BIO
BIO
Selcen Küçüküstel was born in Turkey and completed her graduate studies in
social anthropology. She has received her PhD degree at Humboldt University in
Berlin with her study on nomadic reindeer herder/hunter Dukha of northern
Mongolia, that focuses on on human-animal relations and how the Dukha
perceive their environment. At the moment, she is working as a post-doc
researcher in RIVERS project at the university of Carlos III Madrid on indigenous
people in Nepal and how they are affected by hydropower projects and their
perceptions about rivers. Her main academic interests concern ecological
anthropology, shamanism, nomadic people, Siberia and visual anthropology.
Apart from her academic career, Selcen has also been working as a
photojournalist, producing stories for various geography and culture magazines
in Turkey. After completing her graduate studies, she has travelled overland
from Turkey to Mongolia through Central Asia by bike for her personal project
called “ Following the Traces of Kaf Mountain”, where she has collected fairy
tales from all those countries related to the mysterious mountain in some
famous tales and published them as a series of articles in Atlas magazine. Since
then, she has been working as a freelance photojournalist and has been covering
mostly anthropological stories from various corners of the world from Yemen to
Ethiopia. She has also been working as a producer and assistant director in
documentary movies. She likes to combine her academic career with
photojournalism, looking into the stories she covers from an anthropological
perspective.
Selcen Küçüküstel was born in Turkey and completed her graduate studies in
social anthropology. She has received her PhD degree at Humboldt University in
Berlin with her study on nomadic reindeer herder/hunter Dukha of northern
Mongolia, that focuses on on human-animal relations and how the Dukha
perceive their environment. At the moment, she is working as a post-doc
researcher in RIVERS project at the university of Carlos III Madrid on indigenous
people in Nepal and how they are affected by hydropower projects and their
perceptions about rivers. Her main academic interests concern ecological
anthropology, shamanism, nomadic people, Siberia and visual anthropology.
Apart from her academic career, Selcen has also been working as a
photojournalist, producing stories for various geography and culture magazines
in Turkey. After completing her graduate studies, she has travelled overland
from Turkey to Mongolia through Central Asia by bike for her personal project
called “ Following the Traces of Kaf Mountain”, where she has collected fairy
tales from all those countries related to the mysterious mountain in some
famous tales and published them as a series of articles in Atlas magazine. Since
then, she has been working as a freelance photojournalist and has been covering
mostly anthropological stories from various corners of the world from Yemen to
Ethiopia. She has also been working as a producer and assistant director in
documentary movies. She likes to combine her academic career with
photojournalism, looking into the stories she covers from an anthropological
perspective.
Selcen Küçüküstel
Anthropologist (PhD) / Photojournalist
PROJECTS
Ticuna
The Ticuna are one of the largest Indigenous peoples of the Colombian Amazon, living primarily along the Amazon River and its tributaries near the borders with Brazil and Peru. Their lives are deeply shaped by the forest and the river, through practices of fishing, small-scale agriculture, hunting, and the careful cultivation of chacras that sustain both people and biodiversity. For the Ticuna, the forest is not a backdrop but a living, relational world—one that teaches, nourishes, and demands respect.
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Today, Ticuna communities are also closely connected to regional market economies, selling fish, cassava products, crafts, and forest goods in towns such as Leticia, while navigating the pressures and opportunities of increased mobility, tourism, and state presence. At the same time, they continue to maintain their language, social organization, and ritual life, most notably through the pelazón ceremony, a female initiation ritual that marks the transition to adulthood and reaffirms collective identity, ancestral knowledge, and the enduring ties between people, spirits, and the forest.
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The Ticuna are one of the largest Indigenous peoples of the Amazon
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Ticuna knowledge of the forest is highly detailed and place-based, encompassing medicinal plants, animal behavior, soils, and river cycles, and is learned through daily work, storytelling, and ritual. The forest is understood as a sentient and moral landscape, inhabited by human and nonhuman beings whose relationships must be carefully negotiated through respect, restraint, and proper conduct. As pressures from deforestation, extractive economies, and environmental change intensify, Ticuna communities continue to defend their territories and ways of life, drawing on ancestral knowledge to sustain both cultural continuity and the ecological vitality of the Amazon.
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