Environmental Encounters : Woolly Mammoth, Indigenous Communities and Metropolitan Scientists in the Soviet Arctic

Acknowledgments This paper has been presented at the (Un)Common Worlds: Human-Animal Studies conference in Turku, Finland on 7–9 August 2018 and at Helsinki University Environmental Humanities Forum on 12 March 2019. Many of the ideas in this article have been formulated thanks to my long-term collaborations with Nenets reindeer herders in the Yamal peninsula in the Russian Arctic, namely, Khadri’ nyísya, Gena’ nyebya, Artur nyinyeka, di͡adi͡a Fedi͡a, Roman Andreevich and many others. I thank them for their incredible hospitality, support and genuine interest in what I was doing in the field. This research could not be possible without the help and advice of my colleagues Marii͡a Amelina (Moscow), David Anderson (Aberdeen), Dmitriĭ Doronin (Moscow), Naili͡a Galeeva (Salekhard/Kazan’), Erik Hieta (Helsinki), I͡Ulii͡a Laĭus (Saint Petersburg), Kati Lindström (Stockholm), Li͡udmila Lipatova (Salekhard), Karina Lukin (Helsinki), Serguei Oushakine (Princeton), Viktor Pál (Helsinki), Noora Pyyry (Helsinki), Peder Roberts (Stavanger/Stockholm), Mikko Saikku (Helsinki), Laura Siragusa (Helsinki), Anna Svensson (Stockholm) and Alekseĭ Tikhonov (Saint Petersburg). The analysis of indigenous folklore would be impossible without the online database of folklore motives compiled by I͡Uriĭ E. Berezkin (http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/berezkin/index.htm). I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and recommendations. All Russian words and titles are transliterated with ALA-LC (Library of Congress) Romanization with Diacritics, while Nenets words are transliterated according to the system of Tapani Salminen. Financial Support This article has been written with the support of the ERC project Greening the Poles: Science, the Environment, and the Creation of the Modern Arctic and Antarctic (GRETPOL) (PI Prof Peder Roberts). The field research for this article has been supported by the Russian Scientific Foundation project No 18-18-00309 The Energy of the Arctic and Siberia: The Use of Resources in the Context of Socio-Economic and Ecological Change (PI Dr Vladimir N. Davydov).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Etnos Archipelago : Sergei M. Shirokogoroff and the Life History of a Controversial Anthropological Concept

We thank the 12 commentators for their insights and their invitations for fresh research. The new intellectual terrain of this concept, adopted by Kremlin politicians and social movements alike, deserves more anthropological attention.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Life Histories of the Etnos Concept in Eurasia : An introduction

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Domestication as Enskilment : Harnessing Reindeer in Arctic Siberia

Acknowledgements Funding for this project was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (SFR1725) to R. Losey, the JPI HUMANOR project (ESRC ES/M011054/1) to D. Anderson, ERC GRETPOL to D. Arzyutov, and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research to N.Fedorova (18-09-40011). The authors wish to express their gratitude to the Nenets families, the Okotettos and Yaungads, who hosted us during our stay in Iamal, which is greatly appreciated. Special thanks are also offered to the staff of Iamal-Nenets Autonomous District, and the staff of the Iamal-Nenets Regional Museum and Exhibition Complex of I.S. Shemanovskii, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, and British Museum for providing access to their collections.Peer reviewedPostprin

The Concept of the "Field" in Early Soviet Ethnography : A Northern Perspective

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Order Out of Chaos: Anthropology and Politics of Sergei M. Shirokogoroff

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Reassembling the Environmental Archives of the Cold War : Perspectives from the Russian North

To what extent the environmental history of the Arctic can move beyond the divide between Indigenous peoples and newcomers or vernacular and academic ways of knowing? The present dissertation answers this question by developing the notion of an environmental archive. Such an archive does not have particular reference to a given place but rather it refers to the complex network that marks the relations between paper documents and human and non-human agencies as they are able to work together and stabilise the conceptualisation of a variety of environmental objects. The author thus argues that the environment does not only contain information about the past but just like any paper (or audio and video) archive is able to produce it through the relational nature of human-environment interactions. Through the analysis of five case studies from the Russian North, the reader is invited to go through various forms of environmental archives which in turn embrace histories of a number of disciplines such as palaeontology, biology, anthropology, and medicine. Every case or a “layer” is presented here as a contact zone where Indigenous and academic forms of knowledge are not opposed to each other but, on the contrary, are able to interact and consequently affect the global discussions about the Russian Arctic. This transnational context is pivotal for all the cases discussed in the dissertation. Moreover, by putting the Cold War with its tensions between two superpowers at the chronological center of the present work, the author aims to reveal the multidimensionality of in situ interactions with, for instance, the paleontological remains or the traces of all-terrain vehicles and their involvement into broader science transnational cooperations and competitions. As a result, the heterogeneous archives allow us to reconsider the environmental history of the Russian North and the wider Arctic and open a new avenue for future research transcending the geopolitical and epistemic borders of knowledge production.I vilken grad kan en miljhöhistorisk analys av Arktis undvika klyftan mellan ursprungsfolk och nykomlingar, samt mellan folkliga och akademiska form för vetenskap? Avhandlingen svarar på denna fråga genom att utveckla begreppet ”miljöarkiv.” Ett sådant arkiv hänvisar inte till en särskild plats, men heller till et komplex nätverk som samlar ihop förhållande mellan dokument i papper och båda mänskliga och icke-mänskliga aktörskap. Tillsammans stabiliserar och konceptualiserer de ett antal miljöobjekten. Författaren argumenterar därför att miljö omfattar inte bara information om förtiden men liksom andra form för arkiv (antingen papper-baserat eller elektronisk) kan reproducera förtiden genom att belysa interaktioner mellan människor och natur. Genom fem case studier från det nordliga Ryssland bjudas läsaren på en tur av fem olika miljöarkiv som omfattar olika disciplinära traditioner, t. ex. paleontologi, biolog, antropologi, och medicin. Varje case eller ”lager” presenteras här som kontaktzon var ursprungliga och akademiska form för vetenskap inte nödvändigtvis står i opposition, men tvärtom påverkar varandra, och därmed får inflytelse över diskussioner om det ryska Arktis även på global nivå. Denna transnationella kontext är avgörande för alla cases i avhandlingen. Genom att sätta det kalla kriget i analysens centrum (kronologisk sett), med fokus på spänningarna mellan stormakterna, hoppas författaren att belysa de flerdimensionella interaktionerna mellan t. ex. paleontologiska fynd och spår från bandfordon och hur dessa interaktioner var kopplad till bredare frågor kring multinationella samarbete och konkurrens. En så heterogen uppfattning av arkivet öppnar för nye perspektiv på miljöhistorien av båda det ryska Arktis och Arktis set i sin helhet, samt öppna för nya forskningsfrågor som överskrider nuvarande geopolitiske och epistemologiska gränser innanför kunskapsproduktio

Жизнь вне сети арктических кочевников: социальное генерирование электричества на Северном Ямале

This article deals with the ethnographic analysis of the history and social life of electricity among Nenets in the Yamal Peninsula. Based on historical documents and field data the author reconstructs a history of the electrification of the northern part of the peninsula. This work also includes the reflections on social and cultural meanings of electricity among Nenets in and out the tundra. Through these historical and current dynamics, the author suggests analysing the life of electricity in off-the-grid settings through the lens of transnational technological entanglements in the ArcticНастоящая статья представляет собой попытку этнографического анализа истории и современной социальной жизни электричества у ненцев Ямала. На основании исторических документов и этнографических данных автор выстраивает картину электрификации севера полуострова, обращая внимание на социальные и культурные метаморфозы, которые происходят в среде оленеводов, и показывая, как эти изменения связаны в локальном, национальном и транснациональном измерени

Хождение канинского самоедина Якушки Пирчикова самовольством в Аглинскую землю и обратно: к истории ненецко-английских контактов в I пол. XVII в.

The present paper deals with the microhistorical, anthropological and linguistic analysis of one archival document dated 1637. Through its careful reading, we reveal the story of the Kanin Samoyed (“Samoyedin”) Yakushko Pirchikov who had to flee Arkhangelsk along with two reindeer to England by ship in 1631. Later he found himself again in Arkhangelsk where he was caught by official authorities and eventually imprisoned. The documented interrogations preserved in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA) allowed us to reconstruct the wider context of the Nenets-Russian-English contacts in the Arkhangelsk area in the early modern times. The appendix to the article contains the full-text archival documents (photocopy) supplemented by the cursive transcript, their translation into Modern Russian and the detailed commentary