Forager of information and mushrooms
I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. I study curious things, on the working assumption that this is where insight hides.
Lately that has meant string: knots, netting, string figures, a suite of technologies so old and ordinary that they often escape our attention. I call the study of their evolution ethnotopology. It sits inside my larger interest in ethnomathematics, the mathematics apparent in everyday life and crafts.
Why do humans, separated by oceans and millennia, keep arriving at the same solutions when innovating or solving problems? What knowledge is implicit in everyday material culture? How is such knowledge taught and learned, and how does it spread? Where does mathematics come from?
Typically, I work by taking something ordinary, such as a knot or a children’s game, and look for a way to formalise it for comparative study. That usually involves throwing computational machinery at everyday objects. But equally often, it means sitting down with a length of string, or heading outdoors, and figuring it out the hard way. Over the years, I’ve also worked on the history of measurement (ethnometrology), toys (e.g., spinning tops), ethnomycology (the cultural study of fungi), and collective behaviour.
As a scientist, my work crosses cognitive science, cognitive anthropology, cross-cultural research, cultural evolution, complexity science, and sustainability science. I’m part of the Past Present Sustainability Research Unit (PAES), where I try to put my work in service of a more biologically and culturally diverse world.
As a human, my interest is piqued by sea kayaking, music, the outdoors, photography, woodwork, knots, and mushrooms. I try to combine research and leisure wherever possible, on the firm belief that the best theory grows out of practical knowledge.
If you’d like to get in touch, feel free to drop me a line. I’m always open to new ideas and collaborations.