Pelle Tejsner

Pelle Tejsner is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Head of the Department of Cultural and Social History at Ilisimatursarfik/University of Greenland. His Ph.D. thesis was a seasonality-based research project based on a year-long fieldwork in Qeqertarsuaq on Disco Island/Northwest Greenland. It examined Kalaallit Inuit perceptions of environmental change as part of his wider research focus on socio-cultural resilience, socio-environmental, and human-animal relations (multispeciesism) with Inuit communities. Postdoctoral research was sponsored by the Danish Independent Research Council and reviewed public discourses and civic engagement focusing on indigenous rights in relation to non-renewable resource extraction (offshore hydrocarbon/gas, and mining) and wider societal impacts with a view to promoting sustainable development of non-renewable resource governance in Greenland and the Arctic (Canada and Alaska) at large. As an interdisciplinary researcher he has worked with both indigenous informants and natural scientists as part of his overarching on differing culturally based forms of knowledge-making in relation to climate change mitigation and coastal renewable resource management. 

https://uk.uni.gl/find-employee/department-of-cultural-social-history/pelle-tejsner/ 

Readings Favorite

Horace Miner’s timeless masterpiece is perhaps one the earliest examples of literary text to envision, and signal, what subsequently came to represent the ‘ethnographic turn’ in Social and Cultural Anthropology. In providing a highly detailed account of the Nacirema (American spelled backwards), Miner begs students of anthropology, in fact any researcher engaged in cultural anthropology and essentially the interpretation and representation of the ‘Other’ to critically appraise the object of our research and the ways in which these are represented. It is over 70 years since its first publication and still continues to trick and surprise most students as part of first year introductory courses in social anthropology that I have taught so far and I continue to cite Miner in many of the materials, which I continue to write on cultural representation and the ethnographic turn.