Post-doctoral researcher Tobias Holzlehner is conducting fieldwork along the coast of the Chukchi Peninsula, tracing resettlement histories and their local effects on native cultures with a special attention to memory, practice, resistance, and landscape.

Two major factors influenced and changed the settlement patterns of native communities in Chukotka. First, the restructuring of economic and social space – from sedentarization programs for reindeer herders to the wide-spread introduction of boarding schools – led to fundamental changes in settlement structures and patterns. Second, the implementation of Soviet development policy had direct effects on local economies and the fate of individual villages. The spatial impacts of these forces led on the one hand to the creation of new cities and on the other hand to the closing of many old settlements. Under the pretext of economic consolidation (ukreplenie), forces of Soviet modernization and industrialization encroached on native communities and their economies with often devastating effects on health and traditional forms of life. Inhabitants were mandatorily forced out of their homeland and moved to larger centralized villages with often minimal infrastructural support – in some cases people were moved to villages that were closed again only a couple of years later.

In 20th century Chukotka, resettlement cases can be divided into two distinct forms: voluntary abandonment and state-induced closure. The first set includes villages that were voluntarily abandoned by their own population in the 1920s and 1930s, driven mostly by their own decision to resettle to larger villages in order to have better access to food, medical support and education. The second set consists of villages that were mandatorily closed due to administrative decisions. These state administered closures happened by and large during the 1950s and 1960s. Multiple reasons can be identified that led to the resettlements of native coastal villages in the 1950s and 1960s on the Chukchi Peninsula. The resettlement history is a complex process influenced by multiple factors – administrative, economic, ideological, logistic, territorial, and military reasons – mostly dependent on each other and that ultimately resulted in the forced relocations.

During the recent fieldwork season – Summer 2008 – Tobias Holzlehner is researching the long-term effects of village relocations on native cultures. Local opinions and experiences on and of the relocations on the Chukchi Peninsula are rather diverse. For instance, the generation which experienced the relocations at a rather young age did not perceive the resettlements as traumatic as the generation of their parents. This is especially true for people who have actively worked on preserving a traditional lifestyle, expressed for instance through dances, crafts, or marine mammal hunting.

The focus of the current research lies on several hunting camps in the vicinity of Lorino and Lavrentiya, both villages that were the main recipients of relocated populations. These hunting camps are located at formerly resettled village sites and are now partially re-settled, in the true sense of the word, by groups of sea-mammal hunters that spend weeks at a time there to hunt and escape the predicaments of village life. The logic of subsistence practices and a longing for lost places draw groups of people to the old sites, with the effect that those former settlements are now almost continuously (re-) inhabited by rotating groups of hunters during the summer and winter.

The peculiar topography and ecology of those places – they are exclusively located on bluffs or small cliffs at the end of capes where ice breaks up early in the season, sea mammal migration routes pass by closely, and from which walruses and whales can be easily spotted by the hunters – combined with the desire to flee the village and its intrinsic problems (violence, alcoholism, and unemployment) make them attractive places with distinct qualities.
These hunting camps in post-industrial ghost towns are prime examples for place-making in the making. Therefore, Tobias Holzlehner is investigating the quality of different spaces and the contrast between village life and life at the hunting camps at former re-located village sites, and following up on the reasons why people choose to live in the ruins of the past and revitalize the old sites of abandonment.

The concept of cultural reserves and their (revitalizing) power is observable in these cases. One of the strongest and most effective cultural reserves represents sea-mammal hunting. Embedded in the landscape and local ecology, it allows some people to escape the shattered utopia of Soviet modernization. Revitalization of old hunting technologies, subsistence camps, and traditional forms of cooperation allows for alternative life concepts that are diametrically opposed to the realities in the villages, for instance, hunting camps are dry places in respect to alcohol and traditional hunting and butchering technologies are actively passed on to a younger generation. After the failed experiment of large-scale social and cultural engineering, the depopulated coastal landscape with its abandoned settlements represents new points of anchorage for a partial re-settlement and revitalization movements.