Isabell Herrmans received her doctorate in social and cultural anthropology from the University of Helsinki in 2011. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Academy of Finland-funded project ‘Contested Values in Indonesia: Value Creation and Value Relations in Contemporary Borneo’ (2014-2018) and has received funding for her own research project ‘Dynamics of Religion at the Margins of Modern Indonesia’ from the Kone Foundation (2018-2021). She has done 28 months of intermittent fieldwork among Luangan Dayak people in East and Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Her research interests include healing rituals, religious rationalization, animist ontologies, values, environmental change, and sociality. She has published a monograph on Luangan healing rituals by Berghahn Press (2015).

Monograph

Herrmans, Isabell. 2015. Ritual Retellings: Luangan Healing Performances through Practice. New York: Berghahn Press.

Articles

Herrmans, Isabell. 2021. Ritual Sociality and the Limits of Shamanic Efficacy among the Luangan of Indonesian Borneo. Anthropological Forum 31(1): 49-63.

Herrmans, Isabell. 2020. Spirits Out of Place: Luangan Relational Landscapes and Environmental Change. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26 (4): 766-785.

Herrmans, Isabell. 2017. Values in Practice: Change and Continuity in Luangan Ritual Performance. In C. Arenz, M. Haug, S. Seitz and O. Venz (eds.): Continuity under Change in Dayak Societies. pp. 191-210. Wiesbaden: Springer.

Herrmans, Isabell. 2017. Genre Diversification: Orthodoxy and Innovation in an Indonesian Minority Religion. Indonesia and the Malay World 45 (131): 24-43.