Sibirica

Taking the practices of reindeer ear- and fur-marking in northern European Russia and Western Siberia as its primary focus, this article analyses modifications of informal “traditional” practices as a part of their appropriation by state institutions and highly bureaucratized state-owned enterprises. The practice of making and reading ear- and fur-marks is highly situated and workable only when embedded in a wider web of social communication. Analyzing three cases of the practice in formal institutions, we show that the modifications represent attempts to eliminate the situatedness and embeddedness of the practice. Some modifications can be explained by the attempt to extend the scope of the practice to the level of individuals, but this has made the practice unworkable without reference to special databases and is useless for reindeer herders.

This article focuses on informal road networks in remote Siberian communities: their connectivity and the relations between road owners and road users. These informal roads serve both as conduits and hindrances for local connectivities. Data was collected in the villages Vershina Khandy and Tokma of the Irkutsk region, and the study describes the variety of informal roads in the region: subsistence trails and tracks, inter-settlement roads, forest roads, and oil and gas service roads. Different actors participate in the expansion of the informal road network; our research demonstrates that communities accommodate new infrastructures and negotiate their mobility and connectivity informally according to their needs and desires under uneven power hierarchies. In conclusion, we discuss the possibilities and constraints that different groups of roads users experience because of the informal character of roads.

the young Polish anthropologist Stanisław Poniatowski undertook fieldwork in the Russian Far East in summer 1914. He collected almost five hundred various artifacts (objects, photographs, anthropometric measurement forms, etc.) and linguistic material from the local Nanai and Udege communities along the Amur River. The outbreak of World War I changed Poniatowski's plans and caused the separation (fragmentation) of his original collections, now housed at the Polish Ethnological Society in Wrocław, Poland and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC in the US. The article describes a new multistep effort to digitally “reunite” Poniatowski's collections and convert them into a cultural resource for researchers, museum specialists, and Indigenous communities for heritage and language preservation.

Nenets reindeer pastoralists of Yamal in the Russian Arctic, successfully deal with rapidly changing climate and natural gas industrialization. We present results from our long-term ethnographic study (2001–present) on the adaptive strategies that Nenets nomadic households have employed over time, their tradeoffs, inherent risks, and social implications of these strategies. While some strategies limit the adaptive flexibility of herding, they simultaneously enable agency that keeps Nenets households on the land—critical for maintaining their nomadism. Rapid climate change in the Arctic, which could lead to increased icing of pastures, makes reindeer herding more vulnerable. We examine meteorological data from Yamal to better understand the climatic trends challenging reindeer nomadism. Our analysis is relevant for policymakers through understanding Nenets adaptation and interactions with ecological processes and institutions.

Embracing Landscape: Living with Reindeer and Hunting among Spirits in South Siberia Selcen Küçüküstel (New York: Berghahn Books, 2021) 238 pp., ISBN 978-1-80073-062-5.