Susan A. Crate

Gone the Bull of Winter? Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology's Role(s) in Global Climate Change

Because global climate change is intimately linked to culture, anthropologists are strategically wellplaced to interpret it, communicate information about it, and act in response to it both in the field and at home. Fieldworkers are increasingly encountering reports of the local effects of climate change from their research partners, and it is becoming apparent that indigenous peoples’ recognized capacity for adaptation to change may not be sufficient to cope with these effects. Fieldwork among Viliui Sakha of northeastern Siberia suggests an action-oriented approach to anthropological climate change research that begins by developing cultural models of the local effects of global climate change, goes on to fill in the gaps with Western scientific knowledge, and ends with the dissemination of that information and its use for the development of adaptive strategies, policy recommendations, and advocacy. In the summer of 2003, well into my second decade of study and research with rural Viliui Sakha, native horse and cattle breeders inhabiting the Viliui regions of northeastern Siberia, I heard my research partners’ first testimonies to the local effects of global climate change. 1 Since that time, Sakha have continued to speak about the “softening” 2 of the climate and the increasing summer precipitation, factors that are affecting their ability to maneuver the brief window of summer to harvest enough hay to sustain their herds through the winter. Concomitantly, I realized that other field researchers, most notably anthropologists, are also encountering the issues of global climate change with their research partners. Although many of us are versed in the frames of adaptive capacity and resilience, we have begun to doubt that such coping mechanisms are sufficient to deal with the effects of global climate change. We realize that environmental and cultural change far beyond the reach of restoration is occurring. We find ourselves in a state of emergency as field researchers and are confronted with an ethical and a moral issue, and a number of questions related to our age-old struggle as academics to reconcile anthropology’s applied, public, and activist roots (Lassiter 2005, 84). We ask what our proper responses and responsibilities to our research partners are in these revelations. How do we translate, advocate, educate, and

A Political Ecology of “Water in Mind”: Attributing Perceptions in the Era of Global Climate Change

AbstractThis article explores how researchers can apply social science methods and theoretical frames to capture how place-based communities are perceiving and responding to the immediate effects of global climate change. The study focuses on research with Viliui Sakha—native horse and cattle breeders of northeastern Siberia, Russia, who are increasingly challenged by one of global climate change’s most prevalent effects: altered water regimes. By applying the theoretical framework of political ecology, the article shows how researchers can better understand how affected peoples have, in this case, “water in mind” via their histories, cosmologies, and management practices of water. Such awareness can inform research activities and findings, facilitate effective adaptation, and, ultimately, affect policy. Given the widespread emphasis on adaptation, including the urgent need for, increasing interest in, and funding support for transdisciplinary research projects on adaptation, and the facilitative role res...

Elder Knowledge and Sustainable Livelihoods in Post-Soviet Russia: Finding Dialogue across the Generations

Russia’s indigenous peoples have been struggling with economic, environmental, and socio-cultural dislocation since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In northern rural areas, the end of the Soviet Union most often meant the end of agro-industrial state farm operations that employed and fed surrounding rural populations. Most communities adapted to this loss by reinstating some form of pre-Soviet household-level food production based on hunting, fishing, and/or herding. However, mass media, globalization, and modernity challenge the intergenerational knowledge exchange that grounds subsistence practices. Parts of the circumpolar north have been relatively successful in valuing and integrating elder knowledge within their communities. This has not been the case in Russia. This article presents results of an elder knowledge project in northeast Siberia, Russia that shows how rural communities can both document and use elder knowledge to bolster local definitions of sustainability and, at the same time, initiate new modes of communication between village youth and elders.

The Great Divide: Contested Issues of Post-Soviet Viliui Sakha Land Use

THE MAIN OBJECTIVE OF THIS ARTICLE is to inform the larger discourse on post-Soviet property rights by discussing the land issues of agropastoralist Viliui Sakha, a Turkic-speaking people of northeastern Russia. I argue that Viliui Sakha are struggling to find a place in the drastically changed post-privatisation context not by accessing land through the official allocations made after state farms were dissolved but by pooling land with kin in their home and adjacent villages. I begin with an overview of Viliui Sakha subsistence and land use from pre-Soviet to Soviet and now to post-Soviet times. I next describe how local actors decided the post-Soviet land allocations of the Elgeeii state farm sector when that farm disbanded. I then illustrate with case studies the three central Sakha modes of post-Soviet food production: the private household, the kin-based smaller baahynai khahaaiystyba (S.–peasant farming operation) 1 (hereafter BKh) and the larger BKh .I conclude by explaining how a return to ancestral lands or the sale of land would actually work to disadvantage most inhabitants and that perhaps there is hope in new laws to encourage collective or common property land regimes, depending on how they are translated on a local level. 2 Two moments come to mind as I reflect on the local land issues of Viliui Sakha villages. The first was on 13 April 1993, when, at 9 a.m., as I sat down to tea with my host family, the Petrovs, the Elgeeii village land specialist knocked at our door. He came to speak with Kolya, the Petrov’s eldest son, to solicit his help in dividing up the Kuol Elgeen fields, one of the former state farm tracts adjacent to the village centre, into hay allotments for village households. The village administration wanted Kolya to oversee the allotting because ‘everyone trusted him’. We reached the Kuol Elgeen fields at 10 a.m. to find a gathering of inhabitants standing ready to stake out their 1.5-hectare claims. Kolya, the land specialist and the household members worked diligently to measure and stake out the plots. I later learned that this was one of the final former state farm areas to be divided up as pai (R.—shares) into household allotments for hay to fodder privately and collectively owned cattle and horses. What struck me was the sense of desperation as the inhabitants vied for Kolya’s attention to give them the biggest and best plots. The second moment was a few months later, during the summer haying season, in which I was participating as a fictive member of Kolya’s extended family. We had already cut, stacked and secured the hay from the various plots his kin group uses

Climate change and ice dependent communities: perspectives from Siberia and Labrador

This article explores the shifting dynamics of the utility of ice and snow in rural settlements of two areas of the Arctic, northeastern Siberia, Russia, and Labrador/Nunatsiavut, Canada. In both areas, inhabitants, to a greater or lesser degree, continue historically based subsistence practices that depend on ice and snow. In northeastern Siberia, the main ice form is permafrost, which is the foundation of the hayfields that people depend on to support their practices of breeding horses and cattle. Snow and ice are also critical for horse herds, transportation, food preservation, hunting and fishing practices, and the like. In Labrador/Nunatsiavut, the main ice form is sea ice, to support various forms of sea mammal and fish harvest, with snow and ice critical also as a means of land transport, hunting and fishing. With the advent of global climate change, snow and ice are increasingly less dependable and predictable and, in some cases, absent. Many inhabitants continue historically based subsistence practices but with increased effort and cost, the latter due to the increased amount of fuel and other transport needed to access resources. However critical to subsistence these ice and snow conditions are, they remain subservient to the more immediate threats to local communities – increasing economic uncertainty and a disinterested or absent youth not taking up the local subsistence ways. I argue that despite the perceived less urgent status of the changing snow and ice continuum, there is much at stake in the loss of the physical context and the local understandings that underpin historically based ice/snow dependent practices.

The Russian North in Circumpolar Context

Russia is the worlds largest Arctic country and since the break up of the Soviet Union has become an even more decidedly northern country, with almost all of its territories lying to the latitudes north of the conterminous United States. Although Russia shares similar concerns with its Arctic neighbors related to environmental change and sustainable development, the country is undergoing a geopolitical transition and is having to deal with environmental challenges not experienced elsewhere in the Arctic. Civil society is facing a traumatic transformation and the living conditions and rights of indigenous peoples in the Russian North and Far East are nowhere near the levels achieved in other Arctic nations. This article provides an introduction to the place of the Russian North within the context of the Circumpolar North, and sets the scene for the papers that follow in this special issue of Polar Geography.

Water, Water Everywhere: Perceptions of Chaotic Water Regimes in Northeastern Siberia, Russia

This paper explores applied anthropological research examining perceptions, understandings and responses to increasing water on the land, one of the major effects of global climate change for native Viliui Sakha agropastoralist communities of northeastern Siberia, Russia. The paper draws on fieldwork investigating perceptions, understandings and responses to the local effects of global climate change for native Viliui Sakha agropastoralist communities of northeastern Siberia, Russia. For Viliui Sakha, global climate change translates locally into a highly altered climate system and water regime. 2008 fieldwork shows Inhabitants observing warmer winters, increased snowfall, excessive precipitation, changed seasonality, and the transformation of their ancestral landscape due to increased water on the land and degrading permafrost. One urgent change is how the increased water on the land is turning hayfields into lakes, inundating households and ruining transportation networks. The increasing water on the land interferes with subsistence and threatens to undermine settlement. Beyond these physical changes, what does the increased water on the land mean to Viliui Sakha? Inhabitants expressed not only concern about their future but also common fear that they would ‘go under water.’ Water has visceral meaning to Sakha, based on their historically-based belief system, their adaptation to their environment, and knowledge system. In response, 2009 field research looked in more depth at communities’ perceptions of water, and worked to bring those perceptions and beliefs into our 2010 knowledge exchange exercise. This paper will present our initial findings and make suggestions on how these findings can be understood more broadly for other peoples unprecedentedly affected by water crises in the face of global climate change.

Beginnings of a Rural Sustainability Paradigm: The Arctic as Case in Point

Developing sociocultural, economic, and environmental strategies for sustainability is a major challenge facing the world’s rural and urban populations alike. Rural areas lag severely behind their urban counterparts in addressing sustainability milestones yet, as nexuses of biological, cultural and ethnic diversity, they play a crucial role in planetary sustainability. Therefore, there is great need for rigorous research with rural communities to define issues, exchange necessary knowledge and synthesize nascent initiatives exploring rural sustainability. This paper lays a framework for one possible research approach by reflecting on insights from a comparative case, involving long-term research in two arctic contexts: Viliui Sakha settlements of northeastern Siberia, Russia and Nunatsiavut settlements in Labrador Canada. Despite their location on opposite sides of the Arctic, communities in both regions struggle with contemporary issues of a changing climate, an unpredictable economic basis, outmigration of their young people to the urban areas and issues of environmental contamination from past and projected resource extraction.

Towards Imagining the Big Picture and the Finer Details: Exploring Global Applications of a Local and Scientific Knowledge Exchange Methodology

Local knowledge informs scientific and applied understandings (development, climate change adaptation, etc.) by showing the diversity of ways in which global phenomena are affecting local cultures and ecosystems. However, is there similar value for affected communities? Can global understandings inform local knowledge and, furthermore, can the two knowledge systems inform each other? If so, what could be a model of such knowledge exchange and is there a performative context to bring about such informing? This chapter argues yes, based on a series of successful knowledge exchanges conducted in northeastern Siberia in 2010. The chapter takes this process to the next step, to explore how a model for such knowledge exchanges could potentially be adapted to several different world contexts. The chapter begins with an overview of why such exchanges are important in our twenty-first century world and how the method was developed in the Siberian case. It then discusses relevant results, before moving to explore the ways in which the model could inform other world contexts, using cases from Labrador, Canada and Chesapeake Bay, Maryland.

From Living Water to the “Water of Death”: Implicating Social Resilience in Northeastern Siberia

Rural inhabitants of the Arctic sustain their way of life via refined adaptations to the extreme climate of the North, and subsequent generations continue to adapt. Viliui Sakha, Turkic-speaking horse and cattle breeders of northeastern Siberia, Russia, have been successful through their ancestral adaptations to local water access, in both a solid and liquid state, at specific times and in specific amounts. Viliui Sakha’s activities to access and utilize water are grounded in a belief system where water is spirit-filled, gives life, and can interplay with death. In the context of contemporary global climate change, water’s solid-liquid balance is disrupted by changing seasonal patterns, altered precipitation regimes, and an overall “softening” of the extreme annual temperature range. Inhabitants are finding ways to adapt but at increasing labor and resource costs. In this paper, I analyze Viliui Sakha’s adaptations to altered water regimes on both the physical and cosmological levels to grasp how water is understood in Sakha’s belief system as the water of life, how it becomes “the water of death,” and the implications for social resilience.