Breaking the Rules

Abstract

congress, held online in June 2021. The event was hosted by the University of Helsinki. The theme of the congress was ‘Breaking the Rules: Power, Participation and Transgression’, bringing to the fore discourses and practices of making, breaking, reinterpreting and transgressing rules. The idea was to examine the implications of ‘breaking the rules’ in various social, economic, political, cultural and academic contexts. This special issue of Ethnologia Fennica has been edited by visiting editors Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, Hanna Snellman and Tiina Suopajärvi. Art and storytelling are powerful instruments for distributing alternative voices. They can contest and convey rules but also transmit knowledge. In Indigenous frameworks, stories and knowing have an inseparable relationship. Sanna Valkonen’s review article, which is based on her opening keynote at the SIEF conference, introduces three stories as examples of research projects based on Sámi perceptions of the world and its ontological and epistemological premises. With these examples, Valkonen shows how Sámi ways of knowing about, for example land and nature, could be applied to issues of global environmental responsibility instead of understanding such knowing as only being connected to the Sámi homeland. The rules she invites us to break are, consequently, the rules for producing academic knowledge while studying Indigenous worlds. This could be done by applying narrative and dialogical methods where human, nonhuman and material become interwoven, like in the making of Sámi duodji (handicrafts) or in Sámi artistic interventions. The review article by Ellen Hertz, also based on her keynote lecture at SIEF 2021, is an important contribution to the discussion of rules and breaking them. She takes us to the world of US corporate circles and a consideration of the problems, consequences and alternatives of ‘soft law’, i.e. ‘agreements, compacts, standards, audits, multi-stakeholder initiatives, certification schemes and the like’, and ‘hard law’, i.e. formal legislation. Hertz argues Editorial Breaking the Rules? Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto, Maija Mäki, Hanna Snellman, Kirsi Sonck-Rautio & Tiina Suopajärvi