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 …
Category: Fennoscandia
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, …
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 …
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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Arctic Design: Field Thoughts and Questions
Hi everybody, this is my second appearance in this blog (see the first one https://arcticanthropology.org/2012/03/07/arctic-design-and-indigenous-knowledge/). I have just finished my summer fieldwork in Northern Lapland; so let me share my fresh thoughts. ...In 2006, in the beginning of August, I was sitting in a big bus, drowning in a blue soft seat, traveling from the …
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Meeting old and new friends in Inari
For us from the Anthropology Research Team here in Rovaniemi the Sámi Cultural Centre SAJOS in Inari became a place where we regularly meet friends from the indigenous movement in Russia. Galina Platova from the Association of Nenets people “Yasavey” told me already in Naryan-Mar, that she will come soon to Inari for a conference. …
Arctic Anthropology 