Dear readers and followers
you may have noticed that in the last years, activity on this blog has become less, while the content of what has been posted has become more focused. In this text we just want to spell out this change and make this orientation clearer, for future posts as well. When we started this blog, the science communicators that advised us at Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, promoted the blog as our main social media outlet, where we share not only our scholarly advancements, reflections, discussions about Arctic anthropological theory and practice. We used the blog also for all sorts of announcements and shorter posts, such as job offers, announcements of talks, introductions of staff, and the like. For this purpose, we had for example created special pages such as “lectures and events, Rovaniemi”.
Then started the time when twitter became big, and we were urged to post more and more on twitter. We had an automatic function where each blog entry would also generate a quick twitter announcement, with the limited number of characters this platform allowed. But then Elon Musk bought twitter, and it lost its standing in our scholarly community, so this was discontinued. Instead, more and more people started using linkedin. There, restrictions to post length and visual content do not apply as it used to be on twitter, so it became increasingly difficult to distinguish what deserves to be posted on the blog, and what on linkedin. Most of the authors of this blog have also their linkedin accounts, and whoever is into posting their news and announcing their progress, does so increasingly on linkedin. Finally this year, our communicators also encouraged us to establish a linkedin account for the Rovaniemi Arctic Anthropology Research Team. Those of you on linkedin, you are warmly invited to link up with us there . On that linkedin page we will continue with shorter announcements, celebrate some publications, announce jobs, conferences, presentations, guests, lectures etc, part of which was in earlier years posted here on the blog.
This means that posts on linkedin will be much more frequent than posts here on this blog. This is not necessarily a bad development: continuing to follow this blog means that you will not be flooded with short-lived announcement, possibly irrelevant for you. Instead, the blog will focus on content that we consider interesting for Arctic Anthropology in the longer term, to inspire our further thinking, interest, curiosity and connections to our different field sites. This does not mean that we will not anymore write about publications and conferences here. But rather than just announcing them, in these posts there is some further content, something that sparked our interest that we find worth sharing with the readership of this blog.
Speaking about field sites: you will have noticed that posts here decreased in frequency namely after 2022. This was because we had to stop our fieldwork activities within research projects in Siberia and the Russian Arctic, which was a heavy blow to our community. Of course, we were not the only ones being hit by this blow. This collective destiny for many of us Siberian anthropologists led to the publication of the “Fractured North” trilogy, for which many of us wrote chapters, greatly edited by our close colleagues Igor Krupnik, Gail Fondahl and Erich Kasten. Recently this was very generously reviewed by Oran Young here. This fracture led in fact to the division of what was once Circumpolar Arctic Anthropology. You will have noticed that many of our posts were based on our intensive fieldwork, relations and friendships with people from that eastern half of the Arctic. While we keep these relations alive, due to the political climate it became impossible to write about this publicly on platforms like this. Instead, some of us started working with people in other sites, including Siberian diasporas in the West, but not only.
One difference in these field sites in the Western Arctic is that often the consent process that we work out with field partners is more formal, and often more complicated. In Arctic Finland, for example, and also Sápmi more broadly, people are much less likely to want their faces on photos posted on a blog. In Siberia in the previous 30 years this was different: most people were explicitly happy to be featured on a worldwide network and wanted their names to be mentioned. For an anthropology blog it is of course much harder to produce visual material to accompany posts when you do not feature these people in photos. In a discipline which is about people in places, how would you post content about your working with the people without showing these people? This means we have to re-think the way in which we frame such posts, which we are still in the process of learning. But each field is different, as we can see for example from South Greenland. So this means in future posts you may see actual people in posts from there more than from northern Europe. All this is part of an ongoing process, in which we are curiously participating, and continuously finding and re-inventing our own role. We will be honoured if you continue following this path of ours also in the future.
