Agnieszka Halemba has been working in south-western Siberia (Altai, Tuva and Khakassia) since 1993. In 1995 she received MA degree from the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw and in 2002 PhD degree from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Currently she is working on a project "Thinking in motion. An anthropology of landscape, knowledge and religion among the Telengits of Altai (Russian Federation)", which is sponsored by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Social Anthropology (Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship).

Agnieszka is interested in interactions between different kinds of religious knowledge, particularly in the context of nation building and state intervention in the area of religion. Hence, on the one hand her work addresses such issues as relations between religious knowledge, landscape and movement and on the other hand it is firmly placed in the context of contemporary political situation in Inner Asia. In particular she shows how the idea of national unity as expressed within state ideology interacts with the shaping of spiritual knowledge among Telengits.

Her new project, "Religion as an institution and as a way of life. Changing relations between Buddhism and local religious traditions in south-western Siberia", will investigate the interaction between Buddhism and local religious traditions in the context of the contemporary nation-state. She is interested in following research questions:
· Under what circumstances do such non-formalised religious traditions as Shaman(ism) undergo a process of institutionalisation and how does this change take place?
· What is the role of the nation-state in the institutionalisation of religion, and how does this process influence the way in which shamans relate to spiritual worlds?
· How do laymen react to this process and how are the basic workings of non-institutionalised traditions changed under new circumstances?

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