Tuomas Tammisto
Biographic Data
| ID | 266706 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tuomas Tammisto |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tuomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Tammisto |
| SIGNATURE | TAMMISTO T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9767-7832 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Roads, marketplaces and plantations
Food and infrastructure are entangled in multiple ways on an oil palm plantation in Wide Bay, Papua New Guinea. The plantation was established as part of plan to bring income, employment and road infrastructure to remote and rural area. The plantation company builds and maintains roads in the region, which until 2015 was not connected by road to urban centers. The plantation is also dependent on roads, which grid the oil palm fields and connect t…
Hard Work
For the Mengen people of Papua New Guinea, 'hard work' does not refer to drudgery or physically exhausting labour. Instead, it involves creating and recreating social relations through acts of care, marriages, ceremonial events, sharing, and working the land together. 'Work' as the Mengen see it, produces value understood as meaningful social relations. This differs significantly from the way colonial officials, loggers, and planters perceived va…
The Suomen antropologi Ethnographic Reading Challenge
Each year just before the New Year, our hometown library-the Helsinki Metropolitan Area Library Network (Helmet 2024)-issues a curated 50-book reading challenge. To celebrate a new year, Suomen antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, presents an ethnographic reading challenge in a similar style. The challenge is an outcome of one recent Friday evening when we-middle-aged neighbours and colleagues who did not know what else to…
The Disposition of Oil Palm Infrastructure
The Tzen oil palm plantation in the northwestern corner of Wide Bay in Pomio District, East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea is a highly infrastructured space. Roads surround and order the oil palm plantings into a grid-like space and connect the main estate to the extensions of the plantation in the surrounding area. Not only is the plantation an area characterized by these 'hard infrastructures', but the plantation was established in 2008…
Rupert Stasch. Society of Others
Rupert Stasch. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2009. Pp.336. ISBN: 978-0-520-25685-9 (hardback); 978-0-520-25686-6 (paperback)
Simplicity is Complicated
A key point David Graeber and David Wengrow make in their mammoth work, The Dawn of Everything (2021), is that we humans are not by default redisposed to hierarchy or equality, but are first and foremost a socially creative species. In this essay, I take up Wengrow and Graeber's notion that humans are 'by default' neither authoritarian nor egalitarian, but creative, noting that egalitarian forms of social organisation are complex, complicated, an…
Forum
The year 2021 saw the open-access republication of Culture and History in the Pacific (ed. Jukka Siikala), an edited volume originally published by the Finnish Anthropological Society. Suomen antropologi: The Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society marks the occasion with this special book forum. For a number of years, Culture and History in the Pacific was known as a book that was particularly hard to find. Now, 30 years after the origina…
Closing the Frontier, Opening Doors
In this article I examine a recent communal cocoa planting project in a Wide Bay Mengen community in East Pomio, Papua New Guinea in relation to histories of resource extraction. I discuss how the community members modeled the current planting of cocoa in accordance with earlier forms of agriculture, namely copra production and swidden horticulture. The cocoa planting project is linked to a longer history of labour and resource extraction in Pomi…
Reprises
Chris Gregory's Gifts and Commodities (1982) is widely regarded as a classic in economic anthropology as well as in studies on Melanesia. The work offers a lucid typology and de nition of the concepts of 'gift' and 'commodity'based on the tradition of political economy and economic anthropology.It shows how in colonial Papua New Guinea (PNG) gift and commodity economies articulated with each other and-contrary to the assumption of neoclassical ec…
Life in the Village is Free
In this article I examine how Mengen working on and living near to a newly established oil palm plantation use the distinct categories of 'village' and 'plantation' to refer to different sets of relations and historical processes associated with the places. For the Mengen workers the plantation is simultaneously a place of hard and controlled labor, a site of earning sorely needed monetary income, and a place to momentarily escape relations in th…
Strengthening the State
In this paper I will examine how logging in Papua New Guinea affects the relationship between the state and the local communities on whose lands logging operations take place. The point of departure of my argument is the Ili-Wawas Integrated Project, a combined logging and agricultural project which seeks to bring economic development to the remote Pomio district of East New Britain Province by connecting existing logging roads to the limited nat…
Stuart Kirsch. Reverse Anthropology
STUART KIRSCH . Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. 296, 2 figures, 20 illustrations, 2 maps. ISBN-10 0804753415; ISBN-13 9780804753418
Strengthening the State
In this paper I will examine how logging in Papua New Guinea affects the relationship between the state and the local communities on whose lands logging operations take place. The point of departure of my argument is the Ili-Wawas Integrated Project, a combined logging and agricultural project which seeks to bring economic development to the remote Pomio district of East New Britain Province by connecting existing logging roads to the limited nat…
Stuart Kirsch. Reverse Anthropology
STUART KIRSCH . Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. 296, 2 figures, 20 illustrations, 2 maps. ISBN-10 0804753415; ISBN-13 9780804753418
Strengthening the State
In this paper I will examine how logging in Papua New Guinea affects the relationship between the state and the local communities on whose lands logging operations take place. The point of departure of my argument is the Ili-Wawas Integrated Project, a combined logging and agricultural project which seeks to bring economic development to the remote Pomio district of East New Britain Province by connecting existing logging roads to the limited nat…
Life in the Village is Free
In this article I examine how Mengen working on and living near to a newly established oil palm plantation use the distinct categories of 'village' and 'plantation' to refer to different sets of relations and historical processes associated with the places. For the Mengen workers the plantation is simultaneously a place of hard and controlled labor, a site of earning sorely needed monetary income, and a place to momentarily escape relations in th…
Reprises
Chris Gregory's Gifts and Commodities (1982) is widely regarded as a classic in economic anthropology as well as in studies on Melanesia. The work offers a lucid typology and de nition of the concepts of 'gift' and 'commodity'based on the tradition of political economy and economic anthropology.It shows how in colonial Papua New Guinea (PNG) gift and commodity economies articulated with each other and-contrary to the assumption of neoclassical ec…
Closing the Frontier, Opening Doors
In this article I examine a recent communal cocoa planting project in a Wide Bay Mengen community in East Pomio, Papua New Guinea in relation to histories of resource extraction. I discuss how the community members modeled the current planting of cocoa in accordance with earlier forms of agriculture, namely copra production and swidden horticulture. The cocoa planting project is linked to a longer history of labour and resource extraction in Pomi…
Forum
The year 2021 saw the open-access republication of Culture and History in the Pacific (ed. Jukka Siikala), an edited volume originally published by the Finnish Anthropological Society. Suomen antropologi: The Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society marks the occasion with this special book forum. For a number of years, Culture and History in the Pacific was known as a book that was particularly hard to find. Now, 30 years after the origina…
Rupert Stasch. Society of Others
Rupert Stasch. Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2009. Pp.336. ISBN: 978-0-520-25685-9 (hardback); 978-0-520-25686-6 (paperback)
Simplicity is Complicated
A key point David Graeber and David Wengrow make in their mammoth work, The Dawn of Everything (2021), is that we humans are not by default redisposed to hierarchy or equality, but are first and foremost a socially creative species. In this essay, I take up Wengrow and Graeber's notion that humans are 'by default' neither authoritarian nor egalitarian, but creative, noting that egalitarian forms of social organisation are complex, complicated, an…
Hard Work
For the Mengen people of Papua New Guinea, 'hard work' does not refer to drudgery or physically exhausting labour. Instead, it involves creating and recreating social relations through acts of care, marriages, ceremonial events, sharing, and working the land together. 'Work' as the Mengen see it, produces value understood as meaningful social relations. This differs significantly from the way colonial officials, loggers, and planters perceived va…
The Suomen antropologi Ethnographic Reading Challenge
Each year just before the New Year, our hometown library-the Helsinki Metropolitan Area Library Network (Helmet 2024)-issues a curated 50-book reading challenge. To celebrate a new year, Suomen antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, presents an ethnographic reading challenge in a similar style. The challenge is an outcome of one recent Friday evening when we-middle-aged neighbours and colleagues who did not know what else to…
The Disposition of Oil Palm Infrastructure
The Tzen oil palm plantation in the northwestern corner of Wide Bay in Pomio District, East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea is a highly infrastructured space. Roads surround and order the oil palm plantings into a grid-like space and connect the main estate to the extensions of the plantation in the surrounding area. Not only is the plantation an area characterized by these 'hard infrastructures', but the plantation was established in 2008…
Roads, marketplaces and plantations
Food and infrastructure are entangled in multiple ways on an oil palm plantation in Wide Bay, Papua New Guinea. The plantation was established as part of plan to bring income, employment and road infrastructure to remote and rural area. The plantation company builds and maintains roads in the region, which until 2015 was not connected by road to urban centers. The plantation is also dependent on roads, which grid the oil palm fields and connect t…
Sociology (5 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (4 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (3 works) · Anthropology (3 works) · Frontier (3 works) · History (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Political science (3 works) · Archaeology (2 works) · Art (2 works)