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Temporality of Movements in the North
Pragmatic Use of Infrastructure and Reflexive Mobility of Evenkis and Dolgans
in Sibirica
Abstract
This article addresses the problem of temporality and its potential use in mobility studies by providing examples from the author’s recent fieldwork among Evenkis and Dolgans. It examines the temporal dimension of hunters’, reindeer herders’, and fishers’ movements, and discusses the pragmatic use by local people, in the context of their mobility, of a variety of infrastructures and objects that were introduced to the landscape during the last century. It introduces the concept of points of constant return for ways of relating to places of intensive use beyond the binary opposition of settlements and the surrounding landscape. This article suggests analyzing movements in a broader context that includes not just their starting and final destinations but the relations of different locations in a set of movements of multiple actors and analyzes them as results of both reflexive and creative processes that lead to transformations of material objects and the landscape.
Contributor Notes
Vladimir N. Davydov has a PhD in anthropology (University of Aberdeen, 2012) and a candidate of sciences degree in sociology from the Russian Academy of Sciences (2008). Since 2013 he has been a head of the Siberian Ethnography Department at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg. Research interests: social anthropology, Tungus studies, Siberian and Arctic social studies. He has contributed to two collective monographs and published a set of articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is an honorary research fellow at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. E-mail: davydov.kunstkamera@gmail.com