our university r&d department just shared an EU report, where Finland and Sweden lead their EU-internal rating for innovativeness. Nice to see that the North leads the way there! We know that the Arctic is at the forefront when it comes to noticing the changing climate, and people in the North, particularly those who live …
Category: Theoretical Issues
Rain on snow – how do people and reindeer learn to survive?
This winter and spring we hear again disastrous news from sudden temperature rises and falls, leading to thick ice-crusts on reindeer pastures that block reindeer's access to their pastures. While the most famous of these events happened in 2014 in the Centre of the Yamal Peninsula, West Siberia, the phenomenon is known probably to reindeer …
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Trust Versus Paranoia: Can the Siberian fire spirit explain the spectacular failure of the UK Covid track and trace app?
Piers Vitebsky and Roza Laptander are going to give an interesting example on how to de-provincialise Arctic social sciences. This time on a topic that could hardly be more timely: they refer to their elaborate ethnographies of indigenous Siberians' communications with the fire spirit to explain why apps to track the corona virus may fail. …
Society 5.0 – new evolutionism towards more inclusive well-being?
Listening to the presentation of Ms Kanae from the Japanese cabinet office at the Japan-Finland Joint Committee meeting on Cooperation in Science and Technology, I was impressed how human social evolution as a concept continues to play such a significant role even in concrete decision making. Japan accepted a holistic radical development plan called society …
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The Experience of Displacement and Social Engineering in Kola Saami Oral Histories
Public defence of the doctoral dissertation by blog contributor Lukas Allemann on 15 Oct 2020 Our team member and periodic blog contributor Lukas Allemann examines in his thesis people’s experiences of Soviet-time, state-initiated displacement and (re)emplacement on the Kola Peninsula as well as the consequences of these developments. Sources show that Saami communities bore the …
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Tenure Track Position in Oulu, Finland: Cultural Histories and Traditional Knowledge of Resource Use
Our anthropology colleague Prof Hannu Heikkinen from Oulu just sent this around. Seems to be a rather rare opportunity for a permanent job in Arctic Anthropology! Arctic Interactions (ArcI) is a programme designed to achieve global leadership in the area of “Understanding and mitigating global change in the Arctic through fundamental studies at the interface between …
Arctic Security and Anthropology
Our colleagues Gunhild Hoogensen Gjorv with Marc Lanteigne launched the Routledge Handbook of Arctic Security, of which they are the main editors, and where there are some chapters relevant for (and co-authored by) us. Gunhild said that the starting point for their approach to security is much broader than just hard dominant state approaches to …
Arctic Anthropology 