Elina I. Hartikainen is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology. Her research examines the intersection of religion, politics, law, and race in Brazil through a focus on African origin religions.
Research Interests
Thematic: religion and law; religion and politics; secularism and race; politics of recognition; ethnoracial policy and law; religion and race-based identity politics; semiotics; discourse and interaction
Regional: Latin America; Brazil
About
Elina’s research examines the intersection of religion, politics, law, and race in Brazil through a focus on African origin religions. She is currently working on two distinct research projects. The first of these analyzes how Candomblé practitioners in the city of Salvador responded to escalating violence against their temples and persons in the late 2000s through an embrace of state efforts to expand racial inclusion through ethnoracial policy. The project brings into relief how the inclusion of religious groups in state projects of ethnoracial recognition reconfigures both religion and race as political categories. Her second ongoing research project analyzes the intersectional construction of race and religion in secular governance and law. The project approaches this question through an analysis of the legal treatment of religious violence and discrimination in Brazil. Theoretically and methodologically, her research draws on a combination of socio-cultural and linguistic anthropological approaches to political and legal processes.
Background
Elina joined the Department of Social Anthropology in August 2023. Before this she worked as an Academy Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Helsinki (2019-2023), a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2016-2019), and an Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Anthropology in the University of Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (2013-2016). She earned her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2013.
Currently, she is a member of the editorial board of the journal PoLAR: Political Anthropology Review, and the scientific board of Conexões e Ideias, a book series published by the São Paulo-based publisher Editora Hucitec. In the past years, she has also served as editor for Suomen Antropologi: The Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, board member of the Finnish Anthropological Society, and founder and coordinator of the ELAN (European Association for Social Anthropology Linguistic Anthropology Network) works-in-progress workshop and the University of Helsinki Linguistic Anthropology-workshop.