Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
In this autoethnographic essay, I trace and explore different ways of knowing soils through personal experiences and discussions between three generations (me, my father and my grandparents) who have lived and worked on a family farm in Cen…
The marriage ritual for the Dayak Benawan Indigenous people is a sacred ceremony that has been carried out for generations. Traditional rituals are simultaneously performed with the wedding party for three consecutive days and three consec…
A lectio præcursoria is a short presentation read out loud by a doctoral candidate at the start of a public thesis examination in Finland. It introduces the key points or central argument of the thesis in a way that should make the ensuing …
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society
Academic research results can serve diverse communities and individuals, whilst the research can itself transform researchers in multiple ways. In this article, I examine the significance of more-than-human beings in the process of becomin…
This paper develops a quadripartite panpsychist theory of shamanism(s). This fourpart framework revives and combines four theories: (i) mystical constructivism, (ii) role-taking theory, and (iii) mental imagery cultivation as a cultural pra…
“Eric, you no longer have an Americano soul,” my Avá-Guaraní sister told me as my 2006-2007 fieldwork was ending. In 2005, her mother became my ritual sponsor in the naming/ensouling ritual, mitã karaí, identifying me as “Yvyrajú”, indicati…
This essay is based on an ethnographic study at a self-subsistence-oriented yak herding village in Tibet (Tibetan Autonomous Region, China). I demonstrate how the social-biophysical profile and the life history of the researcher influences …
For Amazonian Indigenous people, the forest plays a vital role in sustaining their subsistence; it also serves as the social arena for interactions between different classes of beings. This paper analyses forest cosmo-politics and the agenc…
This article addresses the stool of thought from the perspective of a researcher from the Bará people of the Upper Negro River, an Eastern Tukanoan people situated in Northwestern Amazonia. Bará children are offered the stool, a being consi…
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society
Tammisto, Tuomas. 2024. Hard Work: Producing Places, Relations and Value on a Papua New Guinea Resource Frontier. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-29
This article addresses more-than-humans in ethnography by focusing on embodied encounters during fieldwork with the help of concepts such as relationality, being with, and with-nessing microbes. Through an ethnographic study of a diarrhoea …
Relations with microbes—especially the pathogens that cause infectious diseases–affect the methods and products of ethnographic field research in multiple ways, both corporeal and conceptual. In work with Indigenous people and their histori…
This paper examines how Generation Z (Gen Z) bridges online and offline spaces to reclaim normal life. Drawing on the concepts of “quiet encroachment” and “everyday resistance”, I argue that resistance flows between online and offline realm…
More-than-human beings consistently challenge ethnographic practices. However, ethnographic training has not consistently adopted such actors as irrefutable subjects of field research. In this article, I describe how the relationship betwee…
Faced with limitations to transnational transactions, Chinese students in Russia engage in informal currency exchanges. Through fieldwork in a Siberian city, we discovered how, against the backdrop of sanctions, fluctuating official exchang…
From 1920 through 1932, Soviet biomedical propaganda disseminated via Udmurt literature including through periodicals, novels, plays, and poetry aimed to instil sanitation values and advance modernisation. This propaganda targeted the Indig…
This essay belongs to the essay series ‘The Anthropologist’s Toolkit: Reflections on Ethnographic Methodology’. In this series, authors peer into the anthropologist’s toolkit to reflect on what ethnographic methodology constitutes in all it…
Since the earliest colonial encounters in Greenland, place-based Inuit knowledge of seal skin processing has been applied and regenerated within a web of regional, national, and global relations. These relations have not only affected metho…
This paper examines how a group of women’s rights activists in Iran who identify as Muslim represented themselves prior to the emergence of the 2022 Mahsa Movement, and why they were reluctant to adopt the labels ‘feminist’ or ‘Islamic femi…
The winds are changing at Suomen antropologi: Journal of Finnish Anthropological Society! My service as editor-in-chief is coming to an end at the end of this year and I am proud to announce the appointment of the incoming editors-in-chief,…
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society
This essay is based on the 2025 Westermarck Lecture, delivered at the 50th anniversary meetings of the Finnish Anthropological Society. My deepest thanks to the organisers, staff, and participants of that conference, including Sarah Green, …
Anthropologists compare – it is at the heart of what we do as we try and make sense of, describe and explain human social being in all its diversity. But the use of comparison extends far beyond anthropology. Indeed, it seems ubiquitous acr…