41. Departures in the Circumpolar North and Siberia RG

41.
Departures in the Circumpolar North and Siberia
RG Zirkumpolargebiete und Sibirien (Joachim Otto Habeck, Verena Traeger,
Gerti Eilmsteiner-Saxinger, Sophie Elixhauser)
Discussant: Sophie Elixhauser
In situations of crisis established structures are breaking apart. Crises, however, also create
opportunities for change and new beginnings. In the Circumpolar North, the preparation for
crises involving complex decision-making and departures formed part of people’s daily lives
for thousands of years. Moreover, survival strategies based on subsistence were part and
parcel of a continual adaptation to changing environments and living conditions.
In the recent past, the circumpolar region has undergone far-reaching changes induced by
colonialism and missionary activities leading to forced relocation and the introduction of a
settled lifestyle, boarding schools and capitalist or socialist economic systems, accompanied
by massive resource exploitation. Environmental pollution and climate change are becoming
ever more acute, affecting subsistence and mobility practices, people’s environ-mental perceptions and sense of place, the stability of food security and cultural identities. Past crises
have continued to affect the inhabitants over the course of many generations up until the
present. A loss of indigenous traditions, languages and oral history as well as a lack of prospects, a rising propensity for violence, high suicide rates and drug abuse are some of the
consequences. Across the Arctic region and Siberia various responses may be observed,
and different solutions with regard to resource control, political self-determination and the
recognition of indigenous rights are being developed. They reflect national sovereignty and
democratic processes and show that people are ready to actively shape their future.
This workshop invites broader theoretical, applied and comparative contributions as well as
thematic papers and ethnographic case studies from the Circumpolar North and Siberia
(presentations can be held in English or German).
Program:
Mark Nuttall, University of Alberta and Ilisimatusarfik/Greenland Institute of Natural
Resources
Something out there in the water: apprehension, anxiety and resistance on Greenland's resource frontier
The frontier is being imagined and made in Greenland. In recent years, interest has grown in
the possibility of developing mines and in oil exploration in offshore waters. Practices of deterritoriality and processes of erasure appear increasingly apparent. Particular places are
defined as resource spaces and become zones of sacrifice. In this presentation, I draw on
continuing ethnographic research in Melville Bay and Nuuk Fjord. I am concerned with how
Greenland is anticipating, discussing, and planning resource development and megaprojects
and what appears to be an inevitable transition to an industrial nation based on the extraction
of minerals and hydrocarbons. This work involves a consideration of how the subsurface is
imagined and politicized, what happens at the intersection of the political discourse surrounding resource development, the emergent public responses to it, debates over decisionmaking processes and the extent and nature of public participation, and the growing influSeite 1 von 5
ence of corporate transnationalism. This focus on Greenland illustrates a broader process of
the reimagining of the Arctic as a resource frontier and the anxieties and resistances it provokes.
Anna Swierczynska, University of Uppsala
“We are not enough”: a local community in crisis
Until the 1970’s, Nattavaara (Norrbotten, Sweden), a remote village located 25 km behind
the Arctic Circle, used to be a lively community of approximately 400 inhabitants. The village
was self-sufficient thanks to well-developed local services and numerous local employers.
Today Nattavaara, like many other villages of northern sparsely populated areas (glesbygd),
suffers from crisis which is depopulation. The village counts ca. 120 inhabitants and is continuously shrinking. The consequences of depopulation begin to threaten the social sustainability of the local community. Local services, such as kindergartens, primary schools, people's houses, libraries, filling stations, grocer's shops, pharmacies, post offices, community
nurse health care services and public transport, are being reduced or closed down – all on
account of unprofitability. The twin villages, Nattavaara and Nattavaara By, have lost most of
their services – the primary school being the heaviest loss – and employment opportunities.
What are the characteristics of Nattavaara’s crisis? What lies at the foundation of Nattavaara’s depopulation? What are the existing and possible ways of the village’s development?.
Julia Feuer-Cotter, University of Nottingham
Memory and Practice: approaching the experiences of women in Alaska’s oil industry
through narratives evoked by smells
This presentation seeks to discuss ways to explore the sensed Arctic environment and human-nature interactions by focusing on emotional practices as a complex documentation of
subjective place experience recalled by odours. My research focuses on performativity and
geographical imagination of Arctic mining infrastructure and how the progressive understanding of place can illuminate changes in environmental perception and through evoked emotion, imagination, and memory of these places. My paper looks at women in Alaska’s oil industry living in so called Man Camps and how traumata, but also positive experiences, have
altered their environmental perception. I will be discussing creative, participatory, community
based endeavours in Alaska and in Europe which have explored Man Camps as temporary
smellscapes and documented the provoked affects, emotions, and memories of these imagined as well as experienced places. This is set in a wider context to encourage a decolonized
kind of sensual geography that advocates to rethink and reframe the environmental understanding and, by extension, to reimagine relationships with the Arctic and its inhabitants.
Verena Traeger, University of Vienna
Krisenthemen in der bildenden Kunst Grönlands
Grönland hat auf seinem Weg von einer dänischen Kolonie zum selbstverwalteten Mitglied
im dänischen Königreich mit eigener Regierungsform die unterschiedlichsten sozialen Krisen
zu bewältigen. Die rapide gesellschaftliche Entwicklung ab dem Zweiten Weltkrieg von einer
reinen Jägerkultur zu einer modernen Wohlstandsgesellschaft hatte postkoloniale Traumata
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zur Folge, die bis heute nachwirken und seit den 1970ern auch in der bildenden Kunst Grönlands thematisiert wurden. Jessie Kleemann (geb. 1959), und Pia Arke (1958-2007) gehören
zu den Pionierinnen der kritischen künstlerischen Auseinandersetzung mit grönländischer
Realität als Produkt der dänisch-grönländischen Kolonialhistorie. Auch jüngere KünstlerInnen
wie Inuk Silis Høegh (geb 1972), der Grönlands Landesverteidigung, das über kein eigenständiges Heer verfügt, thematisierte oder Julie Edel Hardenberg (geb. 1971), die mit einer
wendbaren Zwangsjacke aus der dänischen und grönländischen Fahne Furore machte, bearbeiten in ihren aktuellen Arbeiten grönländische Identität, Kulturverlust und Sprachlosigkeit.
Ihre Radikalität bietet dabei neue Sehweisen und Zugänge.
Andreas Womelsdorf, University of Heidelberg
Vermittlung zwischen Welten – Artikulation von „Indigenität“ in Zeiten des Wandels.
Bemerkungen zum Computerspiel Never Alone (Kisima Innitchuna) 2014
Der Vortrag arbeitet die politische Bedeutung des Computerspiels Never Alone (Kisima Innitchuna 2014) als einer Artikulation von „Iñupiaq culture“ heraus, zuungunsten einer Auffassung, die das Computerspiel als Re-Präsentation vermeintlich vorgängigen „kulturellen Inventars“ betrachtet. Neben dem Aufweis der Strategien, die eine Einheitlichkeit der „Iñupiat“
erscheinen lassen, wird der Vortrag zeigen, dass Never Alone als Antwort auf Herausforderungen und Krisenerscheinungen (sub-)arktischer Gesellschaften betrachtet werden muss,
als Antwort auf Entfremdungsprozesse, die Erosion sozialer Strukturen, Umweltveränderungen und den Umgang mit Medien, wie Computer und Fernsehen. Die Untersuchung der
Funktionen der konstitutiven Differenz von „Tradition“ und „Moderne“ wird flankiert von einer
Analyse der spielmechanischen Eigenheit, im Zuge des straff strukturierten Spielablaufs dokumentarische Kurzfilme zu erspielen, die durch Darstellungen von Lebensweisen und Perspektiven der „Iñupiat“ nicht nur den Handlungsfaden transzendieren, sondern einen „kulturellen Horizont“ entwerfen und zugänglich machen. Welches sind die Ankerpunkte dieser
Artikulation von „Kultur“, „Krise“ und „Medium“?
Maria Nakhshina and Natalie Wahnsiedler, University of Aberdeen
Post-Soviet fishing kolkhozes as viable socio-economic enterprises
Fishing has been the main activity and source of income in rural areas of the White Sea
coast in the north-west of Russia. While perestroika and transition period have led to the dissolution of a large number of fishing collective farms, several kolkhozes have managed to
survive. They sustained local communities throughout the hard 1990s and early 2000s due to
the successful management of their large-scale trawling fleet. Kolkhozes support communities’ viability by providing jobs, paying taxes into local budget and directly sponsoring local
initiatives. Collective farms today perform roles similar to those during the Soviet period, as
they remain the centre of economic and social activity in the village. However, what used to
be enforced from above as part and parcel of the planned economy system is now to a large
extent an initiative from below. This paper looks at how tensions between continuity and
change, state legislation and informal arrangements, self-interest and concern for communal
wellbeing have come together to form a viable socio-economic enterprise.
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Malygina Natalia and Radovskikh Polina, Ural Federal University, Russia
Crisis of traditional economy of Taymyr peninsula indigenous people
Taimyr Peninsula is a huge region of 400 km², northernmost portion of East Siberia. Aborigines of Tymyr Peninsula Nganasans are the bearers of some elements of buolkollachsk culture. Enetz is a little group of indigenous people of Tymyr, Evenks, the youngest of indigenous people of Taimyr, Dolgans and a separate group of prieniseyskikh Nenets, took wild
hunting reindeer as a basic element of their culture. The modern industrial expansion on
Tymyr peninsula, an escalation of Arctic shelf oil-resources together with the quickly changing environment cause observable disruption on wild reindeer pastures and on wild reindeer
population that means a crisis of traditional economy of Taymyr indigenous people. Nowadays East Taymyr territory in some aspect of industrial development is empty. Supposed
development of gold deposits causes changing environmen and increases anthropogenic
pressure on this peninsula portion. Problems of ecological justice for animals, living beings
and living ecological systems, humans are eliminated by environmental, health, housing and
civil rights laws, research and educational activity, new strategy initiatives promotion, which
should be developed and advanced.
Leonie Schiffauer, University of Cambridge
Marketing hope: the promise of pyramid schemes in post-soviet Siberia
Pyramid schemes are booming in the Aga Buriat district in southeastern Siberia. Companies
attract people with the promise of getting rich and with a seemingly easy recipe of how to
fulfill their dreams of material wealth: One simply has to convince friends, relatives and acquaintances to join the schemes as well.
The schemes offer hope in times of economic crisis. Based on a year of PhD fieldwork my
paper zooms in on the rhetoric strategies employed by the companies’ charismatic leaders to
recruit new people. Their logics of argumentation draw on post-Soviet experiences of economic transformation and difficulties. Promoting themselves as guides and teachers in the
confusing world of business and finance they advertise the ‘unique opportunities’ of the
schemes. The ‘network industry’ is claimed to be an established and respected form of entrepreneurship in the West. People in Russia would still have to learn to think in terms of
maximal profitability in order to understand the business’ true potential. Such rhetoric suggests that the pyramids are not merely a local hype but that they must be understood as embedded within larger post-Soviet and global economic developments.
Joachim Otto Habeck, University of Hamburg
Touching a soft spot: indigenous livelihoods on permafrost
In the light of public debates on global warming, there is growing number of studies on permafrost degradation, thermokarst development (soil subsidence) and the threats they pose
for the stability of buildings and infrastructure in the Far North. Much less attention has been
paid, however, to the ways that permafrost dynamics provide the ground for various types of
indigenous land use, among them such unique examples as Sakha (Yakut) horse and cattle
breeding in the thermokarst landscapes of NE Siberia. This paper will exemplify the interaction of indigenous livelihoods and permafrost dynamics, addressing in particular how Sakha
pastoral practices and Soviet strategies of agricultural modernisation have modified the landscape at local and regional scale. It draws on recent anthropological research by Crate,
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Meszaros, and Takakura, to be complemented with the author's research data on regional
agricultural policies from the 1930s to the present. Under conditions of accelerated environmental change, the remarkable plasticity of the permafrost landscape leads to new concerns
about a "viable future" in this part of the Far North, along with new concepts of engagement
with the land.
Tobias Holzlehner, University of Halle-Wittenberg
A coast gone loneseome: the social archaeology of an imperial shatter zone
The native coastal population of Chukotka was subjected to a twofold loss in the 20th century: the large-scale, state induced and enforced closures of many native villages, the subsequent, resettlement of the population to centralized villages, and the following collapse of the
Soviet economy and infrastructure that further depopulated and isolated the region. Eurasia’s
easternmost region represents an imperial shatter zone (J. Scott), characterized and transformed by state making and collapse. The maritime landscape of Chukotka is a coast gone
lonesome. Prehistoric villages, abandoned border guard stations, blind lighthouses, former
Soviet whale processing plants, and contemporary hunting camps in old settlements remain.
The paper investigates the transformations of a coastline, whose intricate settlement history
traces back for thousands of years. As an ethnography in and of ruins, it attempts to explore
the relationships between people, settlements, economy and landscape through time. Notions of abandonment and nostalgia are situated in relation to place, while stories and strategies are examined how people come to terms with the ruins of a fragmented past.
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