Department of social anthropology seminar with Rane Willerslev

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Rane Willerslev, Professor and Director of the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. He will present the following paper:

"‘The New as Always the Same’: Yukaghir Hunting Adaptations to Climate Change"

Abstract

It is customary to assume that the lives of small-scale hunting societies in the Arctic will be forced into radically new strategies of adaptation as a result of global warming and the dramatic ecological effects that it brings about. This article reveals that this is not necessarily the case. Drawing on ethnographic data from the Yukaghirs, a small Siberian group of indigenous hunters, it is shown that these people while having been confronted with dramatic ecological changes, this has not led to simultaneous changes in their subsistence practice and its associated cosmological make-up. In proposing this argument, the article questions the view of much ecological anthropology, namely that ecological pressure is the prime mover behind the production of cultural forms.

Bionote
Rane Willerslev (05.06 1971) has his PhD from the University of Cambridge (2003) and his MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester (1996). Twice (2006 and 2010), he was awarded the ‘Elite Researcher’s Award’ by the Independent Research Councils of Denmark and he has given the Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics in 2010. Since 2007, Willerslev has been the editor of Acta Borealia: Nordic Journal of Circumpolar Societies. His main field of research has been hunting and spiritual knowledge among Siberia’s indigenous peoples. In 2007, his monograph Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs was published by University of California Press, Berkeley and his new monograph On the Run in Siberia is currently being published by University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.  From 2004-6, Willerslev was Associate Professor at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in the Department for Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and he is the author of several articles about vision and visuality. In 2010, he was appointed Full Professor in the Anthropology of Knowledge at the Institute for Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics, University of Aarhus, Denmark. From 2008-2011, he was also the Director of the Ethnographic Collections at Moesgaard Museum. From September 2011, he is taking up the position of Director of the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo.

All interested are welcome!

Best regards
BSAS Comittee