Persistent memories. Pyramiden - a Soviet mining town in the High Arctic (original) (raw)
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Norwegian Archaeological Review, 2012
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Time and Mind, 2021
In past decades landscapes have become recognized as essentially liminal systems: there has been an increased appreciation for the embeddedness of lived experiences of places in four-dimensional space-time and the landscape's connections with perceptions, stories, the material and immaterial pasts, as well as the material and immaterial present and future. Kilpisjärvi is such a place where immaterial pasts, presents, and futures consolidate into lived experiences. Intimate narratives of the local inhabitants and enveloping environment are produced through the intermingling of traditional ways of living and being with the development of modern perspectives and infrastructures. This photo essay glimpses at the flow of interconnected stories of becoming of an Arctic village's lifeworld. It glances at what has never been built nor written down, what has been built over, the local anecdotes that speak to these, and how this amalgamation of interweaving materiality and disembodiment shape an understanding of Kilpisjärvi and its inhabitants from an insiders and outsiders perspective. The essay takes the reader through the liminal landscapes of reindeer, reindeer herders, tourist organizations, and village life, and its analysis advances our understanding of how these all connect in a meshwork that teaches old and new ways of viewing the environment.
Arzyutov 2016 Samoyedic Diary: Early Years of Visual Anthropology in the Soviet Arctic
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The article describes Georgii and Ekaterina Prokofievs’ expedition to the Bol’shezemel’skie Nenets and their experience of filming documentary chronicles. Prokofievs’ records are a unique piece of the visual anthropology of the Samoyedic peoples. Referring to the available archival documents, it is assumed that the chronicles were filmed at the expense of the cooperation agreement signed by Franz Boas and Vladimir Bogoras in New York in 1928. The article offers a reconstruction of Prokofiev’s fieldwork experience and his accounts on the early history of collectivization. In this regard, the cinematic chronicles and a collection of photos taken in the field are treated as a visual conceptualization. The available studies of the visual anthropology in the USSR suggest that the documentary chronicles by the Prokofievs filmed in 1929-1930 are the first cinematic records produced by ethnographers in the Soviet Arctic.
(Un)inhabiting Svalbard: Stories of makings from a transient place in the High Arctic
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2021
The Svalbard archipelago, as well as the Arctic in general, have long been portrayed as pristine nature, harsh and hostile environment, an uninhabitable space for human beings. In reality the Arctic is home to four million people whose everyday lives have been fast-changing and have been impacted by not only the physical changes but also other broader discourses such as geopolitics, scientific research, sustainability and not to forget global crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic. All these myths, representations, and entangled histories and realities lead to the following questions: How have some places, not others, come to be inhabited? What makes a place inhabitable, and for whom? Who has the right to define that? And how do we view different approaches of inhabiting on different scales? Drawing on both conceptual and empirical materials, this article is a joint effort of us as a group of social scientists who are conducting or have conducted research on Svalbard. 1 By telling stories from our respective experiences and backgrounds, we wish to illustrate a more nuanced picture of how economic, geopolitical, scientific, sociocultural, and environmental concerns are always interconnected, and more importantly, how different forms of (in)voluntary inhabiting and uninhabiting in Svalbard, in particular in Longyearbyen and Svea, can possibly lead to or have led to various makings and becomings.
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Photographic recordings from the 1950s–1970s give us glimpses into the Soviet settlements on Svalbard during the Cold War period. The majority of these pictures have been taken by Norwegians during friendly exchanges with the inhabitants in Barentsburg and Pyramiden, and demonstrate how important culture and sport were as a contact zone. These pictures also testify that the Soviets invested more seriously in their welfare, culture, education and family life on Svalbard than the Norwegians did. Photography seems to be a way of seeing, meeting and understanding others, and a way of confirming the existence of a common world on Svalbard. However, the Soviet Consul’s strict control of photographing practices may be seen as part of a propagandizing regime, in line with the Soviet imagery which spread even to this remote Arctic place. Owing to the cultural museums’ digitizing projects and to private sharing on social media, photographs from this period have become increasingly available, ...
Nordlit, 2020
Cultural landscapes represent social structures, interests, and values. At the same time, the observer can derive, interpret, reinterpret, and inscribe new meanings to the landscape. Landscapes that are saturated with ideologically charged symbols dictate to the viewer what can and cannot be seen and derived from them. On the other hand, landscapes that are abandoned, ruined, partly erased, and deprived of actors, activities, and political context present a different sort of setting. What can be derived from them? What or whom do they represent? Can the current conceptualisations help to capture their meanings? This paper attempts to expand the debate on cultural landscapes, by exploring the linkages to the concepts of haunting and ghosts. It uses the Russian settlements of Barentsburg, Pyramiden, and Grumant, located in Svalbard (Norway), as an example. The paper argues that ruined and abandoned landscapes are 'haunted', and that the viewer can engage with a haunted landscape through interactions with 'ghosts'-fictitious agents that fulfil two roles: i) allowing the viewer to associate with the ghost, and ii) reminding the viewer of the bygone actors, forces, and contexts that shaped the landscape.
Arctic Late Industrialism: extracting value through abstraction
Arctic Abstractive Industry: Assessmbling the Valuable and Vulnerable North, Berghahn Press, 2022
During a recent visit to the Lofoten Islands of Arctic Norway, some colleagues and I visited a seaweed harvesting company committed to protecting the marine environment through their use of sustainable methods. What struck me was how dependent our conversation quickly became on the use of a computer screen. The employees utilized digital mapping tools where data about seaweed collection was rendered into seductively crisp images. Over the next several days, our traveling seminar continued to exchange (inter)disciplinary knowledge, mediated as often as not by the support of a well-crafted slide deck. I could not help but think that telling stories in the circumpolar North increasingly relies on ready-made digital platforms. Looking back to another phase of my life in the Arctic, working among the Alutiiq/Sugpiaq of southwestern Alaska during the 1990s, I recalled a version of heritage work wherein the dimensions and values of Indigenous traditions were still mediated through nondigital materials: physical objects, scaff olded by forms of knowing that reached back before the written record. Yet the community-based spaces where this work took place did not fetishize the local or the analog. Rather, they were sites for the creation of a sense of Alaska Native self-awareness and identity explicitly defi ned in relation to outside experts along new axes of common purpose. This passage from an unbroken chain of fi rsthand knowledge accumulation to a moment in which the Arctic is being reimagined as digi
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This article presents the results of fieldwork undertaken over the last four summers at a World War II prisoner of war camp at Sværholt in northernmost Norway. The labour camp for Soviet prisoners was established in 1942 as part of the construction of the German coastal battery at Sværholt, a fortification within the Atlantic Wall. In late fall 1944 the camp, the coastal fort, and the local Norwegian hamlet were abandoned and destroyed in step with the massive and abrupt German retreat from this northern region. This paper describes the remains of the camp and the coastal fort, as still manifest in the barren landscape, and presents in detail the findings of excavations and associated investigations conducted in the camp area. Analysing these findings, particular emphasis is placed on the question of what an archaeological approach can divulge concerning the camp, its construction and conditions, and the ‘trivial’ details of everyday life often passed over by historical accounts. Ultimately, we suggest that the things found challenge our common assumptions about the relationship between prisoners, guards, and locals, and further discuss to what extent the forced encounter at Sværholt also may have included some measures of sympathy within the yet hostile context of war and occupation.
Inconsolable Narrative: Siberian Ruins
Medium, 2025
I got around to editing and publishing an ethnographic essay on Siberian ruins, memory, history, nodding to the Soviet ruins' contribution to the Russian war, cultural history of ruins--things that occupied me during my Siberian travels: Siberia is closed to me now. The public stance I took against the Russian war in Ukraine ensured that I would never return. Even if I could, I doubt I would want to. The thought of stepping back into a country responsible for such profound suffering fills me with unease. Yet, as I reflect on my years of research there, I cannot ignore how deeply my work — examining Soviet ruins and their entanglement with nationalism and Russian self-perception — seems to almost predict the war that unfolded. During my time in Eastern Siberia, I was drawn to the remnants of the Soviet era, the way these structures lingered as both physical and ideological specters. The ruins seemed inert at first, but they were far from empty. They carried a potency I came to describe as “toxic,” capable of contaminating the present with the unresolved weight of the past. My interlocutors, as I called them, didn’t merely pass through these spaces. They inhabited them emotionally, projecting onto them their grievances, their nostalgia, and their hopes. Walking alongside them, I listened as they interpreted these places. In the Alarsky subdistrict, they spoke of the crumbling buildings with a mix of reverence and disdain, as if the bricks themselves held answers to their fractured identity. The “palace of pioneers” in Bratsk was another story — a decayed monument to a vanished utopia, one that still whispered promises of collective progress. And then there was the Alexandrovsky tsentral, the central prison in Irkutsk District, where the past’s grip was suffocatingly close, its walls steeped in tales of suffering and control.