Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
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…
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…
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…
Focusing on embodied and material aspects of lived religion in everyday practices, this article points to the need for culturally relevant concepts and practices to understand the everyday relations of the farmers under investigation with sp…
The existing literature on the role of religion in addressing xenophobia in South Africa has focused predominantly on Christianity, despite documented evidence of the involvement of other religions in campaigns against it. Our study is based…
This article examines the experiences of Thai women living in Finland, addressing a significant gap in research regarding their perspectives on the challenges they face in a new environment, particularly through the lens of Buddhism. In cont…
Among the high number of asylum seekers arriving in Europe in 2015, thousands converted from Islam to Christianity. An emerging body of scholarship explores these conversions. This article sheds light on the lived experience of converting to…
What can we learn about the therapeutic landscapes of in-patient psychiatric care by focusing on the invisible, the seemingly unimportant? To explore how mental affliction and caregiving acts are connected to other-than-human dimensions and …
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam, the media has meticulously covered disease prevention and reported on infection cases. This article will explore the current and shifting gender relations of Vietnam’s state and societ…
Our worlds and lives are awash with industrially-produced chemicals. This dizzying array of chemicals includes compounds, interactions, and health effects that are poorly, if at all, understood. While the vast majority of both natural and so…
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…
The reshaping of global production through platform capitalism has been the subject of numerous studies around the world. Across these, it has been common to observe similar characteristics of this model of management and labour control via …
This paper considers the question of what it is to ‘know’ digital governance through an experiential, bottom-up lens, and presents some empirical detail from recent fieldwork with feminist movement actors in northern India – both formally or…
InVisible Culture
Mental health platforms and apps provide technologies and techniques for self-work, diagnosis, and management of everyday crises. Therapeutic interventions designed to work outside the clinic, they distribute and reconfigure psy expertise. U…
Psychiatric clinicians and managers increasingly use data to monitor the use of force on psychiatric patients. In this study, we describe how Danish authorities simultaneously emphasise a need for close data monitoring and tell a story of fa…