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Paper short abstract

This paper introduces the concept of “thermosociality” to examine how temperature regimes shape social life. Drawing on ethnography from Kolyma, known for its extreme low temperatures, it shows how winter cold defines the ethics, thus positioning thermal comfort within a moral economy.

Paper long abstract

How do temperature regimes affect sociality? In this paper, I will propose the concept of “thermosociality” to account for forms of sociality embedded in the temperature regimes. As a product of modern “social organisation of thermal energy” (Shove et al. 2014), temperature and thermal comfort have been shown to affect social relations in multiple ways: high ambient temperature has been associated with generating social conflicts (Sovacool et al. 2020), fostering discrimination (Mazzone 2024), altering judgment (Behrer and Bolotnyy 2024), exacerbating inequality (Klinenberg 2002), and increasing risks of interpersonal violence (Anderson et al. 2000).

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Kolyma, a region in the Northeast of Russia, notoriously known for its extreme cold and Gulag past, I extend this literature by examining how winter cold reconfigures moral and social life. I show how, during winter, reducing cold exposure to preserve warmth becomes an ethical maxim governing human interactions, and how this is translated into discourses of exceptional relational warmth popular among settlers of the Russian North. By doing so, I move beyond “dark anthropology”-style approaches to the social effects of thermal conditions, articulated through concepts such as “thermal insecurity” or “heat stress,” to reveal temperature regimes as part of a moral economy and therefore central to the diversity of social life.