Work

The Value of Common Bracken Revisited

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Based on a walking ethnography, this photo essay employs sensory ethnography to explore multispecies relationality in steljniki, plots of land traditionally used for grazing and the harvesting of common bracken. Through work in subsistence-based extensive farming, humans have formed multispecies relationality, and, beyond use value, have attributed aesthetic value to the cultivated landscape. This essay presents the micro-processes of relational, affective, and material entanglements of humans with more-than-human worlds in steljniki, particularly with common bracken. Keywords: walking ethnography, multispecies ethnography, landscape, work, extensive farming

Source: Suomen Antropologi Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society

DOI: 10.30676/jfas.141505

Author: Barbara Turk Niskač

Institution: Tampere University

Language: English

Topic: Geographies of human-animal interactions

Subfield: Geography, Planning and Development

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funders: European Commission, HORIZON EUROPE Framework Programme, HORIZON EUROPE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions

Awards: G1196848165, G4238144109, G4597462190, A PATCH OF LAND: RE-CONSIDERING WORK AS A LIFE-SUSTAINING PRACTICE IN THE POST-SOCIALIST SEMI-PERIPHERY THROUGH INTERGENERATIONAL CHILDHOOD MEMORIES