Professor, Ph.D. Veikko Anttonen
I was appointed as the Professor and chair of comparative religion (in Finnish uskontotiede) at the School of Cultural Research at the University of Turku on June, 1998. In 2010 the unit was renamed the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies. I earned my degrees in religious studies from the University of Helsinki (Cand.phil., 1980, Phil.lic. 1987, Dr.phil., 1996) and have held various positions during my academic career. I started out in 1985 as a research assistant at the Academy of Finland and between 1992−1997 had different teaching and research positions at the universities of Turku, Helsinki and Jyväskylä.
My first book, an intellectual biography of Uno Holmberg-Harva, a pioneer into the study of comparative religion in Finland, was published in 1987. In my doctoral dissertation I analysed the semantic history of the ‘sacred’ as a cultural category and it came out in 1996 as Ihmisen ja maan rajat. ‘Pyhä’ kulttuurisena kategoriana. My most recent book from 2010 discusses "the territories and maps of religious studies" (Uskontotieteen maastot ja kartat). All three monographs have been published by the Finnish Literature Society. I am also, together with Ilkka Pyysiäinen from the University of Helsinki, the co-editor of Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion (Continuum, 2002). Currently, we are working with Professor Emerita Anna-Leena Siikala from the University of Helsinki on a co-authored volume on Finnish-Karelian Mythology. Between 2001−2011 I was the editor-in-chief of Temenos. Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion between 2004 and 2011 and I am also on the Editorial Board of The Encyclopedia of Uralic Mythologies.
Over the years I have published over 140 articles in various journals and edited volumes, including The Sacred and its Scholars, edited by Thomas Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan (Brill, 1996); Guide to the Study of Religion edited by Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (Cassell, 2000), Perspectives on Method and Theory in the Study of Religion edited by Russell T. McCutcheon & Armin Geertz (Brill, 2000), and Religion as a Human Capacity edited by Timothy Light and Brian C. Wilson (Brill, 2004). My articles on shamanism have been published in the journal Shaman, the Encyclopedia of Shamanism (ABC-CLIO, 2005), and A Lion Handbook of World Religions (Lion Publishing, 2005); I also contributed to the 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion edited by Lindsay Jones (Macmillan Reference USA, 2005).
I have had several positions of trust both in Finland and within international scholarly communities. I have been the President of the Finnish Society for the Study of Religion between 2006 and 2011, the vice-President of the European Association for the Study of Religion (EASR) and a member of the International Committee of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR). In the 1980s I served as the secretary and a member of the board of the Finnish Anthropological Society and in 2001-2007 as Vice-President of the Finnish Literature Society; I have also been a board member of the Kalevala Society. In June 2010 I was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Debrecen, Hungary.
Research Interests
During the past twenty years I have written and lectured extensively on topics and issues related to the concept of the sacred. My primary intention has been to unravel the mental architecture and cultural logic of the use of the term both as a geographical and a religious category. I have therefore focused on changes and shifts in meanings of terms denoting ‘sacred’ ever since the adoption of the term from Proto-Germanic languages during the Bronze Age in pre-historic era, looking at the Finnish language in particular and various languages more generally. I have approach the ‘sacred’ as a cultural category rather than as a theological concept. One of my aims has been to explain why specific topographically exceptional places and sites out in the wilderness, such as springs, rapids, marshes, lakes and mountains, were designated as ‘sacred’. What were the properties that made a rowan tree and its red berries ‘sacred’? Why did various Nordic peoples regard the bear as a sacred animal? Why do the Mosaic laws assign pig the status of a defiled (forbidden, tabooed, and thus sacred) animal – rules observed by both Jews and Muslims? Why were women set apart during their menstruation period and in the late stage of pregnancy? I have aimed to create a counter-argument against phenomenological interpretations, which emphasize religious experience and the subsequent introspective emotion as the prime avenue for understanding, by putting forth a theory in which both sociocultural and cognitive factors are taken into account in deciphering and explaining ‘the logic’ by which the ‘sacred’ works. I have defined the sacred as a category of non-negotiable value, which is actualized in context-specific situations when transformations take place in the perception of boundaries of temporal, territorial or corporeal categories.
Presently, my scholarly interests vary from archaeology of religion, place names, and landscape studies to the study of nationalism. In addition to issues related to identifying spatio-cognitive parameters of religion and mythology, I have expanded my field of scholarly vision into the role that human body plays in religion. One of my recent publications discussed the case of a Finnish pastor who in 2008 underwent sex reassignment surgery. The pastor’s decision to change sex and become a woman gave rise to heated debates within the Lutheran Church as well as in the media. From the scholarly perspective, this case raises important questions about the meaning and perceptions of the body and gender of a priest as well as about the logic of value-laden boundary-making between the categories of the self, of the society and of the human body more generally.