Dear authors, followers, commenters, readers of our blog. Please allow me to share something on our own behalf: Just got surprising good news that our blog made it to the to rank 30 of the top 42 anthropology blogs worldwide! In their ranking I also noticed that we have been running this blog for 10 years now. Time for an anniversary-congratulation post:) Thank you everyone for keeping this active for a decade already! So that ranking place is a nice little anniversary present. The ranking is made by a company called feedspot, which screens the internet for content and alerts its readers. Apparently they found our content worth reading:). Our spot in their ranking is a nice recognition of the relevance of the Arctic for anthropology as well as the content that we post. We rank just after the blog of “teaching anthropology“, a journal of the RAI, and even some places before the Society for Visual Anthropology of the American Anthropological association. Very impressive! First ranked is Sapiens, a blog by the Wenner Gren Foundation, and second is the blog by Leiden Anthorpology in the Netherlands. In general I thought the ranking is slightly North-American-centric. As far as I understand, only around 10 blogs made it from Europe to their ranking. Congratulations to all of us for this success! That’s how the social media works apparently: the more we write, comment and are followed and read the more popular we become. When we started this blog in 2011, who would have thought that this will reach such a scale and duration!
5 thoughts on “arcticanthropology in top 30! Congratulations to our 10th anniversary!”
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Arctic Anthropology 
congratulations! I enjoy reading your blog very much!
Felicidades!
Wow indeed! Congratulations! A good sign of what we do as anthropologists with significant impacts on the lives of people and their connection to the land. Looking forward to great things coming in the future!
Ayonghe, one of the great things coming in the future could be posts by you, especially on the topic of how Arctic Anthropology helped your thinking about protected areas management in sub-saharan Africa, and vice-versa, what insights can Arctic anthropologists get from your study of indigenous relations to the land in Cameroon? I would be keen to read such thoughts by you here!
Absolutely! Some developments, or per se, based on my ongoing analysis among people in Cameroon, the Bakweri, the Baka, and so on – living at the edge of contested spaces (protected areas management) and other forms of land use brought by ‘imported laws, policies, and initiatives’ of the State, either through the commodification or domestication of forest and its resources, I believe have many similarities among Arctic communities and their indigenous relations to the land. Practices of this kind, Arctic Anthropologists have keenly acknowledged already. But what seems perculiar to the people in Cameroon, which I won’t undermind, is their agency and resilience (both by ability and capacity) of being anonymously in harmony with the nature despite various anthropogenic threats to their livelihoods. In many ways, they can welcome (if there is some kind of benefit for them, e.g. income from ecotourism), resist, or reciprocally negotiate ‘incoming practices’ on their land, and yet, preserve their deeply rooted relations with their land no matter how challenging the circumstances might be – knowing fully well the importance of safeguarding a culture inherited from their ancestors and passed through many generations e.g. use of sacred societies and ritual practices for good deeds, land protection, healing, rain and sunshine for a satisfactory crop harvest, success in hunting, also their taboos/customs prohibiting the over use or excessive extraction of forest resources, and certainly the various consequences by belief (dryness on the land, floods, landslides, poor crop harvests and so on) that come about for not following certain norms and values.
Ps: In the near future, following my doctoral defence, I will indeed, be glad to highlight some of the key findings from my fieldwork among people of the Mount Cameroon National Park and how Arctic Anthropology helped my thinking about protected areas management in sub-saharan Africa, and vice-versa. Atleast, in some of my lectures, getting to know about the Inuit in the Canadian North, where the IPA (Indigenous Protected Areas) approach has for many years been applied under the umbrella of co-management, there are some ideas we could learn from, though with some lapses requiring further research!