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- Convenors:
-
Karina Lukin
(University of Helsinki)
Dmitry Arzyutov (The Ohio State University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Knowledge Production
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 23 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel discusses the ways of practising and narrating the indigenous historicities in the North which have been intertwined with other "western" and "eastern" narratives of the past. We especially welcome papers based on case studies from different parts of the Arctic.
Long Abstract:
What does 'history' mean for the various Arctic indigenous and minority groups? To what extent are the non-western 'historicities' intertwined with the dominant "western" narratives such as national/imperial histories or histories of scientific theories, and may even undermine them? To answer these questions, the panel seeks papers from indigenous scholars and the scholars working in the Arctic as well as historians of science. We invite you to reflect with us on the ontological diversities of the concepts of the past and their narrative and practical entanglements with materiality, bodies, non-human beings, environment, and the invisible. These diversities paradoxically lead us to reveal rather the underappreciated relatedness and mutual dependences of the "western" and "non-western" ideas of history. The encounters of the urban administrators and scholars with the divergent ways of narrating and practising the past could not but affect the further development of "western" epistemologies. The converse was equally true. The colonial authorities tried to persuade local people into following the evolutionistic, linear and event-based history. The inclusive way between the two is still rarely taken. And therefore we intend to do this at our panel. We hope it may allow us to "break the rules" in the discourses about the "Other" within anthropology and ethno- and oral histories and open a new avenue for theorizing the indigenous historicities and their (in)visible presence and involvement in the co-production of knowledge. We particularly welcome papers based on long-term field and/or archival/museum research.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 23 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
My paper reconsiders the Nenets historicities through reading the diaries of a Nenets hunter Tyko Vylka. I argue that his diaries entangle multiple modalities of histories and can contribute to the ongoing discussions on the status of indigenous knowledge and decolonisation of western paradigms.
Paper long abstract:
This paper deals with the diaries of Tyko (Ilya) Vylka (1886-1960), one of the most famous indigenous persons in the Russian/Soviet North. I argue that his everyday notes accompanied by drawings and economic calculations shed light on the social crafting of multimodal Nenets historicities on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. Telling, writing, drawing, and engaging with the surrounded environment were the practices which shaped his subjectivity which in turn was also relationally entangled with a number of Arctic explorers, painters, and high-ranking politicians. In my paper, I reveal how Tyko Vylka mastered the historicity for his community which was situated between the Nenets indigenous way of narrating of the past and the dominant writing practices of Russian administrators and travellers. I, however, take a step further in my reflections upon such divisions and pay special attention to the materiality of his notes, namely the social life of diaries and his usages of paper and ink. Such an approach opens a complex relational field of historicity which allows us to find a way beyond the colonial divisions and includes it into an orchestra of historical practices. The paper is based on my long-term archival and field research and combines the methodologies of historical anthropology, ethnohistory, and visual anthropology.
Paper short abstract:
The paper studies toponymic notions of Sámi past(s) in the texts of Finnish geodesist and ethnographer Karl Nickul. In Nickul’s correspondence with the Sámi and an international network of scholars, Sámi notions of the past traveled from Sámi communities to the international scholarly sphere.
Paper long abstract:
Franz Boas, the famous German-American anthropologist, saw in native place names “the mutual influence of the earth and its inhabitants upon each other.” Boas considered the study of indigenous place names as one of the best ways to study their mental and social life, including notions of past and present.
In a Nordic-Sámi context, the Finnish geodesist and self-learned ethnographer Karl Nickul (1900–1980) studied the indigenous nomenclature among the Skolt Sámi in northeastern Finland/northwestern USSR. Nickul considered the Sámi to possess the “moral right” to name their own region, and to keep these names in cartographic representations: “With the sensitive intuition of a people of nature they identify with the landscape that they know through and through. They belong to it [the landscape]”. According to Nickul, studying and documenting Sámi place names was a gateway to the mental imagery of the Sámi. They did not only reflect the landscape “as it was”, but also ancient events, beliefs and livelihoods. In Nickul’s correspondence with Skolt Sámi individuals on the on the one hand, and an international network of scholars on the other, Skolt Sámi notions of the past traveled from Sámi communities to the international scholarly sphere.
The paper focuses especially on the following questions:
How did Nickul frame Sámi past(s) in relation to “Western” history?
How did Sámi place names form Nickul’s thinking on history?
In what ways did Sámi notions of the past travel through Nickul’s international correspondence to the international arena of anthropology and ethnography?
Paper short abstract:
Employing an Indigenous research method—storying with sentient nonhumans, landscapes and horses—this paper investigates the power dynamics between Indigenous historicities and the state-enforced history in the Tyva republic, Russia.
Paper long abstract:
This paper questions the power dynamics between the state-enforced histories and Indigenous historicities taking as a case-study the diversity of postsocialist meanings conveyed by racehorse Ezir Kara, who lived in 1930 to 1939 in the Tyva republic, Inner Asia. In the early postsocialist period Ezir Kara was re-born as a symbol of the Great Purge; later he acquired a status of a respected kin among the clan of his owner Soyan Sandangmaa. Recently there has been a shift in Ezir Kara’s understanding beyond his South Tyvan homelands. A depersonalized narrative about the timeless ‘nomadic horse’ attempts to take over a story of the unjustly killed racehorse who became a symbol of repressions and a way to heal the severed human-nonhuman relationships.
I argue that meanings of Ezir Kara have diverged in response to two factors: a need to reconcile with the past at the community level and the changing geopolitical context. The latter is framed temporally as the early postsocialist period in the 1990s when ‘history was becoming possible’ (Humphrey 1992) and Putin’s Russia of the past two decades when the state reinstated the policing of the past. I draw parallels between stories of Ezir Kara and racehorse Kulager (c. 1870-1880s) who became prominent in political discourse in postsocialist Kazakhstan.