In the Shadow of Freedom

This work is the first ethnography written on modern Finnish ship’s communities. It is also the first study to focus on the freedom discourses of sailors. It thus extends the study of freedom – which is usually associated with philosophy or political science – to the realm of ordinary people and an anthropology of freedom. The thesis is in three parts. The first part discusses the methodological challenges of this type of ethnography, the second focuses on work, organization, hierarchy and gender, and the third part discusses the freedom concepts of seafarers.