Knowing Familial Soils

In this autoethnographic essay, I trace and explore different ways of knowing soils through personal experiences and discussions between three generations (me, my father and my grandparents) who have lived and worked on a family farm in Cen…

Homeland as Echo, Nostalgia as Strategy

This essay rethinks Heimat through the figure of Heidi, not as a sentimental icon of Alpine innocence but as a conceptual prism through which to understand the contemporary weaponization of nostalgia. Drawing on theories of restorative nosta…

‘To Avoid a Strange European Explanation’

This year marks a century since Finnish ethnographer Hilma Granqvist (1890–1972) embarked on her first journey to Palestine, an undertaking that proved intellectually rich alongside becoming a professional impasse. Initially setting out to …

A British Anthropologist in Finland

I am a social anthropologist born, raised and educated in the United Kingdom. I have however carried out fieldwork in Finnish Lapland, first in 1971-2, for my doctorate, among Skolt Sámi people, and subsequently, in 1979-80, in the distric…

Scaling Feminist Activism

The continuous protests in the Islamic Republic of Iran since Jina Mahsi Amini’s death in the fall of 2022 are challenging common perceptions of resistance, and even revolution. Through looking at the politics of maneuvering of both exiled f…

Hold Music

The notion of sonic intimacy has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, but less well-established has been what it means for a sonic encounter to be non-intimate. This essay proposes an opposite to sonic intimacy, namely so…

Covid-19: Medicine and Colonialism, Past and Present

This essay begins in the past, with the hope of developing a different way of thinking through the transformations of the present. Many commentators and media outlets have referred to the era of the Covid-19 pandemic as ‘unprecedented’, but …

Zagaku

The majority of this article consists of an unadulterated piece of auto-ethnographic writing depicting a key experience from my anthropological fieldwork. For my PhD research on Japanese policing, I spent two years living in Tokyo and traini…