Ebook: Exploring Circum-Baltic Cultures and Beyond

The idea for this special issue is rooted in discussions connected to the multidisciplinary workshop of 'Austmarr VI: Religion, Language, Practice', organized in Helsinki at the end of 2016, but it was not planned as conference proceedings per se. Austmarr Network meetings offer a venue for presenting work in progress rather than more or less ready papers, and the lectures connected with this meeting’s workshop were oriented towards discussion rather than publication. The idea behind the collection was instead built on working not simply with the concept of 'interdisciplinarity', but with a broader phenomenon of which interdisciplinarity is a part, a phenomenon which has no label of its own and thus becomes simultaneously obscured in the shadow of interdisciplinarity. This aspect of the thematic issue’s focus is linked to comparativism, in the broad sense of bringing things together and looking for patterns of sameness and difference or how one thing may help shed light on another, a methodological tool that intersects with interdisciplinarity and the broader phenomenon with which it is connected. The contributions gathered here include introductions to, and discussions of, methodologies that truly unite distinct disciplines or that triangulate analyses of different types of data emblematic of different fields.