Our long-anticipated book project has finally been released! What was thrown around as a catch phrase during our seminars a few years ago, has now been published as the title of our volume in De Gruyter’s series Dialectics of the Global.
LOCATING THE GLOBAL Spaces, Networks, and Interactions from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century
Edited by: Holger Weiss De Gruyter Oldenbourg | 2020
organized by the European Network of Universal and Global History (ENIUGH) and the Flying University of Transnational Humanities (FUTH), with the support of the Global History Lab (Åbo Akademi University, Turku) and the Graduate School of Global and Area Studies, Leipzig University
Date: 22 – 24.06.2020 Venue: Åbo Akademi University, Turku (Finland)
Save the date! The lab welcomes all friends of global history to Turku in 2020 to participate in the the Sixth European Congress on World and Global History (ENIUGH). The main theme for the congress is ‘Minorities in Global history’. Hope to see you there!
“The ENIUGH congress will be organised in Turku on 25–28 June 2020. The congress will be the sixth of its kind. The previous congress, held in Budapest in 2017, hosted 750 delegates.”
The study circle continued the discussion from our last episode and tackled the reactions to Adelman in articles published by Richard Drayton & David Motadel as well as Angelika Epple. You can listen to the podcast on our youtube playlist.
The study circle engaged in a topical discussion relating to the research field of global history. Critical questions have been raised separately by both Jeremy Adelman and Franz Fillafer. You can listen to the podcast on our youtube playlist.
Recently, at a conference, I presented on the history of Finnish folk medicine. After the talk, I got a question from the audience about the peculiarities of folk healing in Finland. Having spent a number of years studying African medical systems, I could only point to the similarities between Finnish and African folk remedies – the use of cupping horns, herbalism, and bone setting. However, someone suggested that sauna perhaps presents a Finnish specialty, and many in the audience seemed to accept this idea. I immediately started thinking about Amerindian sweat lodges and Turkish hammams. Steam cabinets were also used in precolonial Africa as a standard treatment for syphilis, as documented by Rømer on the Gold Coast in the mid-eighteenth century. In this blog post, I want to briefly touch upon the global history of sauna and bathing, which remains to be written in English. Continue reading “Sauna and bathing in global history”
I recently had the pleasure of attending the fifth iteration of the European Congress on World and Global History, a symposium that is arranged every third year by the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH). The conference, held in Budapest and subtitled “Ruptures, Empires, Revolutions”, was a testament to the enduring attraction of the global perspective among scholars of history, as evidenced by roughly 150, each with their own take on how to approach the study of history in a global way. Organized into eight sets of parallel panels, the conference proceedings ran over four days, punctuated by roundtables summarizing the themes thus far, a reception, a concert, and a dinner cruise along the Danube. Continue reading “Impressions of The Fifth European Congress on World and Global History, Budapest 31.8–3.9.2017”
Last year I was invited to return to Ghana. I hadn’t been there for a decade. Although I had continued to read and write about Africa, my focus had been more on a macro-level (global) perspective than a local one. Africa in global history; Africa as part of processes of globalization; portals and ports of globalization in Africa. Africans as actors and agents of globalization but also its victims. Continue reading ““Africa is the continent of death” – Pessimistic realizations and future visions”
In this blog post, me and my colleague Markku Hokkanen share our thoughts on writing medical history from a global history perspective. We have recently completed editing a book titled Kiistellyt tiet terveyteen (Contested Ways to Health, Finnish Literature Society, forthcoming in 2017), in which we examine healing from a cultural and social perspective in global history.
In this first blog post, I wanted to share some thoughts about who I am and why I am interested in global history, as well as to present some of my research interests. In future posts, I will focus more on topics related to my various interests regarding global history. Usually when I start a new book, I like to start by reading the acknowledgments of the author in order to become better acquainted with the author’s thought process behind the book. In my view it is always nice to gain a bit of personal flavour, in order to gain a more personal connection with the author. For that reason, this first blog is my invitation to you to get acquainted with my background as a scholar.
