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
From Tiksi you go another 50 km by motor boat to the village of Cape Bykov (Bykov Mys), where 500 people engage at 72 degrees northern latitude and harsh climate engage in coastal fishing all over the Lena River Delta. Today the only still remaining proper kolkhoz (cooperative enterprise) in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) is …
Until last year it used to be very easy to get to this fieldsite in the Lena River Delta, because direct flights from Moscow brought you to Tiksi in 6 hours. But last year the Russian army who used to run the airbase in Tiksi closed it, and shipped out all the security equipment, so …
Continue reading New field site in East Siberia, Lena Delta and Tiksi
