I’m very pleased to begin this three-year international postdoc hosted at Aarhus University, administered by Uppsala University, and funded by the Swedish Research Council.

I completed my PhD in Social Anthropology at University of Gothenburg in May 2025 with a thesis on ritual and cosmology among the Sihanaka, a rice-farming society in the Alaotra wetlands of Madagascar.

Building on this research and on (so far) seven periods of fieldwork in Madagascar since 2015, my postdoctoral project aims to co-write a history of the Sihanaka with the Sihanaka community of Anororo. By bringing together oral traditions, archival research, and ethnography, the project explores how historical knowledge is produced, transmitted, and negotiated, and how such collaborative practices can reclaim the past of a people long marginalised as a “people without history”. The project benefits from scholarly support from colleagues abroad, particularly Professor Takumi Moriyama at the University of Tokyo.

Moreover, I collaborate with colleagues at Uppsala University, including Kaj Århem, on questions of immanentist cosmology. I also contribute as a field researcher responsible for the Sihanaka field site in the Templeton-funded project ‘Gods, Games and the Socioecological Landscape’, led by Benjamin Purzycki at Aarhus University.

My research interests include ritual and religion, death and divinities, spirit possession, history and tradition, and museum-based and collaborative forms of knowledge production. Regionally, my work focuses on Madagascar, with comparative interests in the wider Indian Ocean world, Austronesia, and Africa.

Contact:
Anders Norge
School of Culture and Society
Department of AnthropologyMoesgård Allé 20
8270 Højbjerg
andersnorge@cas.au.dk