Just found out from the local news that in the Novyi Urengoy hospital two Nenets elders survived covid-19 and recovered from pneumonia, at the age of more than 100 years! These elders are so tough! I have also had the honour of meeting quite many people over 100 years old in the tundra particularly during …
Category: Fieldwork
Covid-19 arrived in the Yamal tundra
It was probably a matter of time, but I thought until today 'how great that the tundra is still free of infections'. The reindeer herders strategy of avoiding dangerous places had worked pretty well since March. Using flexibly nomadic movements to avoid dangerous places has been a strategy among the Nenets for centuries, which has …
Ysyakh 2020 – solstice festival online
Midsummer, solstice on the 21 June is for many northern peoples and cultures an important holiday. In Finland it's called Juhannus and a state holiday. In Yakutia, where I am now, it's called Ysyakh, and considered the Sakha people's new year day. The 2020 celebrations obviously come in a very different format in comparison to …
Record early river-thaw in Siberia
The warm weather in Siberia seems to have led to an exceptionally early ice-thawing on Siberia's major rivers. The specific of the river geography here is that all the major rivers flow from south to north, into the Arctic Ocean. This means the ice melts in the south first, and then the water pushes into …
Sacred Site worshipping for good health in Corona times
Yamal has a legally protected sacred sites inventory: here, Angalskiy Mys Today in the morning I was just about to brew my breakfast coffee, when my friend Mikhail Okotetto called and told me "we need to go and feed the sacred site here, come along, right now". I had 5 minutes to grab my stuff …
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Evelyn Landerer, Siberia, story about procuring and shipping provisions.
Evelyn tells her story about getting ready to go to the forest, from the village of Teteya, Irkutskaya Oblast
Evelyn Landerer, fieldwork stories in German
Here are below in youtube Evelyn Landerer's fieldwork stories told during the Corona lockdown which started our idea of collecting stories on a platform. These stories are in German and with pictures.