular piety. Based on the state of research in the Czech Republic and thanks to archeological finds and printed and archival sources, we will present on select examples, using the cartographic method, the oldest expressions of spiritual and material aspects of religious peregrination (e.g. pilgrimage cults, the geographical radius of pilgrimages, devotionals - pilgrimage medals) and the contemporary transformations of the pilgrimage tradition studied through field research.

Paper short abstract:

This Poster shows how ethnographic research in relations between humans and dogs can be used to track "Europeanization" in Podgorica. Europeanization is materialized in these Contact Zones as practices of "Doing-Europe", where governmental and everyday cultural dimensions come together.

Paper long abstract:

Podgorica as the capital of Montenegro has been for the last decades in a process that is called "Europeanization" by the field itself and sciences outside the field. Europeanization is an analytical category and a cultural and political phenomenon as well and should be investigated in it's governmental and cultural dimensions. This Poster is addressing the question, how transformations in the relations between humans, straying dogs and owned dogs can be used as a window for ethnographic tracking of Europeanization as transformation in Podgorica's urban culture?

The research this poster is based on is dealing with the question how humans, straying and owned dogs live together in the postsocialist urban culture of Podgorica. The remembered number of a few straying and very few owned dogs in Podgorica is constantly rising and in the fieldwork it turned out that Europeanization seems to be one of the driving forces of these transformations. An, in the field so called, "European Trend" of keeping purebred dogs as companions is growing. Abandoned individuals of this "lifestyle with dog" or their descendants often turn into straying dogs. Besides that, a law for the protection of animal rights following the standards of the European Union has recently been implemented and forbids the governmentally organized killing of straying dogs. The poster exemplifies how this field's actors of different species are tracked with multispecies ethnographical methods in their Contact Zones and how Europeanization is materialized in this field as a practice of "Doing-Europe" in which Europeanization's governmental and cultural dimensions come together.

Paper short abstract:

Our poster will present "Project 1967", a research endeavor in which personal stories of both Israelis and Palestinians were collected, providing a wealth of testimonies from people who directly witnessed and experienced the Six-Day War.

Paper long abstract:

In June 1967, a war broke out in the Middle East, that immeasurably reshaped everyday life in the region. Our poster will present "Project 1967", a research endeavor in which personal stories of both Israelis and Palestinians were collected, providing a wealth of testimonies from people who directly witnessed and experienced the war. These multi-layered stories portray conflicting, basically irreconcilable realities, but also overarching memories and sentiments held in common. The stories point to fascinating avenues relating to changing spatial perceptions, the impact of language on memories, as well as many other topics that involve rumors, conspiracies and even jokes, as people talk about war through genres.

In our research in progress, being conducted fifty years after that dramatic war, the main belligerents, the Israelis and the Palestinians disagree on almost everything. For example, while the Israelis call the event "the Six-Day War," the Palestinians talk about the Naksa, meaning "the defeat". The Israelis speak of six days of heroic fighting, while Palestinians talk about a quick occupation, that took no more than two days.

"Project 1967" is being conducted as a collaborative venture involving researchers from the University of Göttingen, the Hebrew University and Al Quds University. Over nearly two years the researchers have conducted dozens of interviews with Jerusalemites from different parties, including men and women, soldiers and civilians, residents and refugees.

Our poster will display the ways we have been collecting and analyzing the materials, focusing on several enlightening and thought-provoking cases.

Paper short abstract:

Ethnographic questionnaires are knowledge instruments that can be used to tell a bottom-up disciplinary history. Whereas EQs prescribed a host of data collection practices with a hope of comparing findings, this poster addresses questions that visitors are invited to engage with.

Paper long abstract:

'Do you know of any customs of tipping off the last wagon load of grain at the end of the harvest?' 'What are the songs or formulas chanted in rope skipping?' 'What is said when a child yawns?' 'How early do people get up in the morning in spring time?' Such questions are real examples taken from ethnographic questionnaires (EQs) that are more than a hundred years old. In my poster I wish to address EQs as a way of engaging the values promoted by folklorists and ethnologists from the vantage point of the present.

EQs were a unique participatory knowledge format, activating many people in the folklore project, shifting awareness to specific cultural expressions and habits. Rather than viewing EQs as a methodology that merely prescribes the collection of data, I examine them as vehicles for transforming knowledge and cultural hierarchies, which eventually had a lasting impact on the relation between local cultures and value (Bendix 2018).

In my poster I wish to present some questions and some examples of EQs with the aim of reflecting on matters that were of much concern in the history of our disciplines. EQs were about finding answers, but they differed from one another in the type of questions asked and the way these were organized. In what ways do these questions matter today? What can they tell us about our present-day concerns? We will find out…

Paper short abstract:

The poster will present results of an ongoing PhD research project on the perception of European identity in post-Brexit Scotland with a particular focus on the relation between European identity and small state vulnerability.

Paper long abstract:

Following two dividing referendums on Scottish independence and the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union, Scotland is undergoing a tumultuous period in which its identity is widely being debated and (re)negotiated. In particular the EU referendum and the ensuing negotiations on Brexit have resulted in Britain entering a liminal phase of change without a foreseeable ending. Within this transformational context, European identity is being understood in new ways and with new meanings. For some it is a defiant expression of connection: a root and a route to the rest of Europe; for others it is also an expression of disconnection between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom and is incorporated into the support for Scottish independence.

This poster will present an ongoing research project which explores the function of European identity within the Scottish pro-independence movement, with a particular focus on the relation between European identity and small-state vulnerability. If Scotland became independent, it would be considered as a small state in Europe. Small state studies have argued that such states are particularly vulnerable to their external environment. This line of study has been based within the political sciences, which have proposed several strategies small states use to counteract their vulnerability. The research project aims to argue that European identity may also be used to create resilience within small states, thereby adding an ethnological perspective to small state studies. Results of a scoping study which forms part of the PhD research will be presented.

Paper short abstract:

How can a library collection reflect changes in science and the transition from the early modern to the late modern period in the European periphery of Sweden-Finland? The poster shows an analysis of the library and archive documents of the famous chemist and professor Johan Gadolin (1762-1850).

Paper long abstract:

The library of professor Johan Gadolin consists of about 3 400 books, acquired by him, his father and grandfather; all professors at the Royal Academy of Åbo (Turku) 1747-1822. The oldest item is printed 1500, and the last one 1848. By analysing the books of the collection, archive studies of letters which reflects Gadolin's wide network of researcher, Gadolin's probate and other source records, I have traced the connections between the actors in the communication cirquit during the late 1800 century and early 1900 century; the aquisition of scholarly books and journals through booksellers and commissioners, fellow researchers in Europe and the bookbinders of Turku. The collection can be studied by referring to Robert Darnton's diagram of the communication circuit as the politics, intellectual influences and economics of Sweden-Finland, later Russia, changed during that time. The great fire of Turku 1827 destroyed the most of the acedemic book collections, but Gadolin's private library was saved as he had moved to a mansion outside the town. One can also study the changes of times through the differences of aquisition generation by generation. Johan Gadolin was a secular researcher, but his father and grandfather, as bishops, had a different view of science, which can be seen in the content of the collection. This makes the collection unique in Scandinavian context, and it received a national Memory of the World status last year in Finland.

Paper short abstract:

This poster aims to be a synthesis of the main achievements of The Ritual Year Working Group (SIEF) in its fifteen years of existence.

Paper long abstract:

The 2019 SIEF congress is the opportunity for members of The Ritual Year Working Group to reflect on the transformations of the ritual year within different times and spaces, within different cultures and value systems. But what about the transformation undergone by our own working group? Where did we start and where are we now? What did we accomplish in the meantime? The celebration of fifteen years of existence is the perfect opportunity to reflect on our overall group activity and achievements.

The Ritual Year Working Group was created in 2004, at the initiative of Emily Lyle (the chair of the group until 2015 and later honorary chair). Since then, it has produced 13 conferences, 8 panels at SIEF congresses and 14 publications. Many other scientific events (workshops, conferences), as well as projects and publications have been facilitated by the working group's meetings, by members communicating, exchanging ideas and getting to know each other. What makes this working group work, is the core of active members who have been there since the very beginning and who have managed to create a warm and welcoming work atmosphere. The results are there to prove it.

This poster aims to be a synthesis of the main achievements of The Ritual Year Working Group in its fifteen years of existence.

Paper short abstract:

This research explores encounters with place and story through the medium of walking tours in Aberdeen, Scotland. Interviews with guides and walk participants explore the uses and experience of the walking tour as a method of narrating historical and real-time changes to the city.

Paper long abstract:

Walking tours are performances based on pre-established routes and narratives, though the resonances of the stories they tell and encounters with place they facilitate are often deeply personal. In other words, both the medium of the walking tour and one's experience of it, can generate narratives of how places have changed over time.

In Aberdeen, Scotland, historical walks facilitate reminiscence and heritage discourse, and tell lesser-known stories about the city. Meanwhile, street art walking tours are a cornerstone in the city centre's redevelopment, based around place-making principles and aims to increase tourism to the region.

How, then, do these walking tours become part of a larger commentary on both past and currently unfolding changes in Aberdeen? Through their chosen narratives, guides openly seek to challenge perceptions of place among both residents and visitors. Discussions with walk participants reveal that participating in walks can trigger reflections on personal history, and allow for views about the present conditions in the city to be expressed.

While tour guide experiences and fieldwork reflections are included here, writing about walking has often focused strongly on the ethnographer's own experience, and writing on walking tours has emphasised the role of the tour guide over participants' perceptions. This research seeks to address these imbalances, prioritising the voices of walkers in exploring the short-term impact of their tour experiences.