Sapiens 2021

This article is founded upon anthropological and longitudinal ethnographic investigations of culture and climate change in rural Indigenous Sakha villages of northeastern Siberia, Russia. It weaves together local historical and contemporary life history accounts with past and present scientific understandings of change in a part of the world where climate change, and particularly permafrost thaw, is transforming landscapes and lives. My approach is to challenge the hegemony of scientific knowledge and neoliberal “solutions” to climate change by bringing to light the importance of the depth and breadth of one culture’s knowledge system that is part of the multitude of ways of knowing on the planet, and the need to engage them all to move forward toward solutions. I argue that only if we integrate scientific knowledge with the Indigenous and local knowledges of the existential crisis of 21st century climate change will we understand our common plight and begin to find our way out.

Link to article here

Anthropology and Humanism 2022

In this article, I explore the relationship of Sakha, horse and cattle pastoralists of northeastern Siberia, and alaas, permafrost ecosystems that Sakha depend on for their subsistence. I show that this relationship is both physical and spiritual. In a time of climate change, alaas are changing due to the thawing permafrost, making them unusable for Sakha people. I argue that we must consider and accommodate the reverberations of such change for a people who are gradually losing a recognizable landscape central to their cultural identity. These questions are highly relevant for anthropologists working with the diversity of cultures challenged by similar “dislocations” from their known places, relevant environments, and core sources of their cultural identities. Such investigations are essential to effective global change research, revealing how engaging all relevant knowledge systems counters the hegemony of scientific knowledge and moves toward more equitable and just adaptation responses and policy prescriptions.

Download article here

Sibirica December 2021

This article explores how a community’s perceptions of a changing climate may shift over time, and the ways in which certain cultural predilections emerge in the process. Through replicating the same focus group method with Viliui Sakha in 2008 and again in 2018, the analysis reveals both continuity in cited changes as well as new emergent ones. Following this comparative exercise, the article further probes two culturally specific phenomena: how some inhabitants continue to attribute change to a long-disproven driver, de facto perpetuating a cultural myth, and how others expressed starkly contrasting perceptions of change. For both, the analysis reveals the importance of using a cultural framing founded in a people’s vernacular knowledge system with a focus on historical precedence for the former case, and on sacred beliefs for the latter.

Download article here

Anthropocene 2017

In a context of scientific and public debates on permafrost degradation under global climate change, this article provides an integrated review and analysis of environmental and socio-economic trends in a subarctic region. It focuses on Sakha (Yakut) animal husbandry as an example of indigenous land use. Within Sakha-Yakutia’s boreal forests, animal husbandry takes place in thermokarst depressions containing grassland areas (alaas) that formed in the early Holocene in a complex interplay of local geological conditions, climate changes, and permafrost dynamics. The current scale and speed of environmental change, along with shifting socio-economic processes, increasingly challenges Sakha’s adaptive capacity in use of alaas areas. The paper synthesizes information on the evolution of permafrost landscapes and on the local inhabitants’ and scientific knowledge. It also probes land-use prospects for the near future. The imminence of challenges for alaas ecosystems requires a holistic understanding between researchers and stakeholder communities, which in turn depends on a comprehensive assessment of the dynamic interaction of physical and social drivers of change.

Download here

Journal of Ethnobiology 2019

Sakha, a Turkic-speaking people of northeastern Siberia, Russia, practice a circle dance called ohuokhai that is fueled by improvisatory song. Although it is typically bracketed by regular introductory and closing stanzas, its improvisatory middle is a communicative forum for the lead singer to report, critique, and prophesize on issues relevant to the dancers she/he leads. In Soviet times, this middle section often contained expressions of discontent masked by the linguistic complexity of the Sakha language compared to Russian. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the improvisatory texts speak to issues of the environmental crises resulting from the Soviet period and of the increasingly obvious effects of climate change on local lands, ecosystems, and Sakhas’ horse and cattle breeding subsistence economy. In this article, I discuss my personal experience with ohuokhai and how it first drew me to work with Viliui Sakha, Sakha living adjacent to the Viliui river and with whom I have collaborated since 1991. My early findings detailed the circle dance’s role in Sakha culture and the power it maintained through the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In this article, I build upon the cultural and historical background I established in my previous research to highlight how ohuokhai can also be considered a perpetuator of biocultural knowledge for the Viliui Sakha. The longitudinal arc of my work with Sakha brings new understandings to ohuokhai, its ethnobiological threads, and its crucial role in transmitting biocultural heritage over generations.

Download article here

From 2017-2019 I participated as a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC). Below I provide a link to Chapter one of the report— although our entire team worked on the chapter together, the sections I focused my contribution on are within ‘Knowledge Systems for Understanding and Responding to Change‘, specifically pp 102-105. This includes: 1.8.2 Indigenous Knowledge and Local Knowledge; 1.8.3 The Role of Knowledge in People’s Responses to Climate, Ocean and Cryosphere Change; and Cross-Chapter Box 4: Indigenous Knowledge and Local Knowledge in Ocean and Cryosphere Change.

Download chapter here

Practicing Anthropology 2019

In 2019 I edited a special issue of Practicing Anthropology focused on ‘Storying Climate Change.’ Herein I asked anthropologists who were engaging narrative and story in an effort to communicate climate change more effectively in their field site, academic institution, public sphere, etc.

Download articles here

Current History 2017

Northern Russia is a vast and diverse territory, both ecologically and culturally. Especially when considering the largest part of this region, Siberia, many people envision a white frozen land, empty save for the gulag. To the contrary, it is a patchwork of arctic and subarctic ecosystems that represent a sampling of most world regions in the same latitude. The second point to keep in mind as we explore climate change adaptation in the Russian north is that because of the cultural and linguistic diversity of the area—and given the history of colonization, Sovietization, and its undoing—how groups adapt is similarly diverse and complex. As diverse as this area is, one feature is shared across most of its expanse: permafrost, the permanently frozen layer that lies beneath the soil surface and provides the foundation for the landscape. Permafrost also has a critical role in water circulation and overall ecosystem health. The extreme continental climate (with annual temperature variation of over 100 degrees Celsius in many places) has made its home complete and sustainable, in ecological terms, by fostering the intricate workings of permafrost.

Download article here

Sibirica 2014

Using longitudinal ethnographic material, anthropologists are skilled to discern how change, in its many forms, interacts with the livelihoods of affected communities. Furthermore, multi-sited ethnography can show how local change is both a result of global to local phenomena and of origins affecting similar local contexts. Ethnographic material is therefore critical to interdisciplinary understandings of change. Through case study in native villages in northeastern Siberia, Russia, this article argues for ethnography’s unique capacity to understand change. In addition, it argues for ethnography’s much-needed contribution in interdisciplinary efforts to account for attributes of global change both highly local and human.

Download article here

Arctic 2013

with Alexander Fedorov, This paper analyzes findings from “Knowledge Exchanges,” which engaged communities of Viliui Sakha, native horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia, Russia, with regional scientific specialists, a cultural anthropologist, and a permafrost scientist. Our process of knowledge exchange involved first gathering ethnographic data from affected communities, through focus groups, interviews, and surveys, and analyzing how people perceived, understood, and responded to local change. Next we documented the community results and compared them with regional climate change data. Lastly, we discussed these results during community knowledge exchange events, facilitating an increased understanding across knowledge systems and stakeholder groups. The knowledge exchange method documented in this article provides an adaptable model for integrating local and scientific knowledge systems that allows participants to reach understanding more quickly at global and local levels of how climate change is affecting places and peoples.

Download article here

Polar Journal 2012

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 hay!elds 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 !shing practices, and the like. In Labrador/Nunatsiavut, the main ice form is sea ice, to support various forms of sea mammal and !sh harvest, with snow and ice critical also as a means of land transport, hunting and !shing. 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.

Download article here

Annual Review of Anthropology 2011

This review provides an overview of foundational climate and culture studies in anthropology; it then tracks developments in this area to date to include anthropological engagements with contemporary global climate change. Although early climate and culture studies were mainly founded in archaeology and environmental anthropology, with the advent of climate change, anthropology’s roles have expanded to engage local to global contexts. Considering both the unprecedented urgency and the new level of reflexivity that climate change ushers in, anthropologists need to adopt cross-scale, multistakeholder, and interdisciplinary approaches in research and practice. I argue for one mode that anthropologists should pursue—the development of critical collaborative, multisited ethnography, which I term “climate ethnography.”

Download article here

Worldviews 2013

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, Turkicspeaking 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.

Download article here

Nature and Culture 2012

with Timothy Leduc This article is concerned with the way in which indigenous place-based knowledge and understandings, in a time of global climate change, have the potential to challenge researchers to self-reflexively shift the focus of their research toward those technological and consumer practices that are the cultural context of our research. After reviewing some literature on the emergence of self-reflexivity in research, the authors offer two case studies from their respective environmental education and anthropological research with northern indigenous cultures that clarifies the nature of a self-reflexive turn in place-based climate research and education. The global interconnections between northern warming and consumer culture—and its relation to ever-expanding technological systems—are considered by following the critical insights of place-based knowledge. We conclude by examining the possibility that relocalizing our research, teaching, and ways of living in consumer culture are central to a sustainable future, and if so, the knowledge and understandings of current place-based peoples will be vital to envisioning such a cultural transformation of our globalizing system.

Download article here

Weather, Climate and Society 2011

This 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 researchers and policymakers can play in adaptation, this move to understanding and integrating a population’s shifting perceptions—in this case, of water in mind—into research is fundamental.

Download article here

Current Anthropology 2008

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.

Download article here

Human Ecology 2008

Contemporary rural Viliui Sakha of northeastern Siberia, Russia, are a Turkicspeaking people practicing horse and cattle breeding in the subarctic. This article details their story of survival in the north as one not only of adapting a southern subsistence to an extreme climate but also to the effects of Russian colonization, Soviet collectivization, and post-Soviet decentralization. In the post-Soviet period a majority of rural Viliu Sakha adapted to the loss of a centralized agro-industrial state farm system by developing a smallholder food production system relying on cattle husbandry supplemented with other subsistence sources including fish, game, forage, other domesticates, and garden products. In the twenty-first century, this “cows-and-kin” system represents a resilient smallholder adaptation based on reviving pre-Soviet production knowledge, recalling ecological knowledge, and relying on kin. The article concludes with a discussion of the future of cows-and-kin by exploring issues of alienated youth, accessing land and the overwhelming concern of inhabitants about the local effects of global climate change.

Download article here

Human Ecology Review 2008

This article examines the spiritual and utilitarian values of sacred practices related to cow care among rural Sakha of northeastern Siberia, Russia. Founded upon a pre-Soviet animistic belief system, sacred practices relating to cows are not only important to post-Soviet Sakha identity and ethnic revival but also may make a difference in the productivity of a herd and in maintaining social cohesion within households and village communities in a period of continued socio-economic and moral decline. The article also draws parallels with the importance of reinstating the sacred in human-animal relationships globally.

Download article here

IJARGE 2007

In the wake of communism’s fall, the majority of rural Russia’s inhabitants were left without the state farm agricultural infrastructure that fed and employed them. Most adapted by innovating to create new forms that combined pre-Soviet subsistence practices with contemporary modes. This paper explores one group’s innovation, ‘cows-and-kin’. Viliui Sakha, the highest latitude horse and cattle breeders in contemporary times, inhabit western Sakha, northeastern Siberia, Russia. Their cows-and-kin innovation is based on household-level cow keeping with interdependence of kin households. In addition to describing this post-soviet community-level innovation, this paper also explores relevant issues about the capacity for continued innovation such as: (1) what is the future of the cows-and-kin innovation, considering that many youth are out-migrating from the rural villages? (2) how is the cows-and-kin innovation affected by the forces of globalisation and modernity? and lastly (3) how can the cows-and-kin innovation face the challenges posed by rapid climate change?

Download article here

Arctic 2006

Download article here

Arctic Anthropology 2006

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.

Download article here

Journal of American Folklore 2006

This article explores the forms and functions of Sakhas' ohuokhai circle dance. Historically,Sakha are Turkic-speaking agropastoralists inhabiting the subarctic Sakha Republic of Russia. Originating as the opening communal prayer during Sakhas' yhyakh festival, ohuokhai has both maintained an original sacred function and, over time, assumed others. This article defines ohuokhai origins and its evolving functions through the pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet times and reveals that, despite continuing post-Soviet threats, ohuokhai continues because of the commitment and initiative of Vilili Sakha inhabitants.

Download article here

Human Ecology 2003

The Sakha of northeastern Siberia, Russia, are the highest latitude contemporary agropastoralists practicing horse and cattle husbandry. In the last 100 years their rural livelihood has gone from household-level subsistence food production in clan clusters of single-family homesteads scattered across the landscape, to village-level state agribusiness farm production in compact settlements dependent on Soviet socialist infrastructure, to the present day post-socialist reliance on household-level subsistence food production. This paper explores how Viliui Sakha are adapting in the post-Soviet context. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the concomitant dissolution of the centralized state farm system, rural inhabitants have developed household and inter-household food production capacities based on keeping cows and relying on exchange among kin. One of the basic tenets of Robert Netting’s smallholder–householder theory is that in times of change, the household system is the most resilient subsistence production unit because of specific qualities including intimate ecological knowledge and implicit labor contracts. This research shows in what ways Netting’s householder theory applies for subarctic agropastoralists.

Download article here

Europe-Asia Studies 2003

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.

Download article here

Polar Geography 2002

A specialist on the Vilyuy Sakha, a native non-Russian people of northeastern Siberia, Russia, examines the public health and environmental challenges threatening the livelihood of the group. The paper presents a case study of political activism among the Vilyuy Sakha in the immediate post-Soviet period, as regional citizens were able to gain access to information on the pollution caused by diamond mining and other forms of industrial development. The demand for public health and environmental information, and mobilization against proposals for new mine development, emerged rapidly during the post-Soviet period, but disappeared almost as suddenly in the late 1990s. This paper explores the reasons for the disappearance of this evolving citizens’ environmental movement, arguing that a major cause was co-option by elite diamond interests.

Download article here

Arctic Anthropology 2002

Download article here

coming soon

coming soon

coming soon

coming soon