The immigrant “Other” and artistic expression: (de)bordering via festivals and social activism in Finland

This paper analyses how cultural production and artistic activities can explain the social (de)construction of borders. The study looks at the soft, cultural aspects of bordering, encounters between the immigrants and their host societies, and the conscious and unintentional ways of altering their mental frames. The analysis focuses on the World Village Festival organised annually in Helsinki, and a young literary project titled “Sidelight – is this Finnish literature?” Based on these two case studies, associations between the concepts of bordering, liminality and translation are developed to enable a deeper understanding of the encounters between immigrant cultures and their host societies.     

Milling Cereals/Legumes and Stamping Bread in Mauretanian Tamuda (Morocco): An Interdisciplinary Study

African Archaeological Review - Recent archaeological excavations (2016–2019) in the city of Tamuda (northern Morocco) yielded evidence of commercial milling and bread-making facilities dated...     

CLASS OR COMMUNITY? MARX,THE RUSSIAN COMMUNE,AND CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THEORY

This article explores the relationship between class and community through a discussion of peasant struggles and the commune during the Russian Revolution. Doing so, we show how Marx's class‐oriented reflections on community can help us to understand the role that the peasantry plays (or should play) in processes of social transformation. This enables us, first, to understand the relevance of communal forms for Marx, who believed that communitarian ways of life were crucial for overcoming a value‐based society. It is, in fact, a mistake to divide Marx's intellectual trajectory into two periods: a categorical Marx, who authored Capital and critically analyzed the classical theory of value, and a phenomenological, empirical Marx, who in the last years of his life abandoned writing Capital and focused instead on studying the Russian peasantry. Second, it enables us to discuss new externalist visions, such as postcolonial and decolonial theories, which postulate that the subordination of contemporary peasant communities is rooted in epistemology, culture, and local power relations. These theories are related to the old social‐democratic canon, which conceives of social classes as preconstituted entities and of capital as a parasitic externality that is incommensurable with social dynamics. The experience of the Russian peasantry calls into question all externalist and ontological perspectives.     

Zapotec innovation in a Mexican village: Building an autonomous mobile network

In 2013, a Zapotec village in the Mexican state of Oaxaca drew international attention when its citizens successfully created an autonomous mobile phone network. Using open‐source software and with technical assistance from an NGO (non‐governmental organization), the people of Talea de Castro obtained antennae, a base station and software that enabled them to build a fully functional mobile network with global reach. This article examines theoretical questions about the nature of innovation and the conditions that might help promote it. It also places the network in broad historical and social contexts. The article reviews the political, legal and technical processes by which villagers were able to create the network. For many years, Talea has been a centre of technological creativity and experimentation. The network might be seen as the village's latest innovation in a centuries‐long process in which creative problem‐solving is integrated with indigenous patterns of mutual aid, reciprocal labour and cooperativism. The article concludes with a discussion of the challenges facing the network and its users.