Literacy Skills As Local Intangible Capital

This book studies the ”grey area” of the success story of rural lending libraries in the Nordic countries through the activities of people’s libraries in one area of Central Finland. The study explores the influence of social, cultural, geographical and economic phenomena, such as the spread of revivalist movements, on the reading habits of the local population and reveals interesting reasons why the establishment of elementary schools and popular libraries and the growth of functional literacy did not automatically increase the informational capital of the common people of remote regions or lead to their social advancement. This study represents a methodological experiment in describing the life history of a people’s library. The combination of collective biographical and transnational comparative methods with rarely utilized original sources in this study is innovative and has not been used before in Finnish historical research on functional literacy and popular libraries. The advantage of the comparison is that it reveals the attitudes to libraries that were characteristic of each of the cultures involved. For the people of the Finnish countryside in the late nineteenth century, libraries represented a way of acquiring new information that was still strange and unwelcome. The distribution of immaterial capital was extremely uneven with regard to age, gender and social rank. In the earlier Finnish research has not very often been analysed, how the communal status of the peasant reader and his or her personal networks in the local community affected the quality of his or her reading habits. This book shows, that the location of the library in its local community and on the other hand the status and position of its customers in their networks, had a great significance on the use of the library and thus to the improvement of reading skills.

This volume analyses the societal legacy of Lutheranism in Finland in broad terms. It contributes to the recent renewed interest in the history of religion in Finland and the Nordic countries by bringing together researchers in history, political science, economics, social psychology, education, linguistics, media studies, and theology to examine the mutual relationship between Lutheranism and society in Finland. The two main foci are (i) the historical effects of the Reformation and its aftermath on societal structures and on national identity, values, linguistic culture, education, and the economy, and (ii) the adaptation of the church – and its theology – to changes in the geo-political and sociocultural context. Important sub-themes include nationalism and religion, the secularization and institutionalization of traditional values, multiple Protestant ethics, and long continuities in history. Overall the book argues that large changes in societies cannot be explained via ‘secular’ factors alone, such as economic development or urbanization, but that factors pertaining to religion provide substantial explanatory power for understanding societal change and the resulting societal structures.

People all over the globe are experiencing unprecedented and often hazardous situations as environments change at speeds never before experienced. This edited collection proposes that anthropological perspectives on landscape have great potential to address the resulting conundrums. The contributions build on broadly phenomenological, structuralist and multi-species approaches to environmental perception and experience, but they also argue for incorporating political power into analysis alongside dwelling, cosmology and everyday practice. The book’s 13 ethnographically rich chapters explore how the material and the conceptual are entangled in and as landscapes, but it also looks at how these processes unfold at many scales in time and space, involving different actors with different powers. Thus it reaches towards new methodologies and new ways of using anthropology to engage with the sense of crisis concerning environment, movements of people, climate change and other planetary transformations. Dwelling in political landscapes: contemporary anthropological perspectives builds substantially upon anthropological work by Tim Ingold, Anna Tsing and Philippe Descola and on related work beyond, which emphasises the ongoing and open-ended, yet historically conditioned ways in which humans and nonhumans produce the environments they inhabit. In such work, landscapes are understood as the medium and outcome of meaningful life activities, where humans, like other animals, dwell. This means that landscapes are neither social/cultural nor natural, but socio-natural. Protesting against and moving on from the proverbial dualisms of modern, Western and maybe capitalist thought, is only the first step in renewing anthropology’s methodology for the current epoch, however. The contributions ask how seemingly disconnected temporal, representational, economic and other systemic dynamics fold back on lived experience that are materialised in landscapes. Foremost through studying how socially valued landscapes become irreversibly disturbed, commodified or subjected to wilful markings or erasures, the book explores a number of approaches to how landscapes are entangled in the ways people gather and organise themselves. Mindful of troubling changes in Earth Systems, all the authors argue from empirics. They show that processes of landscape change are always both habitual and laden with choices. That is, landscape change is political. Undoubtedly, landscape politics is bound up not just in how nature has been imagined, but in long histories of consumption. Today, an alarming quest for raw materials and energy continues to change both political and geological formations. Meanwhile dominant socio-political aspirations mean the exploitation of staggering volumes of cheap resources like fossil fuels in order to sustain economic processes that are as taken-for-granted as they are unsustainable. Like anthropology generally, this book attends to the contextual details buried in such planet-scale pictures. Building on traditional anthropological strengths, many authors consider the details of how the past is brought into the present – or erased from it – in material flows and sensory awareness, as well as in narratives that are explicitly linked to particular landscapes. Colonial identity formation and the different ways that it links with how landscape is viewed and managed (for instance for resource development for a global market), whether in Southern Africa, Israel/Palestine, the Canadian arctic or Indonesia, is a particularly striking example of how to talk about landscape is also to talk about past, present and future. And as the idea that we inhabit the Anthropocene becomes commonplace, the discipline can meaningfully discuss the current era as one of disavowed ruins as well as of poorly understood multispecies relations. To think of landscape as historically produced across multiple scales, does not mean ignoring its sensuous qualities let alone its role in cosmological systems. On the contrary, the analyses in the collection attend to the ways people’s movements through the landscape produce it as a material and conceptual resource. Taken together, the book’s ethnographic analyses take on board the unprecedented conditions under which people everywhere are having to make sense and forge relationships to the worlds they inhabit. Since landscapes are not what they used to be, neither can anthropology be.

This volume includes chapters by junior and senior scholars hailing from Europe, Asia, North America, and Oceania, all of whom sought to understand the social and cultural implications surrounding how people take responsibility for the ways they speak or write in relation to a place—whether it is one they have long resided in, recently moved to, or left a long time ago. The contributors to the volume investigate ‘responsibility’ in and through language practices as inspired by the roots of the (English) word itself: the ability to respond, or mount a response to a situation at hand. It is thus a ‘responsive’ kind of responsibility, one that focuses not only on demonstrating responsibility for language, but highlighting the various ways we respond to situations discursively and metalinguistically. This sort of responsibility is both part of individual and collectively negotiated concerns that shift as people contend with processes related to globalization.

Genetic criticism investigates creative processes by analysing manuscripts and other archival sources. It sheds light on authors’ working practices and the ways works are developed on the writer’s desk or in the artist’s studio. This book provides a cross-section of current international trends in genetic criticism, half a century after the birth of the discipline in Paris. The last two decades have witnessed an expansion of the field of study with new kinds of research objects and new forms of archival material, along with various kinds of interdisciplinary intersections and new theoretical perspectives. The essays in this volume represent various European literary and scholarly traditions discussing creative processes from Polish poetry to French children’s literature, as well as topical issues such as born-digital literature and the application of forensic methodology to manuscript studies. The book is intended for scholars and students of literary criticism and textual scholarship, together with anyone interested in the working practices of writers, illustrators, and editors.

This collection of thirteen chapters answers new questions about rhyme, with views from folklore, ethnopoetics, the history of literature, literary criticism and music criticism, psychology and linguistics. The book examines rhyme as practiced or as understood in English, Old English and Old Norse, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Karelian, Estonian, Medieval Latin, Arabic, and the Central Australian language Kaytetye. Some authors examine written poetry, including modernist poetry, and others focus on various kinds of sung poetry, including rap, which now has a pioneering role in taking rhyme into new traditions. Some authors consider the relation of rhyme to other types of form, notably alliteration. An introductory chapter discusses approaches to rhyme, and ends with a list of languages whose literatures or song traditions are known to have rhyme.

This volume concerns the ways in which verbal and non-verbal actions are combined and linked in a range of contexts in everyday conversation, in institutional contexts, and in written journalism. The volume includes an introduction which, besides presenting the content of the articles, discusses terminological fundamentals such as the understanding of the terms “clause”, “action” and “linkage” and “combining” in different grammatical traditions and the ways they are conceived of here, as well as open questions collectively formulated by the contributors in planning for the volume concerning the recognition, emergence and distance of linkage, and the ways these questions are addressed in the contributions to the volume. Topics treated in the articles include combining physical actions and verbal announcements in everyday conversation, linking of verbal and nonverbal actions as well as verbal linkages between nonverbal actions by dance teachers building pedagogical activity. Other topics concern the mediation of questions through informal translating in multilingual conversation in order to organize participation, and the ways in which student requests for clarification and confirmation create learning occasions in a foreign language classroom. Still other articles concern the on-line emergence of alternative questions with the Finnish particle vai 'or', delayed completions of unfinished turns, the transforming of requests and offers into joint ventures, and the ways in which direct quotations are created in written journalism from the original talk in the spoken interview. Most of the papers employ Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics as a theoretical framework. The languages used as data are Finnish, English, Estonian, French, Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish.