Everything She Touches, Changes Remix

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 …

Repicturing the Past

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…

“Get Yourself a Fire Body”

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…

Marvellous Ecologies

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 Seeker as Weaver

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 Interplay of Art, Occultism and Emancipation

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…

Embodying the Great Mother

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…

“The Cabbage is a Rose”

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…

Building the Human Economy

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, …

Doctrinal and Lived Suffering

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…

Kitchen Utensils, Altarpieces and Friendly Smiles

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…

Reimagining Public Anthropology

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…

Knowing Digital Governance from Below

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…