Bjørn Ola Tafjord is Associate Professor at the Department of History and Religious Studies at the University of Tromsø. His doctoral thesis, Ritualiserte forståingar: bribriar og bahá'í-trua (University of Bergen 2004), is based on fieldwork in Talamanca, Costa Rica. He is continuing to study religions, traditions, relations and changes in Talamanca through additional fieldwork and historical research . He has also a wider interest in religions in Latin America, in anthropological studies of religions, and in methodological issues in the study of religions. The latter is reflected in publications like the article "Indigenous religion(s) as an analytical category" in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 25 (2013). He has been as co-editor of Dīn: tidsskrift for religion og kultur (Oslo, Novus) since 2007.