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It is common to think of the Arctic as remote, perched at the farthest reaches of the world—a simple and harmonious, isolated utopia. But the reality, as Janne Flora shows us, is anything but. In Wandering Spirits, Flora reveals how deeply connected the Arctic is to the rest of the world and how it has been affected by the social, political, economic, and environmental shifts that ushered in the modern age. In this innovative study, Flora focuses on Inuit communities in Greenland and addresses a central puzzle: their alarmingly high suicide rate. She explores the deep connections between loneliness and modernity in the Arctic, tracing the history of Greenland and analyzing the social dynamics that shaped it. Flora’s thorough, sensitive engagement with the families that make up these communities uncovers the complex interplay between loneliness and a host of economic and environmental practices, including the widespread local tradition of hunting. Wandering Spirits offers a vivid portrait of a largely overlooked world, in all its fragility and nuance, while engaging with core anthropological concerns of kinship and the structure of social relations.
Suicide and Agency offers an original and timely challenge to existing ways of understanding suicide. Through the use of rich and detailed case studies, the authors assembled in this volume explore how interplay of self-harm, suicide, personhood and agency varies markedly across site (Greenland, Siberia, India, Palestine and Mexico) and setting (self-run leprosy colony, suicide bomb attack, cash-crop farming, middle-class mothering). Rather than starting from a set definition of suicide, they empirically engage suicide fields-the wider domains of practices and of sense making, out of which realized, imaginary, or disputed suicides emerge. By drawing on ethnographic methods and approaches, a ...
In this third edition of Anthropology and Climate Change, Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall offer a collection of chapters that examine how anthropologists work on climate change issues with their collaborators, both in academic research and practicing contexts, and discuss new developments in contributions to policy and adaptation at different scales. Building on the first edition’s pioneering focus on anthropology’s burgeoning contribution to climate change research, policy, and action, as well as the second edition’s focus on transformations and new directions for anthropological work on climate change, this new edition reveals the extent to which anthropologists’ contributions are con...
The question of ignorance occupies a central place in anthropological theory and practice. This volume argues that the concept of ignorance has largely been pursued as the opposite of knowledge or even its obverse. Though they cover wide empirical ground - from clients of a fertility treatment center in New York to families grappling with suicide in Greenland - contributors share a commitment to understanding the concept as a productive, social practice. Ultimately, The Anthropology of Ignorance asks whether an academic commitment to knowledge can be squared with lived significance of ignorance and how taking it seriously might alter anthropological research practices.
This book investigates the multifaceted nature of change in today’s Nordic Arctic and the necessary research and policy development required to address the challenges and opportunities currently faced by this region. It focuses its attention on the recent efforts of the Nordic community to create specialized Centers of Excellence in Arctic Research in order to facilitate this process of scientific inquiry and policy articulation. The volume seeks to describe both the steps that lead to this decision and the manner in which this undertaking as evolved. The work highlights the research efforts of the four Centers and their investigations of a variety of issues including those related to ecos...
""This work is a masterpiece already as it stands now! It presents an unusually rich ethnography of a part of a community in Europe's farthest Arctic Northeast, with a focus on an extremely difficult topic to do fieldwork on: the conversion of a so-far hardly known group of reindeer nomads to radical evangelical Baptism / Pentecostalism." - Florian Stammler, author of Reindeer Nomads Meet the Market: Culture, Property and Globalisation at the "End of the Land" "Although not working from within the subdiscipline of linguistic anthropology, Vallikivi foregrounds speaking and communication in his analysis of the transformation from "pagan" to Christian. He finds a complex interweaving of speaki...
In this book, author Joachim Otto Habeck takes the reader to the tundra in the Far North of the Russian Federation, describing and interpreting the practice of reindeer herding on the land. His vivid account of the everyday life of Komi reindeer herders and their family members as they interact with their bosses, the town, the market and oil companies, reveals both the reach of their agency and its limitations. Through a meticulous analysis of each of these domains, Habeck shows how public discourse about reindeer husbandry as a traditional life-style derives from outside the Komi reindeer-herding communities, yet it has powerful effects on the local actors' ability to frame their own existence. He argues that the concept of tradition, despite its many positive connotations, places Komi reindeer herders in a "golden cage" which leaves no space for acknowledging their drive to innovation and flexibility.
Anthropologists have long considered kinship as the basis for social solidarity. Indeed, the idea that kinship is grounded in positive sociality has found its way into most anthropological accounts and has served as an orienting framework directing decades of scholarly research. But what about when it is not? What about instances when kinship is anything but ‘warm and fuzzy’ but is characterized, instead, by neglect, violence, negative affect, or a lack of nurturance and care? In the three interlinked sections of this volume, the view that kinship is about “solidarity” and “care” is challenged by exploring how kin relations are not only about connection and inclusion but also about disconnection, exclusion, neglect, and violence. Kinship relationships that feel “positive” and “good” take a great deal of perseverance and work; there is nothing “natural” about kinship ties as being based on positive sociality. In these chapters, the contributors take seriously the contingency of kinship relations (the moments when kinship breaks down or is a source of suffering) and how this prompts scholars to develop new theoretical and methodological perspectives.
The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian indigenous peoples, it presents the young people’s narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study brings a new perspective to the anthropology of childhood and uncovers a quite unexpected dynamic in narrating and foreshadowing the future while relating it to cultural patterns of prediction and fulfillment in nomadic cosmology.
The book examines ideas about the making and shaping of Greenland’s society, environment, and resource spaces. It discusses how Greenland’s resources have been extracted at different points in its history, shows how acquiring knowledge of subsurface environments has been crucial for matters of securitisation, and explores how the country is being imagined as an emerging frontier with vast mineral reserves. The book delves into the history and contemporary practice of geological exploration and considers the politics and corporate activities that frame discussion about extractive industries and resource zones. It touches upon resource policies, the nature of social and environmental asses...