News & Events

Francisco Apurinã and Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen presented a paper: Futuros amazônicos através dos valores, conhecimentos e histórias orais do povo Apurinã

(Amazonian Futures through values, knowledges and oral histories of Apurinã people).

The workshop was co-organised with Carlos Londono-Sulkin and Dan Rosengren.

 

 

On 9.5.2023 we welcomed Francisco in Helsinki and had our first whole team meeting in the premises of Sofia co-working space. We shared our own personal and research experiences, found a lot of similarities in similarly different geographical, biological, and cultural areas, and planned our next project activities. More news will follow after summer!

Victoria Peemot gave a talk in frames of a new seminar series “Indigenous / Decolonial Methodologies Research Methods” (led by Reetta Humalajoki and Nadia Mamontova) at the University of Turku, Finland.
Abstract. Ontologies of Indigenous peoples are inseparable from their epistemologies. The questions What do I know? and How do I know it? are underlined by one’s relationships with the kinship group, homelands, and nonhuman animals. I approach Inner Asian onto-epistemologies through a Tyvan guesting practice aaldaar. I expand on understandings of the guesting practice and introduce it as a theoretical concept and field research methodology. First, I lean on the concept of guesting in analysing the normative regulations of relationships within land-based, human-nonhuman kinship (cher törel) systems. Second, I suggest that a researcher (myself) inadvertently participates in the cher törel kinship relationship and follows its regulations. This notion frames aaldaar as a responsible knowledge exchange between a guest-researcher and hosts—human-nonhuman communities in the Saian and Altai Mountains of Inner Asia.

Victoria Peemot gave a guest lecture for postgraduate students in Museum Studies, University of Helsinki.

Victoria Peemot gave a talk “A Kin, Adversary, and an Intermediary: the Wolf Among the Pastoralists in the Altai and Saian Mountains” at the AMI (Animals Make Identities) Zoom seminar series, University of Helsinki.
I analyse a confrontation between one she-wolf and a multispecies community, comprising several herding families with their domesticated animals, which happened in the Tes river area, the Tyva Republic, in summer 2019. I draw on this case-study and other encounters with a wolf (Canis lupus) during fieldwork in the transboundary region between the Altai and Saian Mountains to seek answers to the following research questions:
• How do we understand the pastoralists’ conflicting attitudes towards a wolf?
• What are the customary regulations of the relationship between a multispecies community and a wolf?
• How are the landscapes and domesticated and wild animals participate in the dynamic knowledge exchange between herders and wolves?
Photo by Aija Macane.

Mapping a wolf story @Victoria Peemot.

Invited talk by Victoria Peemot at the International Interdisciplinary Workshop “Rapid Arctic Warming and its Impact on Indigenous Peoples and Other Communities”, section “Impacts of Arctic Warming on Indigenous Societies and Food Culture”, moderators Associate Professor Shiaki Kondo and Associate Professor Yuka Oishi, Kobe University.

Abstract. My lecture explores the impact of climate change on food practices of mobile pastoralist households in the Altai-Sayan Uplands in North Asia. The focus is on multispecies communities which consist of pastoralist families and various species of domesticated animals: horses, reindeer, yaks, cows, camels, sheep, and goats. The domesticates are a base for subsistence: they are sold, exchanged for goods, used as a food source, and help in herding work. Leaning on ethnographic fieldwork with multispecies communities in the Altai and Sayan Mountains from 2015 to 2022, I discuss the pastoralists’ food practices which take into consideration a number of factors: animals’ condition in different seasons, cultural understanding of animals and animal products—meat and dairy, lack of access to energy sources, a landscape, and harsh continental climate in which people and animals live. The discussion draws attention to the current disruptions in the food-related practices, caused by and connected with global warming: drought, lack of snow, and a change in the seasonal variation characteristics of temperature, precipitation, and winds.

https://www.nipr.ac.jp/aerc/e/info/20230117.html

Shiaki Kondo, Victoria Peemot and Yuka Oishi, Tachikawa, Japan, 10 March 2023.

 

 

Victoria Peemot has participated in the Seventh International Symposium on Arctic Research (ISAR-7) held at the Japan Consortium for Arctic Research, Tachikawa, Tokyo. Her talk was part of Session 16 “Making of Arctic Exhibition and Material Study: the Potential of Collaboration Study with Local People”, March 7, 2023.
Title. The Relational Exhibition: Connecting Landscapes, Communities, and Research Archives.
Abstract. This study explores the ways in which the archival photography exhibition negotiates the relationships within and between different community groups. My case-study for this project is the black and white photography exhibition entitled “In Search Of Gold In Siberia:
The Heritage Of The Finnish Geological Expedition to Uriankhai in 1917” and its opening event which took place on January 13th, 2016, in the Nordic Culture Point in Helsinki, Finland. The exhibition was a result of then three-year-long work on the heritage of the Finnish geological expedition to Uriankhai which is currently known as the Tyva Republic in
North Asia, a part of (Soviet) Russia since 1944. I have collaborated on this heritage project with Sjundby Traditionsförening—a community organization based in the Swedish-speaking municipality of Sjundby (its Finnish name is Siuntio) in southern Finland. The head of the organization is retired farmer Carl-Johan Lindén whose father, Erik Lindén, participated in the
1917 expedition to Tyva. Prior to the exhibition, in summer 2013, we followed the 1917 expedition’s routes in Tyva together with Carl-Johan Lindén and three members of his family. During the trip, we visited the same locations featured in the archival photographs, shared the historical expedition’s
story with local communities and tried to identify descendants of people who were photographed back in 1917. I have continued the same work in the following years, while conducting ethnographic fieldwork for my doctoral and postdoctoral research projects. I approach the exhibition (its preparation, assembling the photographs and artefacts, and the opening programme) as a social process which connected its diverse audiences: the Sjundby community, researchers, people who are interested in Tyva, and numerous descendants of the 1917 expedition’s members from Finland and abroad. In this work, I discuss how each of these groups makes use of the exhibition. https://www.jcar.org/isar-7/program/

Afternoon in the Science Basement” talk series at the Helsinki Oodi Library, 25 February 2023.  In this talk, Victoria shares her experience with unfolding maps and tracing routes of the Finnish researchers in my home region between the Altai and Sayan Mountains in Inner Asia. She has followed the footsteps of the geographer Johannes Gabriel Granö and the 1917 Finnish geological expedition led by Jakob Johannes Sederholm in territories currently part of the Tyva Republic and western Mongolia. Their experiences and Johannes Granö’s concept of perception of the environment, which emphasizes the senses of a perceiving person, have inspired my sensory approaches to the study of relationships between pastoralists, land, and animals. Victoria discusses how the researcher facilitates the mutual sharing and co-producing of knowledge between local communities in Asia and research centers and archives in Europe.

Photo  by Anastasiia Marmyleva.