Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
In this article I engage with the video works Sentimentum and Fantomi by the Finnish visual artist Venla Helenius, departing from the conceptual frameworks of esotericism and critical posthumanism. In these video works, different epistemolo…
The focus of the article is Duchess Hedwig Elisabeth Charlotte of Holstein-Gottorp and her involvement in Freemasonry, specifically through her lodge of adoption, which operated within the Stockholm royal castle in the late eighteenth centu…
This article examines the historical formation and contemporary significance of Kirishitan shrines (Kirishitan jinja) in Nagasaki Prefecture. Rather than viewing Kakure Kirishitan survival primarily as the preservation of Christian practice…
In this article I explore the evolving relationship the Finnish poet and journalist Aarni Kouta had to the mythological character of Lucifer over his lifetime. Kouta was a prominent figure in the early-twentieth-century Finnish cultural sph…
In this article I examine how Elsa Heporauta (1883–1960) produced, interpreted and circulated esoteric knowledge in early-twentieth-century Finland, situating her work within a vibrant esoteric milieu. Drawing on archival notebooks, manuscr…
How do practitioners learn to recognize divine presence? Drawing on apprentice ethnography in the Court of Aine, a Swedish Wiccan coven—four interviews and some twenty ritual occasions—this article argues that revelation is best understood …
In Finland, kirtan—communal call-and-response singing rooted in Indian devotional traditions—has become a diverse practice across both new religious movements and contemporary spirituality. This article asks how culturally learned symbols c…
The Tattarisuo Mystery was a sensationalized witchcraft case in Finland in the early 1930s. At its centre was a group of displaced working-class individuals, called by the press the Tattarisuo coven, who sought through magical rituals to re…
In recent decades, Australia has developed a public grammar for addressing the Stolen Generations through inquiries, testimony, apology, commemoration, legal action and partial schemes of reparation. This article draws on long-term ethnograp…
This article offers a critique of the lord and bondsman scene from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2004[1807]). The scene depicts the struggle between these two protagonists for recognition and material possessions. The outcome of the strug…
Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in a correctional facility for male juveniles (aged 12 to 21) in Ghana, this article elaborates on institutional responses following two attempted escapes in 2018 and in 2021. The institutional resp…
In December 2024, during a parliamentary debate marking 75 years of the Indian Constitution, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) repeatedly invoked the 1975 Emergency as the ‘darkest’ moment in India’…
This article explores motivations of young people running away from residential care institutions. Running away from out-of-home care is often viewed as problematic due to its serious consequences for both the runaways, the other residents a…
This article analyzes Ulf Stark’s children’s book The Runaways as a narrative of age-based epistemic marginalization. Drawing on feminist epistemology, the author identifies ageism as an epistemic problem with profound ethical implications. …
This paper develops a quadripartite panpsychist theory of shamanism(s). This fourpart framework revives and combines four theories: (i) mystical constructivism, (ii) role-taking theory, and (iii) mental imagery cultivation as a cultural pra…
This paper examines how Generation Z (Gen Z) bridges online and offline spaces to reclaim normal life. Drawing on the concepts of “quiet encroachment” and “everyday resistance”, I argue that resistance flows between online and offline realm…
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…