anthropology

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.

Anthropology Conference 2023

Relations and beyond: Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society (21.-23. 3. 2023)
Hosted by the Arctic Anthropology Research Team, this conference invites contributions to an anthropology of relations and beyond, celebrating the multiplicity of facets and “theoretical heterogeneity [that] may strengthen rather than weaken the force of relations as a general concept”.

Arctic Anthropology research group strives to understand the livelihoods, identities, agency, relations, cosmologies and other culturally embedded practices of people in the Arctic – including but not limited to indigenous; their adaptation to social, economic, political and ecological change, but also their capacity to continue their own ways of life, relying on their local ways of knowing; people's relation to the natural and built development; their ways of dealing with a changing climate, and the roles of humans and the environment in the adaptation of Arctic domestic animal species.

Our fieldwork is focused especially on Northern Fennoscandia, Northwest Russia, West Siberia, the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) and Kamtchatka. However, our academic interest is in topics rather than a particular region.

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.

Our group is particularly strongly rooted in the tradition of British Social Anthropology. Our expertise is currently strong in theories, conceptions and ideas about space, landscape and mobility in the North, and in collaborative research methods, co-production of knowledge and research ethics, 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 research partners among the inhabitants of the North. We particularly highlight that in our research the focus is on any inhabitants of the Arctic, indigenous, local, incomers, newcomers and immigrants, depending on the profile of the project and the interest of our researchers.