River

As part of the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA), this panel discusses the relations between humans and water, and how the precious vitality of water is constituted, negotiated and strategically used.

The general conference theme is "Vital powers and politics: human interactions with living things" and therefore very relevant for critical approaches to environmental management.

At the 10th Annual IAS-STS Conference Critical Issues in Science and Technology Studies (May 2-3, 2011 at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society - Graz, Austria) we have brought together several researchers to discuss the study of situated practices of managing environments: For that we have designed a session in which Ingmar Lippert, Silvia Bruzzone, Franz Krause, Anna Schreuer and Gerald Aiken contributed analytically and empirically to the topic.

trying to come to terms with this river (i.e the Kemijoki, in Finnish Lapland) continues to be a challenge, even over a year after fieldwork.

River Management. Technological Challenge or Conceptual Illusion?
Salmon weirs and hydroelectric dams on the Kemi River in Northern Finland

by Franz Krause

This presentation concerns two types of construction that have been built across the flow of the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland over its eventful history. I will try to compare salmon fishing weirs and hydroelectric dams and explore some of the underlying assumptions about the environment and concomitant relations with the river that distinguish these two types of regulators.

Franz works at the Countryside and Community Research Institute, UK, in a project on Flood memories and community resilience. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, UK. In 2010, he was awarded a PhD for his research on uses and meanings of the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland, and the mutual influences of river dwellers and river.