Category: English

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print.

This paper presents the noun class system of Bwala, a nearly undocumented and undescribed Bantu language of the Teke group spoken in the Kinshasa Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Genealogically speaking, Bwala belongs to the Kasai-Ngou…

The general issue of Sites for 2020 is now available featuring articles exploring the Covid lock down experience in Aotearoa New Zealand, the deconstruction of ‘winning’ narratives within the covid pandemic, the ethical navigations of a post colonial r…

The Swedish artist and writer Tyra Kleen (1874–1951) was a professional artist and a constant traveller who had a great interest in different religious questions. This article describes her Symbolist artistry, her interest in Theosophy and her journeys…

Announcing the 2021 SITES senior student essay competition. SITES: journal of social anthropology and cultural studies invites submissions for the annual senior student essay competition. Essays for consideration require submission by the deadline of 1…

In this article I examine the architecture and architectural thinking of Finnish Academician Reima Pietilä (1923–93) in relation to his design methodology. Pietilä was an architect with an original, creative, artistic personality, who set out early in …

This article contributes to the understanding of relations between occulture and Decadence in Finnish art at the turn of the twentieth century, focussing on occulture and Decadence in the works of the Finnish artist Oscar Parviainen (1880–1938). The ai…

Around the year 1900, European discourse on art was becoming increasingly ‘esotericized’. The 1890s saw esoteric art salons create a sensation in Paris, and art critics and theorists painted a picture of the true artist and the esotericist as overlappi…

The five-part relief series The Development of the Human Soul (c.1887–1903) by the Finnish sculptor Sigrid af Forselles is a monumental work consisting of five large plaster reliefs. The artist’s esoteric interests have been noted in previous research,…

The search for truth and spirituality, intertwined with the search for one’s self, has been a perennial theme in arts and literature. In some works of Finnish literature at the turn of the twentieth century, the figure of a person seeking for spiritual…

This article focuses on the concept of the seeker and considers how the analytical tool of seekership, defined and developed in the sociology of religion, could be applied to the study of art and esotericism. The theoretical argument is made more tangi…

Editorial of Approaching Religion, Vol. 11 Issue 1,  based on a two-day seminar arranged in Helsinki in August 2020 by the Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation under the title ‘Clear-sighted Art – Open Mind? Encounters between Art and Esoteric…

Review of Adam Stout’s Glastonbury Holy Thorn: Story of a Legend (Glastonbury: Green & Pleasant Publishing, 2020).

Review of Per Faxneld’s Det ockulta sekelskiftet. Esoteriska strömningar i Hilma af Klints tid (Stockholm: Volante, 2020).

Review of Spiritual Treasures: Esotericism in the Finnish Art World 1890–1950, edited by Nina Kokkinen and Lotta Nylund (Helsinki: Parvs, 2020).

Review of The Path to Hidden Knowledge, art exhibition curated by Nina Kokkinen, 3.6.–11.10.2020 at Villa Gyllenberg, Helsinki.

A reflection on the symposium ‘Clear-sighted Art – Open Mind? Encounters between Art and Esotericism’ arranged at the Amos Rex Art Museum, Helsinki, 25th August 2020.

Meri Genetz (1885–1943) was a Finnish painter, esotericist, and a spiritual seeker. Around 1925, she began truly dedicating herself to spiritual seeking and started to make notes of her studies in black notebooks. This article will go through four of t…

This article analyses ethnographic material gathered in Sweden amongst dancers in the Church of Sweden. With the help of the writings of Sarah Coakley and Simone Weil I explore if, and how, dancing could be considered a contemplative practice in the Ch…

This article focuses on religiousness and spirituality in the art works of psychiatric patients of Nikkilä Hospital, Finland. The pictures analysed here belong to a collection held at the Helsinki City Museum and they were made during the twentieth cen…

Wagner, Roy 2019. The Logic of Invention. Chicago: HAU Books. 135 pp. ISBN: 9780999157053 (paperback); ISBN: 9781912808526 (E-book).

The seventy-three years of exile have molded the life in Palestinian refugee camps. In my dissertation, I explore the conditions created by this long history in order to discuss the futures that those currently living in the refugee camps envision for …

“Social orders, tensions and saviourism” represents an ethnography on the implementation of Finnish national policy on Roma. It draws upon two and half years of fieldwork working in a Roma project. The name of the study, “Social orders, tensions and sa…

The thesis introduced in this lectio praecursoria explores the everyday work, ideals and values of the Latvian organic food movement known as tiešā pirkšana (‘direct purchasing’), an initiative which aims to shorten the physical and symbolic distance b…

The lectio serves as an introduction to the thesis “Life and Abortion: The Post-Biopolitics of Reproductive Health in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia”, an ethnographic study of the ways the insecurities and vulnerabilities of informal abortion are prod…