Research
themes
Our
research environment
Staff
interests
Current
projects and other research pages
Themes
Aberdeen
lies at the hub of a region besides Scotland , extends eastwards
to the Nordic and Baltic countries and to northern Russia, and westwards
to Iceland, Greenland, Canada and Alaska. The region includes several
institutions with distinguished traditions of anthropological scholarship,
and others where it looks set to develop. Much of this scholarship
concentrates on societies and communities within the region, though
like all anthropological work, it also has an important comparative
dimension.
Our objective
from the start has been to establish the University of Aberdeen
as the principal focus, nationally and internationally, for anthropological
research in the region as a whole, through the pursuit of an integrated
programme of research on the ‘Anthropology of the North'. Today,
the Department has the largest concentration of anthropologists
working in the North within the UK and one of the largest internationally.
Our research in this region focuses on the following seven themes:
(1) relations
between indigenous peoples and nation states
(2) comparative
anthropology in the post-Soviet era
(3) biodiversity,
sustainability and resource management
(4) systems
of knowledge, practice and enskilment
(5) perceptions
and constructions of society, nature and environment
(6) representations
of tradition in language and media
(7) transnational
migration and diasporic communities in Scotland, Canada and Siberia.
Alongside
and complementing this northern focus we are developing a second
major focus of research on the theme of ‘Culture, Creativity and
Perception'. We aim to further develop this research in two directions.
The first
is to explore the links between art, architecture and anthropology,
with reference to the formation of places, paths, landscapes and
environments and the interrelations between perception, creativity
and skill. Research in this field has concentrated on such issues
as the sociality of walking, practices of inscription (including
drawing and other forms of line-making) and alternative forms of
notation. We are also initiating research in the emergent field
of design anthropology, which links industrial design, through human
movement studies and ecological psychology, to anthropological studies
of skilled practice, the senses, and the aesthetics of everyday
life.
Secondly,
we aim to capitalise on the facilities and resources of the University's
Marischal Museum in order to develop a sustained programme of research
into the ways in which the histories of artefacts and of persons
are conjoined in the creation and perception of material objects.
We expect this research to yield significant methodological innovations
for the study of artefacts, along with new ways of thinking about
the role of museums in contemporary society. It will also serve
as a catalyst for further international collaborations between anthropologists,
historians, museum ethnographers, craftspeople and artists.
Research
environment
The research
environment at Aberdeen is currently very conducive to the development
of anthropological scholarship. Besides those staff working in the
Department of Anthropology, there are already a number of anthropologists
working in other departments and units of the University, including
Dr Martin Mills and Dr Gabriele Marranci in the School
of Divinity, History and Philosophy, and Dr Trevor Stack
in the School of Language
& Literature. The Department enjoys close research links
with the Elphinstone
Institute (which specialises in the ethnology of Northeast
Scotland), the Research
Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, the Centre
for Early Modern Studies, and other Departments in and beyond
the College of Arts and Social Sciences, including Sociology,
History, Geography
and Environment, Property,
Politics & International
Relations (which includes the Nordic Policy Studies Centre),
and Plant &
Soil Science.
Anthropology
staff and research students in the Department with northern interests
have also joined with colleagues in Geography and Environment, and
Plant and Soil Science, to form the recently established Aberdeen
Northern Studies
Centre. The Centre is part of the Aberdeen Research Consortium,
which includes the Macaulay
Institute for Land Use Research and the Centre
for Ecology and Hydrology at Banchory. For staff and students
with interests in material culture, the University's Marischal
Museum has one of the finest collections of ethnographic
material in the UK , offering unparalleled opportunities for the
‘hands-on' study of artefacts and for the development of research
into the intertwined histories of persons and things.
Forthcoming
developments in the University, including the establishment of a
Centre for Scandinavian Studies and a new programme of research
and teaching in Archaeology, will offer further opportunities for
collaboration in the years to come.
The
editorial office for the international journal Sibirica:
Sibirica:
Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies is based
in the Department as are half the members of the international editorial
board. The journal provides wide exposure to current trends in Siberian
research as well as offering postgraduate students experience in
editing and reviewing.
Members
of staff and research interests
For full details, please visit the staff page
or click below on the individual links.
Dr
David Anderson
Circumpolar ethnology, ecology, political theory, history of anthropology,
aboriginal rights, national identity; Siberia, Canada, eastern Europe.
Dr
Tatiana Argounova-Low
Ethnic identity,
nationalism, post-socialist societies; oral traditions; reindeer
herding communities, food and diet in reindeer herding communities;
Siberia: Sakha (Yakutia), Evenkia.
Dr
Arnar Árnason
Death,
emotion, and psychotherapy and the politics thereof; subjectivities/subjection;
narratives, memory and forgetting; embodiment; identity and landscape.
Dr
Alison Brown
Museum
anthropology; Aboriginal heritage management practices in Canada;
repatriation; material culture; ethnographic photography; ethnohistory;
Blackfoot cultural histories; Scots and First Nations' fur trade
narratives
Neil
Curtis
Museums
and archaeology, education, ideas of identity, material and time.
Dr
Elizabeth Hallam
Gender, anthropology and history, ritual and festivity, popular
culture and belief, textual and visual representations of the body,
death and dying, texts and objects in museum display; archival research,
fieldwork in East Midlands.
Prof
Tim Ingold
Ecological anthropology, hunting-gathering and pastoralism, evolutionary
theory, technology and language, perception and cognition; Northern
circumpolar societies, Saami, northern Finnish farmers.
Dr
Alexander King
Anthropological linguistics, cultural revival and nationalism, native
language education in post-socialist societies, everyday talk and
representations of indigenous culture; Kamchatka, Siberia.
Dr
Jo Lee
Walking
and urban environments, perception of landscape, phenomenology,
farming and environmentalism, European rural social change, Scotland
and Europe.
Dr
Johan Rasanayagam
Uzbekistan
and Central Asia, postsocialist societies, the anthropology of Islam,
anthropology of the state.
Dr
Nancy Wachowich
Oral traditions, ethnohistory, museum studies, environmental thought,
ethnographic film; Inuit, Canadian Arctic and Subarctic, Circumpolar
North.
Dr
Andrew Whitehouse
Nature
conservation, farming, identity, knowledge and values, ecological
anthropology, continuity and change, Islay, Scottish Highlands,
Britain.
Dr
Robert Wishart
Sub Arctic
Canada: Gwich'in, Ojibwe, Scottish Fur Traders; oral history, identity,
colonial wildlife management regimes, continuities in hunting traditions,
ethnohistory, landscape.
Project
and other research pages
The
Baikal Archaeology Project – Ethnoarchaeological Module
A
Major Collaborative Research Initiative Program funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Co-Investigators:
David Anderson, Tatiana Argounova-Low,
Elena Glavatskaya
Postgraduate
researchers: Donatas Brandisauskas, Vladimir
Davydov, Aline Ehrenfried, Joseph Long, Veronika Simonova.
A
British Academy
small grant
David Anderson
and Aline Ehrenfried
Digitising
the photographic archive of Southern Siberian indigenous peoples
Funded
by the Endangered
Archives Programme, The British Library
David Anderson
Aboriginal
Land-Rights in Siberia: Archival and Living Transcripts
A
Standard Research Grant funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council
David
Anderson and Elena Glavatskaya
The
1926 Siberian Polar Census and Contemporary Indigenous Land Rights
in Western Siberia
Funded
by the Norwegian Research Council
David
Anderson and Konstantin Klokov
Home,
Hearth, and Household in the Circumpolar North
Funded
by ESF – EUROCORES
David
Anderson
Material
Histories: Social Relationships between Scots and Aboriginal Peoples
in the Canadian Fur Trade, c1870-1930
Alison
Brown, Nancy Wachowich and Tim Ingold
Culture
from the ground: walking, movement and placemaking
Jo Lee and
Tim Ingold
Learning
is understanding in practice: exploring the interrelations between
perception, skill and creativity
Raymond
Lucas and Tim Ingold
Landscape
seminars (EASA / AHRC)
Arnar Arnason,
Nicolas Ellison, Jo Lee, Andrew Whitehouse.
Koryak
language and culture
Alex King
Northern
Studies Centre
Aberdeen's interdisciplinary
research centre on environment and people in northern areas
Sibirica:
Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies
Journal
edited within the Department
