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Kalajoki Clash. The Last People’s Rebellion in 1953
Nothing exceptional happened in front of the youth association building in Kalajoki on 9 September 1953. There was a minor confrontation between regional police forces and local youth, but hundreds of similar events happened in small municipalities across Finland. The event took about ten minutes, nobody was seriously hurt, and collective feelings quickly calmed down. However, after extensive investigations, the regional prosecutor thought otherwise and prosecuted half a dozen local men for rebellion against the state in January 1954. The district court agreed. The municipality was shocked, and the Finnish society was taken by surprise. The case ended up in Supreme Court. This book analyses why and how the last rebellion in the history of Finland occurred in a tiny municipality on the west coast of Finland. The analysis is based on historical microsociology that integrates the insights of microhistory and microsociology into event structure analysis and collective memory studies.
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The Man of Lapland. Identifications, Environments and Shared Specifity
Finnish Lapland is a historical borderland of Finnish and Sámi cultures. Such a region offers various social-political identifications for people to choose: people may see it possible to identify as Finnish, Laplanders, Lappish or Sámi, for instance. However, the choices have social and political limits, and some identifications are more contested than others. The book examines the processes of identifications in the middle parts of Lapland, just south of the region defined as Sámi homeland in Finland. While the study reveals differences and nuances in people’s thinking, it also shows that there is a recognizable sense of shared cultural specifity around the region. Lapland is conceptualized as an extraordinary place with unusual nature and history, characterized by particular livelihoods (such as reindeer herding) and lively cultural interaction. The book concludes that while Lapland is extraordinary as a historical dwelling region of indigenous Sámi, it may be politically significant to recognize it as a unique borderland of cultures with features of its own.
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Language and interaction in human-animal communities
This collection of articles sheds light on the role of human language in interspecies interaction. The book shows that language is not necessarily what separates us from other creatures. It can also be seen as yet another dimension of human existence that is deeply rooted in our shared history and everyday life with other living beings. This volume contains six individual research articles, two short reviews, an opening introduction to the themes of the book, and an extensive, theoretical closing chapter. The studies draw on methodologies and theoretical approaches including conversation analysis and a cognitive, usage-based approach to grammatical constructions. The book further explores the interfaces of linguistics, biosemiotics, and posthumanism. The studies show how linguistic and interactional approaches can contribute to our understanding of how human and non-human animals communicate with each other during embodied activities, how human language users make sense of interspecies encounters in speaking to or about animals, and how human language is thereby impregnated by the presence of other species. The individual research articles study, e.g., interaction with co-present animals, dialectal cow calls, parliamentary speeches, narratives of nature observation, and historical laws.
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