Nurjailu maantieteen toisinajattelun juurena

Abstract

What is radical geography here? What can it mean in the context of "Finland", understood as a political project of state formation, language and culture? Interpreted in a context-sensitive way, radical geography cannot be merely an attempt to import ideas from the anglophone geography. Instead, it must be able to address locally relevant questions and by doing so to introduce a unique perspective on/of radical geography. In this paper, I draw on philosopher Pauli Pylkkö who has questioned the political and cultural project of the Finnish state formation as European colonisation, arguing that this process has been detrimental to nature–society-relationship lived through language. At the core of the colonisation has been the introduction of the western universalistic, objectifying and subjectifying metaphysics, which in turn have enabled the projects of centralised political power and capitalist exploitation of nature. Pylkkö questions the translatability of language and cultural practice, the universal validity of technoscience and the modern subject by exploring the possibilities of asubjective experience and preconceptual dialectic that enable the non-European language speakers to reassess their relationship with local language, tradition and nature. I explore the possibilities of this provocative re-interpretation for radical geography and relate it to geographical research on indigenous and local-traditional cultures, as well as degrowth and diverse economies.