Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how resilience is not just a matter of one’s own will but remains embedded in the wider network of relations as experienced through dreams. These relations, as witnessed by the Nanai during climate crises, reconstitute and bridge sociality and (im)materiality in novel ways.

Paper long abstract:

What does it mean to witness the breakdown of concepts in which people understand things to be happening? The Nanai fishing community in the Amur region of Siberia has been living through numerous challenges, such as disappearance of fish caused by climate change, lack of financial support from the local governments and internal conflicts amongst the Nanai themselves. Within this landscape operates a Nanai shaman, the director of the Buri centre who seeks to develop and promote the Nanai and indigenous cultures in Russia. Despite personal traumas and mounting political, racial and economic challenges, Leonid stoically designs and realises new plans for the centre and the disappearing community. His strength, as he explains, derives from dreams in which he encounters deceased relatives and friends who offer critique, advice and prophecies. Leonid’s resilience remains, therefore, threaded from a distinct oneiric epistemology that is shaped and defined by distinct relations with non-humans. Situated within the frameworks of new materialism and indigenous metaphysic, in this paper I discuss what kind of insights are added to the understanding of resilience by being attentive to the knowledge about the world brought by non-humans in dreams - a distinct productive crossing that natural sciences may never be able to notice. I further explore how resilience is not just a matter of one’s own will but remains embedded in the wider network of agentive, beyond human, relations. These relations, in the face of climate crises and political conflicts, reconstitute and bridge sociality and (im)materiality in novel ways.