Tangled and Tangible, Straight and Abstract

Abstract

The natural environment has long been treated as an important part of the setting for social life, but buildings have only rarely been the focus of anthropological attention. It is time to engage more actively with the changes in the built environment brought about by recent shifts in global geographies of power. This paper is inspired by anthropological research on environmental perception in a broadly phenomenological research tradition, which emphasizes the embodied aspects of knowledge. Unfortunately, among anthropologists as well as architectural theorists, this approach tends to reproduce an unjustified contrast between the seemingly traditional world it conjures up and the kinds of abstractions often associated with the modern city. Given that the modern city presents inhabitants with straight lines, bureaucratic abstractions and, importantly, vast amounts of textual and visual information, these features should also feature in anthropological analysis. Using Helsinki as an illustration, the paper argues that a city is read and negotiated through abstract knowledge combined with embodied experience. The cultural representations that accompany dramatic change, e.g. place marketing materials, are part of the ethnographic focus and are analysed in connection with material and social obduracy.