Inuit Innovation: grassroots hydropower green transition among sheep farmers

by Florian Stammler, Asiarpa Paviasen and Tupaarnaq Kreutzmann-Kleist What connects dams, hydropower, green energy, agriculture, sheep farming and Inuit in Greenland? in the front the water supply pipe leading to the tiny turbine house of the micro-hydropower plant supplying two sheep farms in South Greenland Inuit are better known in the popular and anthropological literature …

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Fieldwork literally: the stony path of working in the field

Some may remember our entry here with Erik Kielsen about the disastrous early snowfall and freezing event in South Greenland in late 2023. This summer fieldwork in the WIRE project there is on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of modern Inuit animal husbandry, and I am hosted at the Qorlortup Itinnera sheep farm, which …

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Fieldnotes returning to the field: Tim Ingold and the Skolt Sámi

Those of our readers who read Finnish may have seen this already, but this event may be of some wider relevance: https://www.ulapland.fi/events/Antropologi-Tim-Ingoldin-kenttamuistiinpanojen-luovutustilaisuus-Sevettijarven-koululla-/1980/ce07e180-f03c-44f9-9533-c3ddfa59d2f1 Tim Ingold returns his fieldnotes from the early 1970s back to the archive of the Skolt Sámi, who were resettled from the Petsamo area in Murmansk Oblast in the 1940s to the Sevettijärvi …

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Extreme Arctic weather impacts for animal husbandry

Florian Stammler and Erik Kielsen Much has been written already about the losses of reindeer due to icing-over, or rain on snow events, among reindeer herders in Siberia and elsewhere. The climate seasonality is changing and this comes with its challenges in the Arctic for humans and animals alike. For example, in our research site …

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Generation & gender change in reindeer herding – opportunities in Lapland

Congratulations to our research partners from the Sattasniemi Paliskunta in Lapland for their young empowering activism, which is now increasingly noticed also by journalists (see below). Great to have seen a lot of young female herders involved at the Sattasniemi calf marking in early summer 2023 Having started working there this year in two projects …

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Khanty fishing in the Ob’ River system, West Siberia, 6 Sep 2023 Rovaniemi talk by Yuka Oishi

In the current situation we do not get any more new research evidence from our Siberian field sites, unfortunately. Nonetheless Siberia remains THE place in the Arctic where human cultural diversity, a multiplicity of livelihood, languages, subsistence strategies and mobilities remains best preserved. One very interesting case are the Khanty in West Siberia, who have …

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East Finnmark – interethnic borderland now and then

A Russian vessel named "Saami" in a Norwegian wharf in Kirkenes in June 2023: the borderland reality on the ground continues as a lived experience even at times of political conflict A recent trip to Kirkenes and the surroundings was really revealing in many ways. Of course for someone who has worked most of the …

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