Research Series in Anthropology - University of Helsinki

Tutkimuksessa ‘Someone to welcome you home’: Infertility, medicines and the Sukuma-Nyamwezi, tarkastellaan tansanialaisen sukuma-nyamwezi yhteisön kulttuurin muutosta ja tämän muutoksen seurausta erityisesti naisten hedelmättömyyttä koskevien kulttuuristen käytänteiden kautta.

In this dissertation ’Someone to welcome you home: infertility, medicines and the Sukuma-Nyamwezi’, I look into the cultural change among the Sukuma-Nyamwezi of Tanzania and into the consequences of this change especially through the cultural practices connected to female infertility.

The Akan do not merely express or give meaning to some experiences such as illness and other ideas about life; they live it.

Hard Custom, Hard Dance is an ethnographic study of a village community on the island of Tabiteuea in Southern Kiribati, Central Pacific, at the turn of the millennium. This work examines social organisation, looking at how its differentiated or hierarchical aspects intertwine with egalitarian traits, meanwhile bringing a new perspective to scholarly discussions of social differentiation by introducing the concept of ‘undifferentiation’ to describe non-hierarchical social forms and practices. In the course of this work, particular attention is paid to ideas concerning symbolic reproductive power as they relate to the ways in which people are presupposed, made or aspire to be different from, or the same as, others; that is, social differentiation and undifferentiation.

In 1554 the first English merchants settled in Moscow and began to build their communal world. Relocating to St. Petersburg in 1723, their 'world-building' intensified. The records they left behind make it clear that, while the 'place' which was Petersburg shaped their lives in substantial ways, they were resolute in ignoring their hosts, wherever possible, for almost two centuries.

Memory Meanders, Place, Home and Commemoration in an Ex-Rhodesian Diaspora Community is an ethnographic analysis of a postcolonial migrant community, white former Rhodesians, who have emigrated from Zimbabwe to South Africa after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. It explores the ways in which the colonial past is remembered and reworked, and how “Rhodesia” becomes meaningful and is held alive in the everyday lives and social memory practices of former colonials. Since there has been little ethnographic analysis of former members of “settler communities,” this book makes an original contribution to the study of colonialism and postcolonialism in Southern Africa.