Anna Stammler-Gossmann Soviet spirit My next stop in the Svalbard archipelago is the tiny Russian settlement of Barentsburg. How many people are living here is hard to say. The number of residents may change by the end of June and August, when an airplane from Moscow lands in Longyearbyen airport. It may bring 100 workers …
Continue reading Barentsburg: Place names (Svalbard fieldwork, June 2013)
Anna Stammler-Gossmann Diversified community. Everybody here is an outsider, but as my conversation partner in the most popular café tells me, ‘there are still status values: how long have you been living here? How far did you go? Maybe it is also about your polar bear story’. She knows everyone in the café (tourists excluded): …
Anna Stammler-Gossmann Polar bear and community of Longyearbyen Of course, the polar bear is the most prominent animal symbol of Svalbard. Once an animal is charged with this representational status, it means, as Franklin states, that every positive act towards it simultaneously endorses the nation or group that it represents (Franklin, A. 2006. Animal Nation: …
Continue reading Arctic anthropology of Arctic biology (Svalbard fieldwork, June 2013)
Anna Stammler-Gossmann The Arctic as a place to live Svalbard is a place where everything is the northernmost – municipality, hotels, hospital, schools, kinder gardens, church and pubs. In Longyearbyen (the administrative center of Svalbard) there even is the northernmost sushi restaurant and kebab stand, which opened up here recently. On the wall of a …
Continue reading Everything is northernmost here (Svalbard fieldwork, June 2013)
My last summer entry from this Yakutia fieldwork finally brings me to the fieldwork PRACTICE there with the inhabitants of the Lena Delta and coastal area in Yakutia. As some of you may know, one of our crucial methodological approaches in the ORHELIA project is to marry intensive life-history interviewing with anthropological participant observation, which …
(text by Terhi Vuojala-Magga, photos Stephan Dudeck) Visiting Terhi in Kuttura was an adventure, once again – and meeting Stephan was a joy, once again (or Steppa, as we call him, in a more familiar way). We don‘t know how much anthropology plays a role in our lives, or the other way around, are we …
Continue reading From the Gold Road to the Golden River of Ivalo and its People (June 2013)
Today I continue fieldwork reports from the ORHELIA fieldwork in the Lena Delta in cooperation with Yakutsk University (NEFU). During our first walk through the village of Bykov Mys we found out about the great proud but also sad history in Soviet times. Completely unexpected for us was the news of extensive Finnish resettlement to …
Continue reading Finnish, Lithuanian and local resettlers in the 1940s to the Lena Delta
Arctic Anthropology 