anthropology

We are the EU's northernmost research hub for social and cultural anthropology, a discipline that in itself overcomes the division between the social and natural, therefore embracing humans and a multiplicity of other beings in the environment. Our research documents the ways in which Arctic societies and cultures are similar to or different from each other, in other words social and cultural diversity in the Arctic in multiple aspects.

Our research seeks to understand the livelihoods of Arctic people, their identities, activities, interrelationships, cosmologies and other cultural practices. This includes indigenous peoples, but also other inhabitants of the region. In our fieldwork, Arctic people are not ‘informants’ but ‘research partners’. We therefore highly value co-creation of knowledge as an ethically sound research process supporting local and indigenous empowerment, considering indigenous ethics, positionalities and responsibilities of researchers 

Research themes

Our research themes are among others: human-animal relations, wellbeing in the north, Arctic industries and cultural impacts, anthropology of disaster, anthropology of cold, Arctic oral history, sustainability, cultural and spiritual heritage and circularity. 

Exhibition based on research project

Throw Away or Find a Way to Circularity, Exhibition by Anna Stammler-Gossmann. September 2 – 19, 2024, Kopio Gallery, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, exhibition flyer. The exhibition is based on the findings in the project Circular Bioeconomy: From Theory to Practice. 

Our team is strongly rooted in the tradition of British Social Anthropology, with expertise in theories, conceptions and ideas about human-animal-environment relations, space, landscape and mobility, oral history, notions of well-being and impacts of industrial development.

We are united by a strong belief in long-term fieldwork not on or about, but with research partners in the regions where we work: in Fennoscandia, the Russian Arctic and – more recently – South Greenland. Jointly with our research partners we innovate in collaborative research methods and co-creation of knowledge in an ethically sound manner.  

We have language expertise in Finnish, Russian, North Sámi, Sakha, Nenets and English, with decades-long research experience in these language fields. In most other Arctic places and languages, we have close connections through our tightly knit international network of colleagues.

We co-lead the Uarctic Thematic Network Arctic Extractive Industries and are involved as partners in the Thematic Network on Circumpolar Archives, Folklore and Ethnography.

The research team is led by Research Professor Florian Stammler.

Team members