Sibirica

The annexation of the Grand Duchy of Finland by the Russian Empire after the war with Sweden in 1808–1809 sharply strengthened the Russian trading fleet. It is not surprising that Finnish ships, despite their small number, visited the Russian colonies in America over a rather long period—from 1816 to 1856—though at times with substantial temporal intervals. Some of them belonged to the Russian-American Company (RAC), some were chartered by it, and some were in joint possession with the Russian-Finnish Whaling Company. In addition, many Finnish sailors and skippers served on ships of the RAC’s colonial flotilla and on company ships that carried out charter trips between Baltic ports and Russian America and eastern Siberia.

Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1832–1901), a Finnish Swedish scientist and explorer, made three expeditions to the North Asian coast between 1875 and 1879. He completed ten expeditions to the Arctic region between 1858 and 1883. The unifying goal of the North Asian expeditions was to open a trade route between Europe and Siberia. As a scientist, Nordenskiöld also studied the flora, fauna, geology, geography, hydrology, meteorology, ethnology, and history, and produced charts of this unfamiliar territory. This article argues that Nordenskiöld used his skills of environmental literacy when he combined the commercial and scientific goals of his expeditions. He also had the ability to deal with the environment in practical and rational terms, which I argue is also one expression of environmental literacy.

Based on fieldwork in Nenets tundra encampments and multiethnic villages on the northern Yamal Peninsula, this article discusses people’s experiences and expectations of married life. Two types of marriage—”arranged” and “love marriage”—are used to illustrate how marriage brings to the fore the political economy of desire and local reflections on the good society. The article suggests that while Soviet ideology and post-Soviet neotraditionalist discourses have endorsed customary attitudes toward arranged Nenets marriage, love marriage including marriage with Russians often leads to a situation in which “love” or “alien romance” is tempered by “reason” rather than relying on a “modern” nuclear family ideal. It argues that tundra marriage, including arranged marriage, is commonly underwritten by subjectively understood chances of leading a good family life.

Narratives of globalization, conceived of as large-scale political, economic, and cultural processes flowing from metropolitan centers, often emphasize the loss of tradition and cultural originality in the remote and wild peripheries. All three television programs filmed in the past 10 years in Krasnoshchel’e, a remote Arctic village in Northwest Russia where I did anthropological fieldwork, are marked by such sentimental pessimism. Here, I juxtapose them with several local stories, which do not resonate with the melancholic and nostalgic notes of the media. The stories show how new inventions are welcomed and incorporated with laughter and astonishment into everyday life. The sentimental dissonance between mediascape and local imagination brings valuable insights about how globalization is accommodated on different scales and in different geographic settings.

In 1968, the Soviet economist and demographer Boris Urlanis started a national conversation in the Soviet Union with his article “Beregite muzhchin!” or “Save the Men!” in the popular journal Literaturnaia gazeta. The essay, translated here, points out the increasingly troubling imbalance in male and female health as men were dying, on average, eight years earlier than women. Urlanis calls for attention to accidents and lifestyle problems (smoking and drinking, as featured in propaganda posters) as well as a nationwide set of health institutions centered on male health. The essay precipitated a flood of essays, letters, commentaries, cartoons, and even a movie under the same title.

This essay reviews new books by Sarah Badcock, Daniel Beer, and Andrew Gentes on Siberian exile in the long nineteenth century. Based on a wealth of memoirs and archival documents, all three studies shed new light on the aims, practices, and lived experience of exile, with Beer providing a broad overview and Gentes and Badcock focusing on specific episodes. Meticulously researched and well written, the books demonstrate the chaotic nature of exile, with corruption, violence, and the nature of the exiles themselves contributing to the system’s failures to achieve its often-conflicting goals. More context in terms of Siberian development and the Russian penal system and greater theoretical and comparative perspective would have further strengthened these important new books.

The essay provides a review of a small but remarkable book on the work of two important Native American and Siberian poets, Meditations after the Bear Feast by Navarre Scott Momaday and Yuri Vella, published in 2016 by Shanti Arts in Brunswick, Maine. Their poetic dialogue revolves around the well-known role of the bear as a sociocultural keystone species in the boreal forest zone of Eurasia and North America. The essay analyzes the understanding of dialogicity as shaping the intersubjectivity of the poets emerging from human relationships with the environment. It tries to unpack the complex and prophetic bear dream in one of Vella’s poems in which he links indigenous ontologies with urgent sociopolitical problems.