Paula Uimonen – författare

The aim of this book is to explore digital media and intercultural interaction at an arts college in Tanzania, through innovative forms of ethnographic representation. The book and the series website weave together visual and aural narratives, interviews and observations, life stories and video documentaries, art performances and productions. It paints a vivid portrayal of everyday life in East Africa’s only institute for practical art training, while tracing the rich cultural history of a state that has mixed tribalism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and cosmopolitanism in astonishingly creative ways. While following the anthropological tradition of thick description, Digital Drama employs a more artistic and accessible style of writing. Dramatic, ethnographic details are interspersed with theoretical reflections and postulations to explain and make sense of the unfolding narratives. The accompanying website visualizes and sensualizes the stories narrated in the book, unfolding a dramatic world of African dance, music, theater, and digital culture.

The aim of this book is to explore digital media and intercultural interaction at an arts college in Tanzania, through innovative forms of ethnographic representation. The book and the series website weave together visual and aural narratives, interviews and observations, life stories and video documentaries, art performances and productions. It paints a vivid portrayal of everyday life in East Africa’s only institute for practical art training, while tracing the rich cultural history of a state that has mixed tribalism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and cosmopolitanism in astonishingly creative ways. While following the anthropological tradition of thick description, Digital Drama employs a more artistic and accessible style of writing. Dramatic, ethnographic details are interspersed with theoretical reflections and postulations to explain and make sense of the unfolding narratives. The accompanying website visualizes and sensualizes the stories narrated in the book, unfolding a dramatic world of African dance, music, theater, and digital culture.

Sea Cucumber Stories explores multispecies entanglements and ocean worldings, from a sea cucumber perspective. Drawing on environmental, multispecies and ocean anthropology, it enlists the sea cucumber to tell stories of how and why the ocean and its creatures matter to life on our blue planet. The chapters draw on multisited, multimodal and multisensory fieldwork in Tanzania, where the sea cucumber is undergoing interesting transformations, from an ocean creature created by God to a commodity in the global seafood market, farmed for export to China. While breaking new ground in multispecies anthropology, this creative book builds on the author’s earlier work in digital and literary anthropology. Sea cucumber stories are told from an imaginary as well as a scholarly perspective. The sea cucumber is treated as a fellow creature to draw attention to the wonders of multispecies undersea worlds and the troubles of human exploitation of what is perceived as a marine resource.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.