The multi-generation book project "The Peoples of Siberia" enabled a group of Leningrad-based scholars to reshape their museum into a Soviet ethnographic community. This article analyses the face-to-face performances, the legalistic stenographic documentation, the collective crafting of a single authoritative style, and a unique temporal frame as an important background to understand a hallmark volume in Siberian studies. The authors argue that the published volume indexes nearly thirty years of scholarly debates as much as it indexes the peoples it represents. The article concludes with a critical discussion of how this volume was translated and received by a Euro-American readership influencing the perception of Siberian peoples internationally. It also links the volume to contemporary post-Soviet publication projects which seem to retrace the same path. The article is based on extensive archival work and references collections recently discovered and which are presented for publication here for the first time.
The concept of etnos—one of the more controversial anthropological concepts of the Cold War period—is contextualized by looking at its “life history” through the biography of one of its proponents. Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff was a Russian/Chinese anthropologist whose career transected Eurasia from Paris to Beijing via Saint Petersburg and the Siberian borderlands of the Russian Empire. His transnational biography and active correspondence shaped the unique spatial and intellectual configuration of a concept that became a cornerstone of both Soviet and Chinese ethnography. The theory of etnos turned out to be surprisingly stable, while circulating through various political and intellectual environments ranging from England, Germany, and China to Imperial, Soviet, and modern Russia. This case study presents a history of anthropology wherein networks and conversations originating in the Far East of Eurasia have had unexpected influences on the heartlands of anthropology.
The idea of etnos came into being over a hundred years ago as a way of understanding the collective identities of people with a common language and shared traditions. In the twentieth century, the concept came to be associated with Soviet state-building, and it fell sharply out of favour. Yet outside the academy, etnos-style arguments not only persist, but are a vibrant part of regional anthropological traditions.Life Histories of Etnos Theory in Russia and Beyond makes a powerful argument for reconsidering the importance of etnos in our understanding of ethnicity and national identity across Eurasia. The collection brings to life a rich archive of previously unpublished letters, fieldnotes, and photographic collections of the theory’s early proponents. Using contemporary fieldwork and case studies, the volume shows how the ideas of these ethnographers continue to impact and shape identities in various regional theatres from Ukraine to the Russian North to the Manchurian steppes of what is now China. Through writing a life history of these collectivist concepts, the contributors to this volume unveil a world where the assumptions of liberal individualism do not hold. In doing so, they demonstrate how notions of belonging are not fleeting but persistent, multi-generational, and bio-social.This collection is essential reading for anyone interested in Russian and Chinese area studies. It will also appeal to historians and students of anthropology and ethnography more generally.
The impossibility results of Bovens and Hartmann (2003, Bayesian epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press) and Olsson (2005, Against coherence: Truth, probability and justification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) show that the link between coherence and probability is not as strong as some have supposed. This paper is an attempt to bring out a way in which coherence reasoning nevertheless can be justified, based on the idea that, even if it does not provide an infallible guide to probability, it can give us an indication thereof. It is further shown that this actually is the case, for several of the coherence measures discussed in the literature so far. We also discuss how this affects the possibility to use coherence as a means of epistemic justification.
In this chapter I will explore how migrants have adapted, fought with, and reshaped the environment they moved into, changing themselves and nature at the same time. Their tools, skills, knowledge, even their ethnic identities and solidarity, interacted with the local natural resources. Immigrants have looked at nature with different eyes; sometimes they saw natural resources where others could not see anything (for instance, in the case of urban commons); they adapted themselves or fought against the landscape they arrived in (as in the case of Southern plantations in the Mississippi Delta or the making of California’s agricultural landscape); their bodies became part of the capitalistic ecologies of industrial and mining production transforming both the external and the internal nature. While in the classical narrative pioneers entered, settled, and coped with a natural environment they heroically tamed, in this chapter I argue that immigrants’ environments were never only “natural.” Those were racialized landscapes, where class, law, and property rights were influential at least as much as soil, climate, viruses, or wild animals. Therefore, rather than speaking of how immigrants shaped or adapted to the “natural” environment, it seems more appropriate to analyze the metabolic relationships between immigrants and the socionatures in which they settled. I will do so employing several examples from the history of various immigrants’ groups, especially Italians, in the United States.
Once there was a spectre haunting Europe and maybe the world. Now other fears and invisible presences have occupied the space of imagination, above all CO2 emissions and “the Anthropocene,” projecting their shadows and diminishing what we can imagine for the future. Building on my experience as a researcher on waste in Naples, Italy, I reflect on our own presence as radical scholars among activists and argue that the figure of the ghost might help to better understand the relation between theory, academic discourse, and activists’ storytelling practices. The hope is to contribute towards the every-necessary work needed to craft emancipatory imaginaries, yet again.
The metaphor of the ship has always been extremely powerful in the global narrative about the common fate of planet Earth. The famous image of the Blue Marble was instrumental in the construction of the imaginary of the planet as a spaceship roaming in the universe. The ship evokes the idea of both finiteness and unity. In many languages "to be in the same boat" means to share the same destiny, thereby, to collaborate in order to operate the ship. The corollary of that metaphor is the existence of the open ocean, that is, of a risky space in which the ship and its crew are navigating. I will discuss about what these metaphors say - and hide - about the ecological crisis, or the the collapse of modern civilization using the key concept of this workshop.
Sono vent’anni che la Campania è sommersa dai rifiuti. Una politica corrotta o incapace, poteri criminali e interessi economici hanno determinato un disastro ecologico di enormi proporzioni. Si è scelta una comunità «debole» per trasformarla nella discarica finale di ogni scarto. Ma la convinzione che quella comunità sarebbe rimasta apatica si è rivelata sbagliata. Si è formata, invece, una comunità resistente capace di battersi per la giustizia ambientale, di proporre soluzioni alternative, di gridare le sue ragioni. In Campania sono le donne a svolgere un ruolo di primo piano. Questo libro racconta le storie di alcune di loro nella convinzione che costruire la memoria significa lottare contro la fine della storia e il ricatto di un presente senza alternative. Raccontare le storie di Teresa e le altre è un antidoto potente, un tassello di una resistenza collettiva, un progetto di guerrilla narrative. Perché la resistenza ha bisogno di voci e di reti. Sulla munnezza campana si sono scritte enciclopedie, trattati scientifici, resoconti giornalistici, persino pièce teatrali. Questo libro vuole fare altro. Tanto per cominciare, si ispira allo slogan del movimento americano della giustizia ambientale: "we speak for ourselves", che qui non significa solo che attivisti e attiviste parlano in prima persona ma rimanda anche al carattere "narrativo" del movimento, alla volontà di sfidare il sistema che ha prodotto ingiustizia con la forza del raccontare. Scrive Marco Armiero nella sua introduzione al volume: «Io mi sono messo a cercare l’ingiustizia, ovvero ho provato a legge- re questa vicenda campana non tanto come una storia di inefficienze, di corruzione, di camorra, ma come una storia che mette a nudo le asimmetrie del potere, il sistematico scegliere comunità marginali, spesso già contaminate, come «zone di sacrificio» destinate ad accogliere ciò che nessuno vuole».
Environmental history has grown greatly in various countries, in the last years, and has penetrated in Italy, too. At the same time, it remains in many ways a small sector, while political history, for its part, seems to be untouched by it, despite the relevance of the environment in political discourse. The forum, which closes this special issue on the relationship between politics and the environment, and involves both environmental and political historians, intends to give a contribution to the debate on the nature and fate of political and, more generally, contemporary history.
The introduction reflects on processes of historical production of marginal environments. In particular, it pays attention to their political components - namely states, nationalism, and imperialism - and to continuities and ruptures. In the context of climate change and in the very years of the popularisation of the ‘conquest’ of the outer space, the following chapters adopt a new approach, stressing the interconnectivity of distant areas and their dialectical relationship and highlighting the colonial and extractivist matrix behind the historic and historiographical concepts of frontiers and exploration.
This article builds upon a rich scholarship that has proposed, though with different shades, the concept of socionatures, meaning by this the inextricable hybrid of ecological and social facts. In this article, we aim to explore how the Mafia produces particular socionatural formations, entering into landscapes, becoming rivers and cities, penetrating into the bodies of humans and nonhumans. We will develop our argument by exploring a specific geographical area, the Simeto River, and how the Mafia has become intertwined with its ecologies. We will analyse the appropriation of the river since the 1950s, illustrating various ways in which the Mafia has blended with its ecologies: the control of water, the touristification of the river’s mouth and the placement of waste facilities. We argue that one crucial feature of Mafia socionatures is the attack against commons, i.e. the attempt to subdue the (re)productive properties of human and more-than-human communities to Mafia economic interests. Therefore, we will propose the practices of commons and commoning – that is, the making of commons – as one of the possible strategies against the Mafia
Think globally, act locally’ has become a call to environmentalist mobilization, proposing a closer connection between global concerns, local issues and individual responsibility. A History of Environmentalism explores this dialectic relationship, with ten contributors from a range of disciplines providing a history of environmentalism which frames global themes and narrates local stories.Each of the chapters in this volume addresses specific struggles in the history of environmental movements, for example over national parks, species protection, forests, waste, contamination, nuclear energy and expropriation. A diverse range of environments and environmental actors are covered, including the communities in the Amazonian Forest, the antelope in Tibet, atomic power plants in Europe and oil and politics in the Niger Delta. The chapters demonstrate how these conflicts make visible the intricate connections between local and global, the body and the environment, and power and nature. A History of Environmentalism tells us much about transformations of cultural perceptions and ways of production and consuming, as well as ecological and social changes. More than offering an exhaustive picture of the entire environmentalist movement, A History of Environmentalism highlights the importance of the experience of environmentalism within local communities. It offers a worldwide and polyphonic perspective, making it key reading for students and scholars of global and environmental history and political ecology.
In the age of climate change, the possibility that dramatic environmental transformations might cause the dislocation of millions of people has become not only a matter for scientific speculation or science-fiction narratives, but the object of strategic planning and military analysis. Environmental History of Modern Migrations offers a worldwide perspective on the history of migrations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provides an opportunity to reflect on the global ecological transformations and developments which have occurred throughout the last few centuries. With a primary focus on the environment/migration nexus, this book advocates that global environmental changes are not distinct from global social transformations. Instead, it offers a progressive method of combining environmental and social history, which manages to both encompass and transcend current approaches to environmental justice issues. This edited collection will be of great interest to students and practitioners of environmental history and migration studies, as well as those with an interest in history and sociology.
In comparison with the significant historiographical work on the German case, specifically on Nazi environmental policies and ideology, studies on such issues for other Fascist regimes are still rather rare. This article attempts partially to fill this gap, at least as regards the Italian case, offering a general overview of the Fascist regime and its environmental politics and narratives. Analysing how Fascists appropriated Italian landscapes through both discourses and concrete policies, this paper examines the construction of a Fascist nature as a rhetorical, symbolic and geographical space. In particular, this essay explores the combined process of appropriation and expropriation through the analysis of two diverse but intertwined issues: firstly, Fascist rural ideology as a narrative on the mutual constituency of nature and people and secondly, the creation of the first Italian national parks, their successes and failures as institutions of nature conservation and their role as symbols of the nature/society divide. While blending the ideas of race, landscape, history, modernity and ruralism, Fascists shaped both the national environment and general ideas about nature in a narrative which affected the very object of the narration that is, nature itself.
Dmitry Arzyutov discusses a phenomenon that he defines as "American dreams" of Russian ethnography in the early twentieth century based on the example of Waldemar Bogoras, one of the founders of early Soviet ethnography. The essay highlights three specific cases that frame the development of this discipline not through the familiar narrative of gradual isolation but as a story of sometimes problematic contacts and exchanges with American anthropologists. The contacts that were established during the joint Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902) led by Franz Boas continued into the 1920s. Arzyutov shows that the main concepts of Soviet ethnography, such as "ethnogenesis" and "ethnic history," were products of the debates about the origin of the peoples of Arctica and Siberia between Franz Boas and the Russian expedition participants, Bogoras and, to a lesser degree, Lev Shternberg. The second case addresses Bogoras's unrealized project of establishing nature reserves-cum-reservations for the native peoples of Siberia. These were to combine the prerevolutionary idea of nature reserves (popular among Bogoras's geographer colleagues) with the North American practice of Indian reservations. Finally, the third case compares trajectories of the two students of Bogoras and Boas, Julia Averkieva and Archie Phinney. Their stories show how Marxism might have been differently understood and deployed in the transnational context, and how this difference could have generated intellectual and personal disagreements and conflicting versions of identity politics. The three cases taken together testify to the importance of shifting the optics of the history of anthropology from reconstructing national traditions and local genealogies toward tracing dialogue and mutual borrowings.