A Review of Franz Krause, Thinking Like a River: An Anthropology of Water and Its Uses Along the Kemi River, Northern Finland. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2023, 292 pp.

Abstract

Thinking Like a River by Franz Krause presents an environmental, economic, and social research on historic development and the current state of the river Kemi of Lapland, Northern Finland. The study builds on research agenda and methodology of environmental history alongside theoretical framework devised by an anthropologist Tim Ingold. The opening ethnographic sections of the book address the settlement process in the region, formation of private economies of the local households, and the role of the river as a space-maker that underlies the toponymic system of the region. The detailed ethnography of fishing and boating activities of the local population is followed by the study of the road system that replaced boating along the river as a dominant way of getting around. Besides being an ‘integrator’ of the catchment area, the Kemi River has been acting as a tool for facilitating resource extraction from the region. Throughout the 20th century, the river was used by the state and companies approved by the state as an infrastructure for transportation of timber and production of hydroelectricity. Throughout the book the life of the Kemi catchment area is consistently described in terms of ‘flows’, ‘rhythms’ and ‘resonances’. This analytical framework allows Krause to conceptualize the river dwellers’ world as a landscape (‘taskscape’) of resonating rhythms produced by both humans and non-human entities. For example, meteorological conditions resonate with the movement of fish, with the choice of a way and means of transport, with the control over river discharge and long-term plans of the hydroelectric company.