A duo-biographical recollection of an encounter, this article comprises a dialogue between the authors. On the one hand, it is about a shared moment – a tandem ‘go-along’ tour of the Echo of the Urals exhibition in the Estonian National Museum. On the other, it is about certain similarities and differences in the disciplinary approaches to curating as well as to spectating an ‘inter-national’ museum space in Estonia's second-largest city, Tartu.
The beginnings of the interview date back to 2019, the year when we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Barth 1969). We used this event as a springboard for looking back at the rich professional trajectory of Professor Ulf Hannerz, in which ethnicity and other forms of collective identities play one of the key roles. The interview was started after a lecture by Professor Hannerz, ‘Fifty Years of Diversity Watching’, given at the Department of Ethnology of Charles University in Prague in September 2019, and it was finalised during the COVID-19 pandemic online via e-mailing the questions and answers back and forth between Stockholm and Prague.
This auto-ethnographic/biographical account deals with the experiences that a non-flying Northern-Ireland-born anthropologist living in the Baltic States has of mobility, infrastructure and connectedness, in particular with reference to academic and personal life. The article considers the movements which a career as an academic anthropologist requires, as well as the difficulties and intricacies that being located in Eastern Europe has for such land travel. Based on years of experience, it questions travel time and cost with particular reference to the seeming need to travel towards Western Europe in order to remain connected to the discipline's main ‘movements’. The article also examines solutions such as the Via Baltica, and looks forward to improvements that new infrastructure (such as high-speed railways) can bring.
A three-act session of storytelling, this visual essay explores the connection between photographs (and images at large) and death. A piece of authobiography, it follows the intimate journey of the author accompanying his father's departure first and his own grief later. The article positions photographs as objects that are more than mere representations. They are living things that accompany us during our lives. And photography, the author suggests by looking at photographs taken by himself, is a way for opening up time and acknowledging the present. Photographs are capable of bridging the gap between life and death.
This article employs an anthropology ‘at-home’ approach to discuss dimensions of social and cultural changes amongst women in post-transitional societies. By applying person-centred ethnography, we aim to provide rich insights into the socio-cultural context and individual development of a young woman in Croatia. We examine how a young woman reasons about what kind of a person she is and wants to become by comparing the different sets of basic values that she ascribes to her emancipatory efforts, with a focus on how she juxtaposes ‘traditional family roles’ and ‘feminist values’. The article thus describes how this woman (Jadranka) experiences life challenges and shapes social values in her everyday cultural settings.
This article studies the use of livestock dung in the social and ecological context of pastoralism in the Tyva Republic, Inner Asia. In steppe ecologies, livestock dung, depending on its (mis)management, can be a valuable resource or a threat to animals’ health and herders’ well-being. Its use is embedded in the relationships between herder-livestock communities and landscapes, which are sentient and superordinate. Utilizing dung for household needs is simultaneously a form of care for livestock and a method of balancing the relationship with sentient homelands.
Drawn from ethnographic fieldwork and documentary research, this article examines three shifts in national-scale planning in Palestine. In the period after the Oslo accords, Palestinian planners were tasked with the responsibility to create formal structures of governance and build for a future, eventual state there. Through that process and especially after the second intifada, national planning came to focus almost exclusively on market openness, privatization, and capitalistic development as part of a state and economy building project. Increasingly since 2015, planners have attempted to re-take some kind of formal authority. This article argues that such regimes show how Palestine is increasingly crafted at the state-scale as a node in wider global political economies in order to ostensibly stabilize the political situation, and in ways that have wide consequences for Palestine.
The development of the Arctic was an important political and economic topic of the Soviet Union. This urbanization activity declined dramatically in the economic and political chaos of the 1990s, although some positive transformations have been seen in the new millennium. This article examines whether the colonization of the Russian Arctic will follow Soviet-era plans or the region will remain scarcely populated in the near future. The history and methods of urbanization in the Russian Arctic have been analyzed in order to better shed light on this question.
Valeri, Valerio, Classic Concepts in Anthropology, 280 pp., appendix, bibliography. Chicago: HAU Books, 2018. Paperback, $30.00. ISBN 9780990505082.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds, 366 pp., bibliography, index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Paperback, $35.00. ISBN 9780990505037.
Ab ramson, Allen, and Martin Holbraad, eds., Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds, 336 pp., bibligraphical references, index. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Paperback, $35.00. ISBN 9781526107183.
Aleksandar Bošković (2021), William Robertson Smith (Oxford: Berghahn), 120 pp., Pbk $24.94. ISBN 781800731585, Hbk $145. ISBN 9781800731578.
Christiana Constantopoulou (ed) (2020), Crisis’ Representations: Frontiers and Identities in the Contemporary Media Narratives (Leiden: Brill), 190 pp., Ebk. $192 ISBN 9789004439559, Hbk. $192. ISBN 9789004439542.
Julie L. Drolet (ed) (2019), Rebuilding Lives Post-Disaster (New York: Oxford University Press), 263 pp., Pbk. $46.95 ISBN 9780190942199.
Eszter Krasznai Kovacs (ed) (2021), Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers), 344 pp., Hbk. $82. ISBN 9781800641334.
Ulrich Kasten and Grażyna Kubica (2021), Das Männerlager im Frauen-Kz Ravensbrück, sowie Lagerbriefe und die Biografie des Häftlings Janek Błaszczyk (Fürstenberg, Germany: Verlag der Kulturstiftung Sibirien), 184 pp. Pbk. €18. ISBN 9783942883726.
