Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
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…
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, …
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…
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 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…
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 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…
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…
A defining feature of an anthropological perspective is that it acknowledges the importance of cultural specificity. As Marshall Sahlins (1976:170) succinctly put it: ‘no object, no thing, has being or movement in human society except by th…
The call by Alf Hornborg for a better consideration of the human dimension in the public discussion of global environmental change, networks of production and consumption, and structures of knowledge and power is a welcome contribution to e…
The author has always been sceptical about the use of value theory in anthropology. Here he considers its scope in relation to a project linked to the publication of The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide in 2010. This international project, …
I am a social anthropologist born, raised and educated in the United Kingdom. I have however carried out fieldwork in Finnish Lapland, first in 1971-2, for my doctorate, among Skolt Sámi people, and subsequently, in 1979-80, in the distric…
Public anthropology refers to the dissemination of anthropological knowledge beyond the academy, although no clear-cut definition of the term exists. In this article, we scrutinise the history, meanings, and practices of public anthropology…
This year marks a century since Finnish ethnographer Hilma Granqvist (1890–1972) embarked on her first journey to Palestine, an undertaking that proved intellectually rich alongside becoming a professional impasse. Initially setting out to …
Sarah Green was invited by the editorial team of Suomen antropologi to write something for their Jubilee Edition about Finnish anthropology, perhaps about her experience as an outsider, having worked in anthropology departments for a couple…
This year, the Finnish Anthropological Society turns 50 years old! Hooray! Founded in 1975, the core focus of the Society has remained trained on promoting high-quality research in the field of anthropology and in disciplines closely aligne…
Book Review: Venkatesan, Soumhya. Decolonizing Anthropology: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity. 2025. 252 pp. ISBN: 9781509540600 (softcover), 9781509540594 (hardcover); 9781509540617 (e-book).
Based on a walking ethnography, this photo essay employs sensory ethnography to explore multispecies relationality in steljniki, plots of land traditionally used for grazing and the harvesting of common bracken. Through work in subsistence-based extens…
In Volume 48, Issue 3 of Suomen Antropologi, we published a Lectio Praecursoria by Ioana Țîștea, entitled ‘Creolising Nordic Migration Research: Entangled Knowledges, Migratisations, and Reflexivities’. In the lectio, Țîștea was drawing direct attentio…
On a cold December evening, in the thick cloud of cigarette smoke and clatter of the cocktail shaker, two women, Suvi Rautio and He Beili tell stories of what it means to see through the eyes of an anthropologist. Speaking to a crowded room of seventy …
This article presents an ethnographic analysis of the care and attention between other-than humans and musicians in the contemporary improvised music scene. From dominant Western perspectives, ethical relations are considered in anthropocentric terms: …
Lately, our daily news is engulfed with billowing clouds of despair as democracy slips away and is replaced with emboldened form of authoritarianism. We live in dark times. Global disasters are multiplying with no end in sight. Powerful institutions ge…
The lack of concerted action by the majority of the population in the face of the global ecological catastrophe compels us to ponder the deeper cause of inaction: a troubled relationship with the more-than-human world. Redressing this relationship and …
Sanjeev Routray The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2022. 347 pp. ISBN: 9781503630840 (cloth); ISBN: 9781503632134 (paperback); ISBN: 9781503632141 (E-book)