The Anthropology Research Team is very happy to welcome you all at the Arctic Centre for a joint presentation by Professor Elena Isayev and Professor Staffan Müller-Wille, both from the University of Exeter, UK, on the 28^th of May at 14:00 in the Thule seminar room.

Look at or download a poster of the talk on the “lectures and events, Rovaniemi” page.

Elena Isayev is Professor of Ancient History and Place and Staffan Müller-Wille is Associate professor at the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology.

In the summer of 1732, the Swedish botanist and physician Carl Linnaeus journeyed through the Northern provinces of the Swedish Kingdom, including parts of Sápmi, known to him (and most English speakers today) as Lapland. His travel journal is often cited as the earliest account of Lapland by a naturalist and ethnographer. We are in the planning stages for a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award application that uses the journal to create a platform for public debate about issues ranging from sustainability and wellbeing to indigeneity and sovereignty. Linnaeus’s travel diary allows to explore how knowledge was created “in transit”, that is, in encounters among people, like Linnaeus himself, who were multi-lingual and moved between cultures: guides and servants, settlers, priests, merchants, reindeer herders. In order to bring out this aspect, we plan to create a new online translation of the journal while re-enacting his journey. Discussing the translation at gatherings with local experts and audiences – a form of collective learning while the journey unfolds – will be our vehicle for exposing the meshwork of interactions through which the North and its supposed healthiness have been, and continue to be, constructed.