During fieldwork for our Arc Ark research project, I walk the street in Sakkyryr, the central village of the Eveno-Bytantay Ulus (District) of the Sakha Republic, Yakutia, East Siberia. I stop to take a picture of two beautiful white cows as they feed on something I can't quite identify, out on the street at minus …
Tag: Sakha Yakutia
Arctic Ark: new project on animal breeds, species and human practices in the Arctic
We are very happy to announce that we started working on a new project funded within the Finnish Academy's Arctic programme, called Arctic Ark. Human-animal adaptations to the Arctic environment: natural and folk selection practices (Arc-Ark) The Arctic is often seen as a biodiversity-poor region, where animal husbandry is solely based on herding of reindeer …
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Report from two workshops at the Arctic Science Summit Week in Helsinki
“Permafrost Dynamics and Indigenous Land Use” was the title of a two-day workshop at the Arctic Science Summit Week in Helsinki – which is still ongoing at the time of writing this post (5-11 April 2014). Organised by Joachim Otto Habeck and Hiroki Takakura, the workshop brought together scholars from different disciplines (from geosciences to …
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Fishing fieldwork, ORHELIA Arctic Yakutia
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 …
Finnish, Lithuanian and local resettlers in the 1940s to the Lena Delta
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 …
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Bykov Mys, fuzzy ethnic identities at the edge of an eroding Peninsula in the Arctic Ocean
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 …
New field site in East Siberia, Lena Delta and Tiksi
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 …
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Arctic Anthropology 