Supporting Visual Anthropology, Tromsø

Dear readers, some of you may remember the film on Khanty fishing in the Yamal-Nenets Okrug, Siberia, Russia by an Estonian graduate, Janno Simm. That film "Autumn on Ob River" came out in 2004 as a masters work at the Tromso visual anthropology programme. Now it seems that this programme is under threat of being …

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Mining and local people in the North

Some of our team were recently at the Jokkmokk winter conference, which is held in connection to the famous Jokkmokk winter market, an important event in the Sámi yearly cycle for the last 400 years. The Jokkmokk winter market has been held already more than 400 years. Now mining comes closer to this place too, …

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Siberia films online Finnish TV

Finnish State TV Yle has been sending a number of excellent documentaries on and / or by northern indigenous people recently. You can watch them usually for three weeks longer online. Today there will be the screening on YLE TEEMA TV of Lapsui/Lehmuskallio's famous "Seven Songs from the Tundra", the world's first fiction film in …

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Adventure Siberia, 90 minutes documentary

TV channel ZDF (second German state channel) screened over the holiday a two-part documentary on Siberia and the fascination that this huge land mass has had on researchers, business people and other adventurers. The programme can be watched online via the media library of the TV channel as PART ONE and PART TWO. The film …

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Sámi herding, Utsjoki, Lemmenjoki Finland TV

For those interested in Sámi reindeer herding in northern Finland, and Utsjoki, and especially those who know German, you may be interested to watch a programme in the German second channel ZDF that they were sending for the end of 2012. The programme talks about Sámi land rights, reindeer roundup, gender relations, schooling in Utsjoki, …

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“Electronic Memory of the Arctic” – conference on cultural communication in the circumpolar world

It's a high profile conference taking place in St Petersburg, with support by the Arctic Council, RF Ministry of Foreign Affairs, RF Ministry of Culture and the Russian Geographical Society. For us arctic anthropologists, it's nice to see that this conference has cultural communication in its name. The organisers understand under cultural communication all activities …

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Santa anthropology? Santa Claus link collection

Where would be a better place than at the Arctic Circle to establish a research unit on the ethnography and social anthropology of Santa Clauses? When we think about Santa, we mostly get the image of this Coca-Cola dressed red and white person riding on Rudolf the reindeer bringing presents. But in fact there is …

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