Natalia (Natasha) Magnani

Professional Interests

Natasha Magnani is a sociocultural anthropologist who examines the underlying mechanisms of social change—the ways that people seek to transform themselves and society through embodied and material practice. She studies resurgences of
production—from the recreation of craft objects, local food ways, and their ecological
relations, to large-scale infrastructural revivals, all of which become entangled with
wider cultural and environmental movements, climate change, and geopolitics. Collaborative projects are ongoing with craft artisans and artists in the Indigenous homelands of Sápmi in Fennoscandia and postcolonial Cyprus. She leads a Norwegian Research Council project on the anticipation of melting Arctic sea routes and large-scale infrastructures in Sápmi and across the circumpolar North.

Representative Publications

Books

Magnani, N. Silent Knowledge: Reviving Sámi Practice. University of British Columbia Press (in press)

Magnani, M. and N. Magnani. The Craft of Belonging. University of Toronto Press (in press)

Magnani, N. and M. Magnani, eds. Arctic Silk Roads: An Anthropology of the Unbuilt. Berghahn Books.

Articles and Chapters

Magnani, N. and M. Magnani. 2026. Economies of ghosts infrastructures in Arctic Norway. In Arctic Silk Roads: An Anthropology of the Unbuilt (see Books)

Magnani, N. and M. Magnani. 2026. Imagining unbuilt infrastructures across the circumpolar North. In Arctic Silk Roads: An Anthropology of the Unbuilt. (See Books)

Magnani, M. and N. Magnani. 2026. Resonance of the unbuilt. In Arctic Silk Roads: An Anthropology of the Unbuilt (see Books)

Magnani, N. and M. Magnani. 2025. Unsettling Production: Affective Geographies of Contested Commodities in Sápmi. American Anthropologist 127(3): 552-565.

Magnani, M., Porsanger, J., Laiti, S., Magnani, N., Olli, A.M., Rauhala, P., Valkeapää, S.
and Hollinger, E., 2023. Small collections remembered: Sámi material culture and
community‐based digitization at the Smithsonian Institution. Museum Anthropology.

Magnani, N. and M. Magnani. 2022. Decolonizing Production: Healing, Belonging, and
Social Change in Sápmi. Current Anthropology 63(4): 386-406.

Magnani, N. 2022. Reflections of movement. Current Anthropology 63(5).

Magnani, N. 2022. Commemorating Continuity: Reconciling Representations in Sääʹm
Land. In The Sámi World, ed. Valkonen, Sanna, et al. London: Routledge.

Magnani, M, J. Clindaniel, and N. Magnani. 2022. Material Culture Studies in the Age of
Big Data: Digital Excavation of Homemade Face-Mask Production during the COVID-19
Pandemic. American Antiquity 1-21.

Magnani, N. and M. Magnani. 2020. Material Methods for a Rapid-Response
Anthropology. Social Anthropology 28(2): 312-314

Magnani, N., M. Magnani, A. Venovcevs, and S. Farstadvoll. 2020. Material
Transformations of Memory. American Anthropologist, Public Anthropologies.

Magnani, M. and N. Magnani. 2018. Archaeological Ethnography of an Indigenous
Movement: Revitalization and Production in a Skolt Sámi Community. Journal of Social
Archaeology 18(1): 3-29.

Magnani, M., A. Guttorm, and N. Magnani. 2018. Three-Dimensional Community-Based Heritage Management of Indigenous Museum Collections: Archaeological Ethnography, Revitalization, and Repatriation at Sámi Museum Siida. Journal of Cultural Heritage 31: 162-169.