Anthropology Research Team

You can find the latest news, fieldwork reports and discussions from the Arctic anthropology blog.

 We are a number of anthropologists based in Finnish Lapland with a shared enthusiasm for our discipline and an interest in the North as a space for living and doing research among its inhabitants. Our research and theoretical interests are diverse, but united by the conviction that we can contribute to general debates in our discipline ‘from the North’, i.e. by combining evidence from our fieldwork with theoretical interests.

Social Anthropology is the study of humans with shared practices, values, worldviews, institutions and economic forms that lead to identification of people with groups. Therefore most anthropological works contribute to understanding how societies are culturally similar or diverse. Anthropologists share a commitment to long-term fieldwork with participant observation generating in depth qualitative research data. Scholars usually specialize on a) theoretical topics and b) particular regions. They explore what results from research in a particular region can tell us for our general understanding of the topic in question.

Our group is particularly strongly rooted in the tradition of British Social Anthropology, as four of our members have lived, studied or worked in Britain. Our expertise is currently strong in theories, conceptions and ideas about space, landscape and mobility in the North, topics that unite all of us. We find links to these topics in almost every corner of the North, in our practice and our conversations with friends and informants among the inhabitants of the North. Our academic interest is in topics rather than a particular region, which is why we are open for input from anywhere in the world. However, of course we share our fieldwork experiences in the North, and developed expertise in particular areas: Northern Fennoscandia, Finnish Lapland, the Sami area, Northwest Russia, West Siberia, the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), Kamtchatka.




People and other treasures of the Arctic at the Jokkmokk Winter Market, Lapland 2013