A new book about Yukaghir people

Our anthropological team would like to congratulate Dr Cecilia Odé on her new book Life with the Yukaghir: North-East Siberia’s oldest tundra people. The book was published this summer in the Netherlands. Cecilia wrote it as a diary about her linguistic fieldwork trips to the far Northeast of Siberia.  In this book Cecilia Odé describes her field …

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Assessing damage to indigenous cultures by industrial development with maths?

I just read an interesting post by the Russian news agency TASS (in Russian) announcing proudly the launch of a new method for assessing damage to indigenous culture and livelihood during industrial development of the Arctic. Russian scholars in this field know that there has been long a discussion about how the only Russian law …

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Воспоминания коренных жителей Севера о национальных и вспомогательных школах-интернатах – Testimonies about boarding schools among indigenous people in Russia’s North

English text see below. Цель данной статьи – предоставить слово бывшим ученикам интернатов Севера России, с особенным упором на вспомогательных школах-интернатах советского периода, в народе приобретавшие печальное прозвище «дебилки». Материалы являются свидетельством событий с 1960-х по 1980-е годы. Я собирал эти материалы в проекте по устной истории в течение последних лет и решил опубликовать здесь …

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Exploring the Arctic at Venice International University

Scholars, indigenous activists and students from both sides of the Atlantic (or Pacific?) met at the small Venetian island of San Servolo from 14th to 19th of January 2018. I am reporting here as part of a group of three professors and five students from Russia who attended the international graduate seminar “Northern Territories and …

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Care, assimilation and revitalization in Deanuleahki, Sápmi

We have the pleasure to host at the anthropology team Annikki Herranen-Tabibi, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University. She is doing research on  kin-based forms of care, and the ecological and political context thereof, in Deanoleahki, Sápmi, and going to talk about her anthropological fieldwork plan, as well as answering any possible questions someone might …

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Women as guardians of Human Security in the Arctic?

11 September, talking about Human Security. Is that by coincidence or a slight hint at the terrible events in New York in 2001? It was not quite a usual group of people for a scholarly conference who had gathered in Helsinki in the Foreign Affairs Institute to explore security beyond armies, military and sovereignty questions. …

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Language contacts in the Arctic

August 31 is the deadline for paper submissions to a congress in Moscow. Judging from the keynote speakers, this should be also very interesting for us anthropologists, because it's not only about hard core linguistic studies, but very much about the cultural context in which speakers of different languages get into contact. Have a look …

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