Unlike the other books in this series, this one wasn’t published recently – it dates back to 1988. I originally picked it up from the Helsinki University Library’s surplus sale, probably in the 1990s. It resurfaced while I was tidying my bookshelf, and after reading just a few pages, I was hooked. The book offers an exceptionally sharp and still relevant perspective on the development of planetary culture.
At the time of publication, Matti Sarmela had just been appointed Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. His background combined fieldwork on Finno-Ugric bear rituals, Thai rice farming communities, and a decade of writing on the cultural impacts of emerging information technology. In this book, he brings those threads together into a framework that divides human history into three cultural systems: the local, the de-local, and the post-local.
In the local culture, people lived deeply embedded in their surroundings – drawing on local resources, bound closely to nature, mythology, and tight-knit communities. Life was shaped by hunting and slash-and-burn agriculture. With settled agriculture came the de-local culture: state institutions, organised religion, national education systems, inherited land ownership, and eventually, industrialisation. These institutions increasingly detached people from the local. Finally, post-local culture – shaped by global technology, media idols, cosmopolitan identities and the rise of the self – emerged as the dominant force.
What’s most astonishing is how up-to-date Sarmela’s description of post-local culture feels – despite the fact that he was writing at a time when global information networks barely existed, mass media was still overwhelmingly national, and corporations were not yet the globally managed behemoths they are today. In hindsight, we can clearly see how the systems he described – externally driven lives, homogenised control mechanisms, and the instrumental logic of global competition – have only become more dominant.
Sarmela’s view of human development is provocative. He sees post-local culture as a profound alienation – marked by the loss of authenticity, the erosion of ecological limits, and a drift toward life beyond the Earth, whether human or machine-led. Only fragments of the original local culture remain.
Yet in the final pages of the book, Sarmela sketches a planetary return to localism: a future where automation and digital systems liberate people from the demands of wage labour, allowing for life in cooperative village communities, remote work, deeper relationships with neighbours and nature, and children raised within intergenerational local networks.
