Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting
Global Challenge, Local Action: Ethical Engagement, Partnerships, and Practice
Santa Fe, New Mexico March 17-21, 2009

Moved By the State and Moving Against the State: Resettlement and Spatial Resistance in the Circumpolar North, Part-I.
Throughout the 20th century, northern communities have been subject to relocations triggered by outsiders. This session compares state-induced population movements and their impacts on people in northern Russia, Canada, and Alaska, with particular attention to local expressions of coping, rebuilding, and remembering. Individuals and communities, however, continue to be creative in using state policies for their own needs, as evidenced in the ongoing negotiations between states and communities about location and relocation in the face of increasing social and climate change.

STAMMLER, Florian and BOLOTOVA, Alla
(U Lapland) How Collective Agency Changes
Community Viability in a Threatened Northern
Russian Town

How Collective Agency Changes Community Viability in a Threatened Northern Russian Town. The influence of a civil society initiative to rescue a town after post-Soviet restructuring shows how demographic downscaling can be interpreted as ‘healthy shrinking’’ where increased social cohesion among those who stay can turn the image of a place ‘dying out’ into a viable community. This viability is threatened, however, by administrative measures and the influx of disprivileged persons from all over the region. Analysing these conflicting tendencies, we contribute to alternative qualitative interpretations of demographic change, and to conceptions of community sustainability in non-indigenous Russian northern settlements.

EILMSTEINER-SAXINGER, Gertrude (U Vienna)
“I Cannot Live Without Moving”: Shift-
Labor and Private Life in Northern Russia

 “I Cannot Live Without Moving”: Shift-Labor and Private Life in Northern Russia. Promising job opportunities in Russia’s hydro-carbon industry continue to shift northward. This necessitates the use of an increasing number of long-distance shift-workers, so-called vakhtoviki. This paper presents ethnographic examples of how the identities of these shift workers are formed by being constantly on the move. This impacts the family life constellations of shift-workers, which seem at first glance at odds with “normality” as defined by mainstream discourses about Russian gender relations. This, in turn, has important implications for understanding the future challenges and opportunities of shift-labor in Russia.

KHLINOVSKAYA ROCKHILL, Elena (Canadian Circumpolar Inst)
An Island within an Island: Living with the Absence of the State

An Island within an Island: Living with the Absence of the State. The Stalinist industrialisation plan of the 1930s required development of the minerals-rich Magadan Region of the Russian Northeast, necessitating massive relocation of people first as forced labour and, starting in the 1950s, free labour attracted by state-funded hefty material benefits. The retreat of the state in the 1990s required initiatives concerning moving much of the population back into the western part of Russia. This paper focuses on state programmes to assist and induce relocation and local responses to these initiatives, using a case study of a ‘closed down’ community where many families remain without any state infrastructure in

HOLZLEHNER, Tobias (UA-Fairbanks)
Lives in the Ruins of the Past: Local Reactions to Forced
Relocations in a Borderland of the Russian North

Lives in the Ruins of the Past: Local Reactions to Forced Relocations in a Borderland of the Russian North. During the 20th century, state induced resettlement policies on the Chukchi Peninsula in Northeastern Russia resulted in the closure of dozens of native coastal villages whose inhabitants had been subsequently relocated to larger settlement centers. Yet, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the revitalization of subsistence practices led to a partial re-settlement of abandoned village sites. This paper explores the various strategies of indigenous hunters to reconnect with a lost past in the ruins of a modern world.

MARINO, Elizabeth (UA-Fairbanks)
Losing Ground: Understanding Environmental Relocations and the Struggle for Local Control

Losing Ground: Understanding Environmental Relocations and the Struggle for Local Control. Migration of indigenous communities in Alaska has in some cases led to increased social and environmental vulnerabilities. This paper explores how social vulnerability is created and experienced through state-induced migrations of the past and how, in contemporary environmentally-induced relocations, communities are attempting to control migration processes. This paper will also seek to demonstrate how communities today exercise their own political power and prestige to avoid increased social vulnerability due to theses forthcoming relocations.