About

I am Naama Cohen, an Israeli anthropologist, writer, and research consultant, based in Copenhagen since 2020. In the past, alongside my anthropology studies, I worked as a software developer.

I hold a BA in Sociology and Cognition from The Open University of Israel and an MSc in Medical Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen.

My work examines how people become who they are. I work within the anthropology of consciousness, psychological anthropology, and phenomenology, and am interested in the places where thought, habit, technology, body, and matter meet and shape us.

I study how practices, technologies, spaces, and objects both shape and are shaped by consciousness, human experience, social relations, and ways of being in the world.

I am interested in how daily rhythms organize our mental and emotional life, and in how people imagine and experience their own inner worlds and those of others.

In my thesis research I worked with programmers, and with how programming involves imaginative work and shapes thinking, worldview, and the body.

Since October 7 I have been writing and researching the lives of Israelis and Jews in Denmark, focusing on questions of antisemitism, identity, belonging, fear, and the encounter between communities, institutions, and historical memory.

Denmark and Israel are two of the central fields through which I think, write, and teach. Through them I return again and again to the questions that guide my work: how everyday life shapes us, and what we can learn from it about the society we live in and the society we seek to build.

In 2025 I founded Field Notes & Finds, an anthropological space that seeks to make knowledge and a way of thinking—full of curiosity, compassion, and humility—accessible to a wide public, through writing, lectures, workshops, learning journeys, and objects.

The project grows out of a desire to turn anthropological thought into a living language we can think with, travel with, teach with, and act through in the world.

One of the project's central threads is the idea that objects, clothes, and spaces are not only an outer expression of who we are. They take part in making us. We tend to think of the true self as something deep inside, and the outside as a shell, costume, or stage.

But the anthropology of materiality offers a different view: the objects we live with, the clothes we learn to wear, and the spaces we move through are not only markers of identity. They shape habits, consciousness, relationships, taste, status, and a sense of belonging.

Sometimes they affect us precisely because they become invisible—a taken-for-granted part of life's background.

Through each of these spaces I return to the same question: how culture is made tangible, and how the most tangible things in our lives shape what we experience as inner, personal, and private.