Marianne Elisabeth Lien is Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology. Her research concerns nature, human-animal relations and the politics of food and landscapes.
Research interests
Thematic: Domestication, aquaculture, human animal relations, conservation and contested landscapes, temporality, commons and decolonization, food production and consumption, environmental anthropology, Studies of Technology and Science.
About
Marianne Lien has a long-standing interest in how lives are sustained through materials. Foods, tools, animals, and plants constitute webs of relations that humans and other beings depend on, relations that are currently under threat.
Ethnographic research offers insight into such relations. Lien has traced the politics of food from kitchen tables to fish farms, from agricultural production to modern marketing. She is particularly interested in Arctic domestication and challenges of the Anthropocene, and in the links between agricultural practices and colonization, as well as understandings of the commons.
Currently Lien studies digitalization in human-animal relations with a focus on reindeer husbandry, which is part of a broader ambition to advance experimental and collaborative ethnographic methods. Her work contributes to theoretical discussions in environmental anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, economic anthropology, kinship studies, digital ethnography and the anthropology of food.
Lien's regional expertise is based primarily in the North, the Nordic region and especially the Nordic Arctic. She works in the coastal and border regions of Finnmark, North Norway, and has also done fieldwork in Tasmania, Australia.
Lien is inspired by collaborative and interdisciplinary work, and has lead several research projects, including Arctic Domestication in the era of the Anthropocene - CAS (Centre for Advanced Studies), Materializing Kinship - Cycles of Life at the Norwegian Hytte, and Newcomers to the Farm - Atlantic Salmon between the Wild and the Industrial. Her current projects are Nordic Arctic Colonisation - A multidisciplinary, multispecies and multitemporal approach, and Private Lives - Embedding Sociality at Digital Kitchen-Tables.