Böcker av Olli Pyyhtinen

While Georg Simmel is widely known, the impact of his work has been far from straightforward, with the ways in which his ideas have been taken up by later thinkers as complex and diverse as the ideas themselves.

This book invokes the radical potentialities of 'untidiness' to envision alternative arrangements of social life and hospitality. Instead of trying to manage sustainability or tidy up tourist situations, the authors embrace the messiness of human relations and argue for more creative, embodied and ethical ontologies of tourism and mobility.

Bringing social theory and philosophy to bear on popular movies, novels, myths, and fairy tales, The Gift and its Paradoxes explores the ambiguity of the gift: it is at once both a relation and a thing, alienable and inalienable, present and poison. Challenging the nature of giving as reciprocal.

This book argues for the centrality of Georg Simmel's social theory to the relational and processual emphases that are often considered as much more recent developments in social theory. Situating Simmel's work in particular with respect to New Vitalism and Bruno Latour's work, the book shows that Simmel has still an enormous amount to contribute.