Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
This study investigates polemical representations of enemies in early Christian Greek literature (1–600 CE) through the framework of Cultural Attraction Theory. It begins with the identification of recurring categories of accusations—such a…
Identity is a key concept in practically all fields of the humanities and social sciences. However, different approaches diverge dramatically in their conceptualization of identity, which makes mutual dialogue and integration markedly chall…
The aim of this article is to synthesize existing knowledge in a novel way by looking through a social psychological lens at historical manifestations of antisemitism and its most recent variant, presented as a case study which tracks its d…
This article examines how identity motives shape siblings’ disaffiliation from the Conservative Laestadian revival movement in a Sweden-Finnish context, highlighting apostasy as a multifaceted identity process marked by renegotiation betwee…
This article critically reassesses the accounts of the supposed custom of infanticide, particularly female infanticide (in Arabic, wa’d al-banāt), among pre-Islamic Arabs, arguing that this notion emerged during the Umayyad era as an imagin…
Youth facing the juvenile justice system encounter, in Switzerland as in other European countries, a continuum of surveillance and constraints that stretches from the control of their bodies and environment to the regulation of their speech …
Scholarship on post-independence Zimbabwean soldiers ascertains that the military functions as perpetrators of political violence against unarmed civilians, with less emphasis on soldiers’ own dissatisfaction and disgruntlement with barrack …
When young people in Danish residential care escape their institutions without permission it is often understood as acts of ‘troubling behaviour’ among social workers. Drawing on one and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork across three re…
This article provides a novel perspective on the phenomenon of youths running away from Norwegian residential childcare institutions, challenging conventional views that attribute such actions to delinquency or pathology. By adopting an expe…
This article examines dropout from therapeutic communities for addiction treatment through the lens of institutional escape. In conventional treatment research, dropout is framed as evidence of patients’ non-compliance, lack of motivation, o…
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…
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…
In the early 1900s, the Swedish noblewoman Tyra Kleen (1874–1951) was a highly productive artist, author, suffragette and occult seeker. Although Kleen’s esoteric and feminist interests have to a limited extent been considered in previous r…
This article examines the trans-disciplinary œuvre and hosting activities of the Swiss-based artist and archivist, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962), founder of the Eranos Conferences and creator of the Eranos Archive. Drawn from my doctoral p…
This essay revisits art as an alternative epistemology that probes the parameters of the real and the complicated entanglements between humans and non-humans from an eco-feminist perspective. It builds upon the work of Leonora Carrington an…
This article explores a group of contemporary magical artists who are inspired by feminist new materialist thought. In the work of these contemporary artists, magic is defined less by the transmission of traditions and initiatory wisdom or …
Seeking to establish “psychical history” as a category of Victorian occult science, this paper explores the consequences that emerge when belief in spirit phenomena converges on the historical imagination. To do so, a study of the Bygone Da…
This article proposes that approaching the work and practice of the British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) and other women working at the intersection of art and esotericism necessitates revisiting some fundamental assum…
This article explores the intersections of clairvoyance, mediumship and gender in early-twentieth-century art through the case of the Finnish artist and occultist Meri Genetz (1885–1943). While esotericism has played a pivotal role in moder…
This article explores esoteric potentiality—the perceived possibility of accessing the otherworldly—through a hermeneutic framework that integrates artist intent, the photographic image and audience reception. The Finnish artist Hanne Kiive…
In this article I examine how ecological and esoteric knowledge intersects in the works of the contemporary Icelandic artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir. Drawing from diverse traditions and practices, such as alchemy, Neopaganism, tarot, numero…
The essay considers the seeker as weaver and positions relationality as central to the experiences of many at the intersections of esotericism and modern art. It invokes the metaphor of weaving to envision a non-static, dislocated and limin…
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, …
This article is grounded in a longitudinal ethnographic investigation of half a dozen working-class neighbourhoods in a large town in northern England. That investigation focused on nostalgia and culturally informed perceptions of change. Re…