Paper short abstract:

The Amur River region's locals were close to the local wildlife. Their attitude to a bear and a tiger acquired both sacred form and became a part of hunting ethics, according to which, man and a beast were equals. These parity relations expressed in contesting territories with each other.

Paper long abstract:

Studies the Amur River region's locals show that their vital activity depended on taiga environment. Like all fishing and hunting peoples, the native population was close to the local wildlife, which was a source of food and raw material, and danger for it. The local population's mythological consciousness endowed predators, like as a bear and a tiger, with the status of first ancestors, patrons of taiga, and personifications of evil spirits. The human attitude to predators has acquired not only a sacred form, but also became a part of hunting ethics, according to which, man and a beast acted in hunting as equals, not taking away prey from each other. These parity relations indicate a coexistence of human and wild animal with a similar behavioral repertoire. The main factors uniting man and animal were vital needs, ensuring reproduction and security, which are manifested in the territory control and marking. For settling and hunting the Amur indigenous peoples chose places out the areas of predators. People left their settlement, considering it as damn (susu), if came across a tiger or a bear inside. Contesting for territories with predators became significant events for the Amur fishers and hunters, reflected in their vocabulary. In the Nanai, Oroch, Udege, Nivkh, Ulchi languages, there are group of terms denoting the age and gender gradation of predators that emphasizes their significant role (as actors) in the natural-social communication of the Lower Amur Region.

Paper short abstract:

The paper compares the patterns of production and maintenance of science-based knowledge in two organizational settings - Narim Selection Station and Kolpashevo Airport in Western Siberia. It outlines the evolution of these patterns during the USSR and their evolution in post-soviet period.

Paper long abstract:

The paper compares the patterns of science-based knowledge in two different organizational settings - Narim Selection Station and Kolpashevo Airport in Western Siberia. It outlines the establishment and maintenance of these patterns during the decades of USSR and post-soviet period. Applying a modified version of actor-network theory (Tchalakov 2014), it considers the knowledge production through the categories of persistence and endurance of human actors in the heterogeneous scientific and engineering (micro)communities. In particular it considers 1) the establishment of Kolpashevo Airport and the small local airfields attached to it, and 2) the Narim Selection Station as a 'forms of life", where the science-based knowledge is produced, maintained and transmitted in the local communities, thus interacting and transforming their adherent everyday knowledge. In the first case it traces the types of (science-based) knowledge that mediated the smooth functioning of the set of local (village) airfields affiliated to the Kolpashevo airport - engineering, radio-communications and navigation, meteorology and how they became part of the everyday life of local communities. Similarly, it outlines how the unique science practices in creating new varieties of crops suitable for artic climate have been embedded in the local practices of Soviet and post-sovied farming and became part of their everyday life. The importance of the preservation of the organizational context of knowledge production and maintenance is pointed out, evidenced by the differences in the evolution of the two knowledge context after the closure of Kolpashevo Airport early this century and continuous existence of Narim selection station.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation summarises the principal author's findings done withing the fieldwork of 2018-2019 concerning public and academic discourse, emerging in connection with upcoming building the 'Krapivinski' hydroelectric power station in the middle stream of the Tom River (Western Siberia).

Paper long abstract:

This research paper presents some author's findings and data gathered within the fieldwork of 2018-2019 in the Kemerovo region (so-called 'Kuzbass'), Russian Federation. The materials presented in this paper are focused on studying the current multi-sided and socially sharp discourse of one of the most economically important infrastructural project in Western Siberia - the project of 'Krapivinski' hydroelectric power station building in the middle stream of the Tom River. The narratives of public and academic discussions on the different aspects of the possible hydraulic structure construction consequences characterized through the lens of the concept of performative languages and practices, typical for key discourse actors such as scientists (hydrologists, geologists, ecologists, social scientists, etc. ), local and regional communities, authorities and industrial corporation representatives, engineers and technical specialists. The paper contains a summary of interviews with representatives of all of these stakeholders illustrating, in general, the variety of group self-determination and motivations in a broad context of not only the given infrastructural project in the hydroelectric power sphere but in terms of socio-economic development as such.

The data presented in this research paper also seems to be illustrative for analyzing the issues of how the knowledge about the river, its role in the landscape, climate change, and local communities' life is being constructed and shared within the frameworks of complex and multidimensional discourses.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation summarises outcomes of the author's studies of performative cultures, determining the interactions between extractive (coal minng) companies and local groups of indigenous peoples in Kemerovo region of Russia (co-called 'Kuzbass') obtained in the fieldworks of 2017 - 2019.

Paper long abstract:

The paper considers the issues of performative cultures and practices that exist in the discursive space of every-day interaction between extractive corporations from the one hand, as well as the local communities being under the pressure of subsoil resources extraction - from another. On the basis of long-standing observation of how such an interaction is affected in many aspects by the grounded cultural patterns, symbols, self-determinating issues, and corresponding practices primordially immanent for both interacted collective actors, the author's analyzing all of these in conection to the concept of performative culture and its role in the discourses of issues of nonrenewable resources extraction, and resource rent distribution. There the key author's findings demonstrate that the great part of local interactions in the regions of exstensive subsoil resources extraction among the extractive companies and locals are performatively determined by different cultures of these two collective actors. Thus, the communities of resource miners are exactly intend to operate in accordance with the cultural pattern of extractivism and have in mind correspondent ethics, norms, etc based on the values of classic industrial society. Anytime such values, behaviors, and norms come into the contradiction with the traditional ethic and norms of indigenous communities, and this is often the ground for social conflicts emerging.

The second of the concepts used in this research is the actor-network theory in that its part connected with characterizing the intergroup communication in terms of a specific knowledge co-production, and conjugation of local communities and extractive corporations lifeworlds.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how environmental instabilities actualise ways of knowing among scientists and farmers in Costa Rica. Can a nation-wide plan to 'decarbonise' the agricultural sector make way for new forms of techno-science-society interactions?

Paper long abstract:

Environmental instabilities and notions of ecological alterations are challenging scientists and non-scientists to think anew about what they know about "natural" environments. Although its causes were complex, the coffee rust epidemic in Central America in 2012-2013 which caused massive yield losses, is one example of such instabilities.

During fieldwork in Costa Rica, I found that in dealings with coffee rust, small-scale coffee farmers increasingly combined experiential and technique-based knowledge with chemical products and tools developed by science compared to before the epidemic. In a similar manner, agronomists relied on both technological tools and technique-based knowledge in efforts to understand the rust-epidemic. Despite such interchanges between knowledge practices, the production of scientific knowledge has remained in the hands of scientists, and only to a small degree included farmers.

With the recent launch of a nation-wide plan to decarbonise Costa Rica (i.e. make carbon neutral, sustainable) by 2050, this paper asks whether new forms of techno-science-society interactions may emerge in efforts to produce and disseminate knowledge about how to relate to the environment and non-human beings (e.g. coffee rust) in new manners. The "decarbonisation plan" challenges the dominance of the agro-industrial model and the scientific knowledge on which it is primarily based, as the model has long contributed to destabilise environments by emitting high levels of Greenhouse Gasses. Simultaneously, small-scale farmers in Latin America and globally take steps to reclaim ownership of food production and knowledges based in "traditional agriculture". Can these circumstances open up for a new science "in the wild"?

Paper short abstract:

Through a biocultural approach, I intend to demonstrate ethnographically how the genetic history of chimpanzees in Guinea-Bissau touches and connects with the cosmologies of the Nalu people contributing not only to understand the history of the landscape but also of those natures.

Paper long abstract:

One of the challenges of preserving biodiversity, particularly at its most primary level - genes - requires that the genetic diversity of endangered species be characterized from the point of view of their structure and distribution so that mitigation and safeguarding plans can be effectively designed. Based on this principle of conservation genetics and taking chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) from the Cantanhez National Park of southern Guinea-Bissau as leitmotiv, I will disentangle an ethnographic frame based on an empirical study conducted between 2007 and 2019 that aims to demonstrate how the history of chimpanzee lineages intertwines with the colonial war in space and with the founding myths of Nalu in time, thus creating a complex reality where humans and non-humans connect and cross their teleological limits. Using a biocultural approach (i.e. genetics and anthropology), the environmental history of the landscape is explored where humans and chimpanzees still coexist, their future implications in terms of conservation are discussed and epistemological bridges are reinforced. It is concluded that the traditional local knowledge can and should be incorporated in environmental management plans since they can be concomitantly not only a departing point but also an arrival.