Risky Futures: Climate, Geopolitics and Local Realities in the Uncertain Circumpolar North Olga Ulturgasheva and Barbara Bodenhorn, eds. (London: Berghahn Books, 2023). 234 pp., ISBN 978-1-80073-593-4.

In chapter 1 of Risky Futures, Olga Ulturgasheva and Barbara Bodenhorn (who are also the editors) challenge the idea that the Arctic is an empty, pristine wilderness just waiting for scientists and explorers to wander its snowy wastes and paint its blank canvasses. This stereotype and the dismantling of it is surely by now a familiar one, after books and articles about the Arctic—both from the sciences and the humanities, as well as within the popular news cycle—have proliferated in the past decade, but that does not mean that revisiting the critique cannot offer anything new. Both Ulturgasheva and Bodenhorn have impressive CVs with long-term ethnographic study of Indigenous groups in the circumpolar North, and their workshop in 2016 at the British Museum—whose collection rests on the theft of many Indigenous artefacts—considered the future of the Arctic (or the North) not only from a position of deep engagement with Indigenous Arctic cultures but also a recognition that these Indigenous groups are not homogenous, nor do they frame risk in the same ways. It is this positionality that allows this edited collection to shine, asking us both to take seriously the multiplicities of knowledge making and sharing and to recognize that the perception of and response to hazards emerge from complex sociopolitical entanglements.

With the Arctic now warming at four times the rate of the rest of the planet, its focus within newspapers, magazines, journals, and the like has spurred not only a curation of the Arctic as a harbinger of doom, but also increased efforts to better understand a region that has historically been so misunderstood, and in doing so, to provide the solutions to a growing threat. The question of risk management is important here. It is tempting to imagine the climate crisis—a global phenomenon—as the ultimate hazard that, if we were just able to work together, could be defeated in the pursuit of a habitable planet for all. This is a surface-level position, however, and does not account for the multiplicity of worldviews and cosmologies that do not necessarily approach every problem as having a solution, nor privilege objective science above everything else. I myself can recall a workshop designed to bring Arctic natural scientists and humanities scholars together where, when designing an interdisciplinary research proposal together, one geochemist argued for the inclusion of an Indigenous stakeholder because “that's how you get funding these days”. The fact that TEK largely fails as an approach is reflected in this sort of worldview, where Indigenous knowledges are either relegated as addendums to the real work (the science), or are simply unable to co-exist within a western ontological framework.

Risky Futures never loses sight of this fundamental discrepancy, and purposely foregrounds the work of not only Indigenous scholars, but people who live and have lived in the regions in question for many years, and have often decades of lived experience and embodied local knowledge. Whilst disregarding scientific knowledge entirely is not the goal here, the editors instead highlight how knowledge of a thing will always be partial and plural, but the politics behind which knowledges are valued above others produce particular frameworks of risk that can often leave the most affected behind. Risky Futures, in the editors’ words, “neither siloes nor exoticizes ‘indigenous knowledge’ as something apart; instead, it offers a complex account of thinking about the Arctic that includes multiple perspectives, with local voices at the core and not at the periphery of the discussion” (31).

There are only seven chapters but the collection manages to mostly cover the geographical Arctic, as well as the Himalayas (often referred to as the third pole), although there is scant reference to the Nordic Arctic and its colonial projects in both Sapmi and what is now known as Greenland. Whilst the chapters—particularly the first three—emphasize the local character and embodied knowledge of living in that particular Arctic place, there is also the acknowledgement that humans and non-humans living with ice and coldness share a material reality that can provide opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Diemberger and Hovden argue for an articulation of the cryosphere that can cut across the dominance of scientific knowledge by “mobilizing human and non-human communities around shared goals” (169). The Inuk activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier's call for “the right to be cold” (2015) echoes throughout the chapters, with Ulturgasheva and Bodenhorn's provocation of “cryocide” being integral to the identities of people experiencing a disorientating loss or scaling back of cryo-environments. Moving the focus away from the Arctic as seen through geopolitical or area studies both foregrounds the immediacy of the ongoing climatic and material devastation, as well as providing an anchor through which to build solidarity and knowledge collaboration.

What holds the book together with a generosity of spirit and hope are the stories told within its chapters. Not only are these important documentary pieces, they also illustrate how material experiences and shared wisdom become enfolded into animistic worldviews. The point is not to separate the two, but rather to acknowledge the co-constitutive nature of living with ice that dismantles the modernist dichotomies of nature and culture, self and world. In the Afterword, Michael Bravo coins the phrase “risk constellations” to capture the very urgent threats to Arctic peoples’ livelihoods, but also how stories such as these are not meant to fit into a neat, mechanistic understanding of the cryosphere, but rather can act as ethical and spatial guidelines as the entire planet navigates an uncertain future. Whilst this book does not purport to tell all the stories, nor offer them as a panacea for the climate crisis, it is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the circumpolar North that identifies—and celebrates—its liveliness, difference, and resilience.

Charlotte Alexandra Wrigley

University of Stavanger

Evil Spirits and Rocket Debris: In Search of Lost Souls in Siberia Ludek Broz (New York: Berghahn Books, 2024), 240 pp., ISBN: 978-1-80539-260-6.

In this ethnographic synthesis of Altaian understandings of space-military material byproducts and the spiritual landscape, Broz encourages other cultural anthropologists “to address the ontology of demons, gods, spirits and souls instead of limiting our investigations to the way people represent them” (9). Consistent with other ontologists, Broz emphasizes taking “what informants say about the occult realm at face value” (8). He pushes against explaining the supernatural as emanations of things like “social solidarity, evolved cognitive capacities, socialized grief, or local notions of probability” (6), because doing so renders spirits “beyond the scope of anthropological interest” (195) so much that “the urge to interpret and explain—the ‘supernatural’ is in fact absent from our work” (65).

What does it mean to take statements about the occult realm at “face value”? Broz rhetorically distances himself from appeals to “social solidarity, evolved cognitive capacities…” and so forth as examples of what to avoid, because they engage in “analytical substitution” (60–66). These “diversions” (6) are just “indicative of other issues” (8) and do not actually study the supernatural. Unfortunately, Broz offers little substantive engagement with these “diversions” and does not convincingly demonstrate they are guilty of “analytical substitution” or taking claims about the supernatural at “face value.” As such, it appears that we, too, are to take at face value claims of such deficits.

To avoid banishing spirits to the nether regions of inquiry, Broz uses the notion of “negative externalities” to “serve as a symmetrizing analytical platform that allows us to grant the same empirical treatment to those claims of our informants that go against our own ontological assumptions that we typically grant to those claims that comply with them” (73). In other words, by attending to the negative byproducts of Altaians’ interactions with spirits and space junk, we can better understand their views, thereby challenging our own underlying views of reality. The thesis is intriguing, but there are a few key ways its persuasiveness could have been strengthened.

First, it appears that Broz engages in the same kind of analytical substitution he wishes to avoid. Substitution might simply be an unavoidable part of trying to make sense of the world, but the book does not entertain this possibility. In Chapter 6, for example, Broz compares how various utterances and experiences promote the “othering” of various agents. These range from drinking with spirits, correctly honoring them, how Russian officials “other” those spirits in dismissive ways, and how anthropologists “other” spirits by avoiding them. As interesting as this comparison is, it is unclear how this analysis of the “othering” found in various statements is anything but a way to represent particular sentiments by talking about their effects. Doesn't framing statements as forms of “othering” take us farther away from or even “analytically substitute” such statements by steering our attention towards “othering” instead of the targets of that “othering”? It certainly has the potential to evoke longstanding discussions found in ethnographic circles that are likely absent between informants, thus taking us even farther away from “face value” statements.

What about the framing things in terms of ontologies? Doesn't the process of linking statements to underlying ontologies and their perturbations go beyond taking what informants say at “face value”? Broz “want[s] to examine [his] informants’ assertions by confronting them head-on, by taking them at face value as ontological statements” (153, emphasis added), but it is left unclear why this conflation is warranted. Why is this approach not simply another form of analytical substitution? Not all statements reflect ontologies, so why do the selected examples? If some form of substitution is an inescapable aspect of making sense of some aspect of the world, why is one form acceptable when others aren't? A bit more guidance on how to live up to Broz's recommendations would be helpful here.

Second, while the book deftly uses information from various sources, it never makes clear how representative any of the sentiments included are. In terms of method and data handling, the book draws from anecdotes, informants’ statements, letters from politicians (Chapter 2), gentle overviews of the spiritual (Chapter 3) and social landscapes (Chapter 4), and a notably detailed discussion of the Russian space program (Chapter 1). Neither sample size nor formal methods are considered much at all throughout the text. Broz uses anecdotes in various ways (e.g., to frame deeper issues or treated as evidence of specific claims) but beyond recognizing that pockets of consensus might exist (178), a clearer discussion of the anecdotes’ and quotations’ reliability and a bit more consideration of their use across other forms of data would have strengthened the discussion. Despite Broz acknowledging the occasional logical lapse across interlocutors’ statements, it is difficult to anticipate the kind of variation that likely exists in the region or how we might go about making sense of that variation if we had it in hand. This is not to say that Broz consistently treats singular statements as safe generalizations to represent some abstract or monolithic “Altaian sensibility” (see 59–60), but without a sense of the space of possible variation, readers have little to work with regarding how seriously we are to take what the book offers.

Finally, some consideration of the extant, tried-and-true ways that take what participants say seriously and examine their effects on the world would have been helpful. Indeed, many scholars and social scientists study the content, structure, distribution, and effects of religious beliefs and practices (see, for example, the contemporary cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion) in ways that neither “analytically substitute” their target of inquiry nor rely on assumptions of their existence at all. If this work did not challenge preconceived ideas, we might otherwise declare the field moribund. Quite the contrary, these approaches deeply consider the significance of beliefs and practices for informants, and they strive to account for why spiritual agents crop up in specific circumstances. Indeed, the field regularly yields new insights directly linked to what people say and do.

We cannot study ghosts, but we can study what people say about them, how individuals think about them, what they do to engage them, and the effects of these thoughts and practices on the world. Such approaches are under no pressure to portray spirits as “absent from the described world” at all. This increasingly large body of work does not turn “spirits, demons and souls” into anything else, assume, or make definitive (or even approximate) statements about the veracity of spirits’ existence. Instead, it examines the relationship between what people say and do and other aspects of their experience and contexts at various analytical levels.

In fact, there are many empirical methods available to systematically probe and compare the facets of worldviews. Generations of dedicated ethnoscientists and cognitive anthropologists have developed and employed these methods to great success. With methods explicitly designed to systematically and transparently assess differences and similarities in ontological understandings of people from all walks of life, it is unfortunate that this book and its presumed conversation partners so rarely engage with this literature and all it has to offer. At the end of the day, if Broz's primary goal is not to help us make better sense of Altaian views, but instead to challenge our sense of what reality is (194), perhaps the approach employed by ethnoscience is merely guilty of working toward other ends? Whatever the answer, the means by which ethnoscientists have assessed variation in worldviews offer considerable promise as a useful starting point for a conversation grounded in a reality that most can appreciate.

Ultimately, the book should satisfy readers with a general interest in the region's religious traditions and experiences, but it should also stimulate some discussion among regional experts, especially those who work in the theoretical milieu of the ontological turn.

Benjamin Grant Purzycki

Aarhus University