Tuulikki Pietilä

University of Helsinki, Department of Social Research, Faculty Member

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I am a social anthropologist educated and working at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Geographically my research focuses on Africa. Thematically, I have examined various socio-cultural processes that take place in the encounter of global and local regimes of value.

In Kilimanjaro I investigated women's trading activities and everyday gossip. This research was published as a book entitled Gossip, Markets, and Gender: How Dialogue Constructs Moral Value in Post-Socialist Kilimanjaro (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). The book was awarded the Aidoo-Snyder prize by the African Studies Association of the United States in 2009.

In South Africa I investigated ideas of ownership and authorship as well as modes of organizing creative labor and rewards from it. This research was published as a monograph entitled Contracts, Patronage and Mediation: The Articulation of Global and Local in the South African Recording Industry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Moreover, I have studied, and published on, World Music industry and South African youth music.

In 2013-2016 I was the PI in the research project entitled “Youth Music and the Construction of Social Subjectivities and Communities in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, which was a joint project funded by the Academy of Finland and the National Research Foundation of South Africa. The project’s homepage: http://southafricanyouthtoday.com/.

Currently I am conducting research in Tanzania and South Africa on the moral values of the African creative class. This research is funded by the Kone Foundation. I am also the PI in the ongoing project entitled "The Morality of Success among the Emerging Black Middle Class in South Africa" (2016-2020). The project employs the post-doctoral researcher Ibrahim Abraham and the post-graduate student Bjørn Inge Sjødin.

For my publications, see: https://tuhat.helsinki.fi/portal/en/persons/tuulikki-pietila(870ff98d-1910-4bb9-bd29-f1128fc63378)/publications.html
Phone: +358 2941 22645
Address: Social and Cultural Anthropology P.O. Box 18
00014 University of Helsinki
Finland

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Contracts, Patronage and Mediation: The Articulation of Global and Local in the South African Recording Industry

This book is a social history and ethnography of street-food vendors in Mumbai. Each chapter is a... more This book is a social history and ethnography of street-food vendors in Mumbai. Each chapter is a stand-alone essay describing different facets of street life, especially the sale of street food, and each reconciles different relationships between ideas and behavior. For instance, the second chapter describes historical conflict between different groups over street food to show that our contemporary understandings about struggles on the street have long historical roots. In short, Anjaria's chapters narrate lives in an effort to reconcile scholars' artificial distinctions between the various accounts they have of street life. Studying street vendors is particularly useful in this effort as street-level life is at the intersection of many actors with multiple purposes, such as the street-level enforcement agent balancing relationships with superiors, the need to supplement his income, and his relationships with vendors, or the vendors struggling for income, constrained by multiple household responsibilities and harassed by agents of the state. Anjaria provides us fascinating stories of people practicing intersecting activities, not always congruent and often in conflict with ostensible allies, state agents, and others. The third chapter is about vendors occupying the street. The stories recounted describe how vendors feel about vending space and the relationships with other vendors, state agents, and others that produce those feelings. Multiplex relationships make stable space possible, yet stability can be fleeting in the face of seemingly capricious state enforcement of regulations. The close description of how people react to their circumstances provides a sense of "being there." Likewise, the fourth chapter helps us understand how dependent vendors are on relationships with state agents, and the narrative describes circumstances where agents and vendors display discretion and contingency over the occupation of space. The details of the two chapters are fascinating, and the description is lively. Yet I was left wanting a stronger argument and more systematic evidence to understand the

Tuulikki Pietilä

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