Ethnographic biography? What can oral history contribute?

I just read an interesting conference call for papers that centres on ethnography and biography, very much what we deal with in our oral history project work: In the ORHELIA project, we are all confronted as anthropologists with the methodological challenge of doing a sort of data collection based on interviews, be they audio, video …

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Terhi Vuojala-Magga and Stephan Dudeck breaching the image of the North as a home and as a field

Stephan Dudeck visited Terhi Vuojala-Magga in the Inari region of Finnish Sápmi (Sámi home area) two times during this year.  The first visit was in January in Kuttura – a Sami reindeer herders´ forest village of six houses in the upper stream of Ivalo River - and the second visit was at the beginning of …

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Conference in Riga “Oral History – Dialogue with Society”

I’m just back from the conference “Oral History – Dialogue with Society” in Riga that took place from 29th till 30th March. The conference was hosted by the Latvian National Oral History Centre of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Latvia in cooperation with the Association of Oral History Researchers of …

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Arctic Design and Indigenous Knowledge

My name is Svetlana Usenyuk, I am a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture, Helsinki. I completed my PhD last summer in Ekaterinburg, Russia, with the topic “Arctic Design: the Principle of Co-creation for Transport Vehicles”. My research experience is rooted in studying Western Siberian indigenous peoples, particularly Khanty and Nenets. …

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City moose in Anchorage, Alaska

This is Sara Komarnisky, PhD student at UBC, currently in Anchorage doing fieldwork with Mexican migrants and immigrants here. One thing about life in Anchorage that is funny and fits very much with clichés about Alaska are all of the MOOSE! There are moose all over the city, all year, but they are especially noticeable …

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Living in the Taiga: moving in the field

I just had an inspiring phone talk with PhD student Evelyn Landerer, who returned from a year of fieldwork in some of the Russian North's remotest places, in the North of Irkutskaya Oblast and Krasnoyarski Krai. You need a month to even get there, if you get there, e.g. to the small village of Teteya …

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Circumpolar Book publication

Ziker, John & Florian Stammler (eds) 2011. Histories from the North. Environments, Movements and Narratives. Proceedings of the Final BOREAS Conference Rovaniemi, Finland, October 29-31, 2009. Boise (ID): Department of Anthropology, Boise State University in conjunction with Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Finland This edited volume is unique in the way that it is more …

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