Homewarding Remoteness: Representations, agency and everyday life in a tundra village (NW Russia)

Abstract

In remote geographical areas, state power and modernization processes often slow down, become subverted or fail. For the people who live there the everyday life usually brings other worries and concerns. Based on anthropological fieldwork in Krasnoshchelye, a remote tundra village in Murmansk region, the dissertation addresses questions of remoteness. Inspired by the spatial theories of Michel de Certeau and Doreen Massey, it describes the village as an open space where the trajectories of governmental strategies, popular representations, collective projects and individual undertakings exist simultaneously. They intersect in different ways through time. Such approach embosses the temporary and transient nature of all human agency and shows that the village is never isolated or backward. The thesis consists of an introductory essay and four articles. In the introductory essay I address the dynamic nature of the relationship between abstract ideas of remoteness and everyday life. The four articles show how this relationship affects ethnographic descriptions, educational institutions, mass media, local storytelling, and public events as the Festival of the North. At the same time, by focusing on the century old Izhma Komi diaspora in an area considered and recognized as traditional for the indigenous Sami people (Lovozero District), in a region (Murmansk region) where the majority today is constituted of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and many other nationalities, I also question ideas of home and belonging.