War photography experienced its genesis during WWI, and by the time of WWII, it had become one of the most significant media and an important propagandistic weapon. Official propaganda images and pre-war conventions influenced the private photography of soldiers, which generally presented a less ideologically charged view on the war. Through the process of selection and composition, photo albums evolved into narrative spaces in which individual memories of the wars were constructed. In our article, we will investigate to what extent the conventions of private war photo albums evolved from an adventurous travelogue with touristic themes during WWI into a more straightforward documentation of brutal war events during WWII, and how this transformation manifested in private photo albums and reflects broader shifts in mentalities and ideological frameworks between these two periods. Our source material consists of private German photo albums from the Baltic Front during WWI (1914–1917), from the invasion of Poland (1939), and of Finnish Border Jaegers from the Finnish-Soviet Continuation War (1941–1944). This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of visual discourses in the reproduction of ideological narratives – a development that continues to be relevant in recent conflicts.

French film director Robert Bresson's (1901-1999) last film was the L'argent (Money) 1983. The film was based on the first part of the 1911 novella 'The Forged Coupon' by Leo Tolstoy. The film follows a series of events set in motion by a counterfeit banknote. The style is stripped-down ascetic, minimalist and alienating. The compositions contain many close-ups of objects. In addition, the film's use of acting makes the characters 'models,' detached from their emotions. Research questions are: why do Bresson cultivate images that are partially delineated, use certain colors and make the characters unappealing to the viewer? Approach is motivated by the film theory of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Schizoanalysis and the Institutional Theory of Money (ITM) which will be applied as a reading guide. Bresson's cinema is analyzed as a political image of its time. I argue that the film is motivated by the neoliberal revolution that took place in socialist president Francois Mitterrand's France in the early 1980's. As a simulacrum and otherness, the film can be read as an image of the hopelessness of Post-Industrial Capitalism at the dawn of Neoliberal rule.

Drawings made by minors are assets for understanding their perceptions of events and for addressing themes that are difficult to talk or write about. However, when found in archives they pose methodological and ethical challenges if the makers or the contexts of creation and collection are not known. These absences complicate writing about youths and matters that represent them. To overcome this, we propose a viewing guide by example of drawings made by early youths in Finland in two historical contexts: the process of European integration in the early 1990s and the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Grounding the analysis in the motifs and their materiality, four viewings are proposed: the first focuses on how these historical events are depicted, the second examines traits that evidence the makers’ youth, the third highlights emotions and states of mind, and the fourth zooms into the material and the sensory experiences they transmit. This viewing guide demonstrates that drawings effectively capture youths' perceptions of specific events, but also broader phenomena that affect them, opening possibilities to understand their experiences more holistically. This guide helps researchers appreciate drawings as personal narratives, and it informs the future collection of similar materials to better include minors in curatorial processes.

The article focuses on the attempts by Finland’s governmental bodies to reach an agreement on scientific and technological cooperation with the western-allied liberal democracy and a flourishing market economy, Japan, that rivalled the United States and Western Europe in the technological competition of the 1980’s and offered Finland an alternative route to the group of leading high-tech countries. Japan, unlike Finland, was a member of the Western technology embargo, and thus being considered “Western European” became crucial for the neutral Finland in building contacts with Japan’s S & T administration, as this area of cooperation was considered politically increasingly sensitive amid the eroding bipolar cold war order. The original source material of Finnish ministries studied in this article show that, a central importance in pursuing the Japanese officials’ approval was given to Finland’s country image, which the Finnish diplomatic mission in Tokyo strove to polish, to picture Finland not as ‘finlandized’ but as a trustworthy partner to the US-allied economic powerhouse, Japan.

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The materiality of artefacts can be studied from a variety of perspectives, depending on academic discipline. Practice-based research focuses on handmade artefacts, and the comprehension of their materiality is created through understanding of the qualities of materials, the crafting processes, and the context. In archaeology and ethnology, experiential and experimental research helps in understanding degraded and fragmented artefacts and brings into light the experienced makers of the past. Practice-based methodology reaches for an embodied knowledge of craft making through experiments and acquiring the skills needed for producing handmade artefacts. The methodology also includes experimental research on materials and manufacturing processes aimed at developing contemporary and future materials and processes. In this essay we will discuss the various approaches of archaeology, ethnology, and crafts studies to materiality research. We will integrate these perspectives with the temporal dimension, spanning from the ancient past to contemporary and potentially future eras.

This paper uses the question of what kind of person is a thing, to trace a trajectory through material culture studies through digital anthropology. It aims to demonstrate the continued values ​​of material culture studies in helping us understand contemporary issues around materiality and the ways in which digital technologies have added to our capacity to represent, develop relationships with and to go beyond conventional anthropomorphism, in creating things that have person like qualities. This history starts with theories that derive from structuralism and Marxism. The paper then becomes a retrospective of the author's contributions, first to non-dualist theory of the relationship between things and people and then a series of research projects that followed from this. The paper argues that the online and digital should be seen more as continuity, rather than a break, from older material culture studies. Examples are given based on studies of smartphones and finally the use of AI to develop what is here called `Beyond Anthropomorphism' in the replication of the dead.