We are delighted to announce that an exciting new double-issue of the student-led open-access journal The Unfamiliar: an anthropological journal, Volume 5 (1-2), “Humans and the Environment / Walking Threads”, is now available online.
Humans and the Environment
The individual contributions to this double-issue of The Unfamiliar all explore the different and intricate relationships that exist between people and environments. The environment is here understood in its broadest sense, to also include social, economic, cultural and political aspects, all co-constitutive elements influencing how one comes to perceive and relate to the surrounding world.

Walking Threads
In continuation with the theme of Humans and the Environment, the final part of this volume is dedicated to a special section on the ongoing collaborative initiative Walking Threads. The different reflections, essays and creative interventions represented by these pieces offer a glimpse into an ongoing conversation that originated in the context of one such collaboration, between performance and anthropology, and after an unplanned communal walk with a thread in Seaton Park, Aberdeen. The contributions exemplify the value of experimentation and play, while also offering us reflections on the walk’s potential methodological implications and relevance for anthropological research – and how we come to know and connect with our surrounding environment.

Table of Contents:

Humans and the Environment

A Windswept Archipelago: Stories of Perception, Time and Landscape in the Orkney Islands
– Sara Bowman Friend
Walking Through Amazonia: An Embodied Perspective on “Natural” Environment
– Manuela Tassan
Esther’s Life Story within a Dryland Biography: Livelihood Viability in Central Pokot, Kenya.
– Paul Roden and Christoph Bergmann
Mountains as actors in the Bolivian Andes: The interrelationship between politics and ritual in the Kallawaya ayllus
– Jonathan Alderman
Becoming With, in Life and Death
– Hannah Kuemmerle
Learning Respect in the Mountains: Children’s perception of nature and its master spirits in a Mapuche community
– Gabriela Alejandra Pina Ahumada

Walking Threads

Interrupted Everyday Motions: Journeying With Threads and Lives
– Ragnhild Freng Dale
Introducing the Walking Threads Project
– Paola Esposito and Jan Peter Laurens Loovers
“Walking Threads, Threading Walk”: Embroidering reflection
– Valeria Lembo
Stepping In and Out of the Picture: A drawing-based reflection on Walking Threads
– Paola Esposito
Walking Threads: A Memory and a Reflective Speculation Inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari
– Brian Schultis
“Walking Threads, Threading Walk”: Weaving and Entangling Deleuze and Ingold with Threads
– Jan Peter Laurens Loovers
An intuitive walk – a thread to play along
– Gey Pin Ang
Anthropological Renga
– Caroline Gatt

Library supported publishing 

The Unfamiliar is supported by the Library’s Open Journals service. The service is offered free to academic staff and students who are interested in publishing new Open Access journals or migrating existing journals to the Library’s OJS (Open Journal Systems) platform.  You can find out more about the service on the Information Services website or email Library.Learning@ed.ac.uk

Angela Laurins

Library Learning Services Manager