Author: Nora Repo-Saeed

As the dramatic consequences of climate change finally begin to motivate governments around the world to explore how to move away from a dependence on fossil fuels, nuclear power is back on the agenda in the UK as a potential energy source. However, th…

Fredrik Barth called attention to two ways ritually transmitted knowledge gains value: knowledge he associated with the figure of the ‘Guru’ valued for being widely shared versus knowledge associated with the figure of the ‘conjurer’ or ‘initiator’ val…

This paper looks at the theme of collaboration through the prism of game design, and especially the example of serious games. At its heart, this is a consideration of two collaborative projects between experts. The first is a current collaboration betw…

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 discussion b…

People go missing all over the world, but the reasons for disappearances are enormously diverse. Some people are intentionally disappeared by the state: totalitarian and military governments as well as various paramilitary and criminal organizations ha…

Growing numbers of children are moving between countries because of their parent(s)’ careers. The temporary labour migration of highly educated professionals – sometimes called career expatriates or transnational corporate elites (Amit 2002; Fechter 20…

Sustaining lives in urban environments depends on infrastructures – buildings, water pipes, sewers, energy distribution, or roads, among others. Their availability is particularly acute in Africa due to rapid urbanization, entrenched inequalities and p…

Once a large-scale infrastructure such as a railroad, sewage system or power plant is put into place, it not only tends to enjoy a long life, but often also a forceful afterlife. Abandoned railroads may find new uses, while ruined sewage systems or pow…

“The Anthropologist’s Toolkit: Reflections on ethnographic methodology” is a new essay series that peers into the anthropologist’s toolkit to reflect on what ethnographic methodology constitutes in all its multimodal forms. We invite all contributions …

Since the beginning of February this year, Suomen antropologi: Journal of Finnish Anthropological Society has navigated a succession. The previous editors-in-chief, Heikki Wilenius and Tuomas Tammisto, passed their roles on to me, Suvi Rautio, and I ha…

This article draws on ethnographic material from life stories and nonfiction literature and is complemented by fieldwork vignettes. The material is used to discuss how experiences of connections and disconnections between past and present, self and int…

This article explores the story of Sanwar, who fled Bangladesh following persecution for his sexuality, and spent five years struggling for asylum in the UK. Analysing our conversations together with his asylum paperwork, I show how trauma was apprehen…

Laos is a country of seven million people in Southeast Asia, with its largest urban centre having a population of just under one million people. At a time of rising inflation and growing awareness of climate change, this article investigates how urban …

This paper reflexively unpicks digital ethnographic methods employed during ongoing online fieldwork on ‘digital deaths’. To do so, this research delves into the digital afterlife, exploring the fate of online traces and social media profiles after dea…

Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen and Edvard Hviding (eds.) Anthropology in Norway: Directions, Locations, Relations. Canon Pyon, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing. The RAI Country Series, Volume Three. 2021. 152 pp. ISBN: 978-1-912385-30-0 (paperback); ISBN: 978-1-9…

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 discussion b…

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 discussion b…

The Finnish geodesist and self-taught ethnographer Karl Nickul (1900–1980) studied the Indigenous toponymy among the Skolt Sámi in northeastern Finland. This article analyses Nickul’s early publications and international correspondence, focusing on the…

This article discusses Nenets epic songs, focusing on two texts collected at the beginning of the twentieth century in relation to the divergent historicities they represent. The process of gathering and publishing folklore is analysed as folklorisatio…

The historiography of maritime archaeology is one of margins and peripheries. Linked to the development of underwater archaeology, efforts to advance theoretical frameworks within the discipline have been slow at best. There remains a widespread assump…

The book The Dawn of Everything is an introduction to some of the diversity and surprising complexity of ancestral social lives written in an accessible, yet academic fashion. The book also develops a theory of human development as emerging from encoun…

Anthropology human’ other (American things, has as Anthropological ‘the been study described, of what Association makes amongst us 2023), ‘the science of human beings’ (Merriam–Webster Dictionary 2023), and ‘the comparative study of common sense’ (Herz…

The present collection examines the ways Indigenous peoples across the Eurasian North—Sámi, Nenets, Khanty, and Tyva—deal with the past and how their conceptualizations of the past are entangled with dominant ideologies in Russia and Finland, human-env…

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society

In an information society, where overload has become a problem, might anthropology’s comparative method find a new lease of life? This Lecture sets out to test the hunch that it might. A field ever more densely populated with information is that of org…