Introduction to a Project Idea: Forest Cultures in Global perspectives � Nature, Work and Freedom as culturally constituted Themes in different Forest Contexts

I want to present som ideas and plans for a new international and multidisciplinary project about Forest Cultures. The aim of the project is to investigate how cultural meanings of selected aspects of life have been made, expressed and changed within different contexts characterized by forest and woodland. The aim of the project is to concentrate the research on three themes who are relevant on different levels to contemporary life and debates: 1. The forest has for a long time been a main subject not only for environmentalists all over the world, using it as an ideal of what should be preserved as �nature�, but also for people looking looking for what is �natural� on different levels, from groups searching alternative ways of life, to the use of wood as building material, characterised by its �natural� qualities. 2. In contexts dominated by forest, the concept of 'work' has often had different meanings than those known from other industrial, post-industrial or rural societies. By analysing what work has meant in different forest contexts, the project aims at broadening our perspectives on work in a time with profound and rapid changes in ways of thinking about work as well as in our working conditions. 3. As identities break up and change, it is important to consider how they have been made and maintained, for example through stories and myths about the relationship between nature and peoples and nations. Forest has often been associated with independence and strength in different ideological contexts. At the same time, the forests have also been considered a place of freedom and a source of survival for poor people, and as an arena for recreation for modern urban population. Within this project themes like these will be analysed by interpreting different kinds of materials, from different fields of life: from memories and myths about work and everyday life in forest contexts, gender in hunting cultures, and differences between mens and womens ways of utilising the forests, to the forest as symbol in literature, metaphorical meanings of wooden materials in arcitecture, and the use of forest history in cultural tourist projects.