A right to remoteness? A missing bridge and articulations of indigeneity along an East Siberian railroad

Abstract

The Soviet Union and its successor states have been avid supporters of a modernisation paradigm aimed at ‘overcoming remoteness’ and ‘bringing civilisation’ to the periphery and its ‘backward’ indigenous people. The Baikal–Amur Mainline ( BAM ) railroad, built as a much‐hyped prestige project of late socialism, is a good example of that. The BAM has affected indigenous communities and reconfigured the geographic and social space of East Siberia. Our case study, an Evenki village located fairly close to the BAM , is (in)famous today for its supposed refusal to get connected via a bridge to the nearby railroad town. Some actors portray this disconnection as a sign of backwardness, while others celebrate it as the main reason for native language retention and cultural preservation. Focusing on discourses linking the notions of remoteness and cultural revitalisation, the article argues for conceptualising the story of the missing bridge not as the result of political resistance but rather as an articulation of indigeneity, which foregrounds cultural rights over more contentious political claims. Thus, the article explores constellations of remoteness and indigeneity, posing the question whether there might be a moral right to remoteness to be claimed by those who view spatial distance as a potential resource.

Roads versus Rivers

“…Roads can create economic and social inequality (Harvey and Knox 2015). Russia, in general, and Siberia in particular, although this has not been specifically explored in this article, provide a number of examples of such inequality (see Schweitzer and Povoroznyuk 2019;Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk, and Schiesser 2017). This article demonstrates that roads can also have a psychological dividing effect.…”

“…The indigenous inhabitants, by contrast, still live in a mostly roadless space; most of the traditional settlements on the banks of the rivers still do not have any permanent road connection with the "bigger world." Even in those cases where the roads cross hunting grounds and reindeer pasturelands, the local hunters and herders preferred to move away, retreating to the roadless areas, because it soon turned out that pasturing reindeer and living near a road is difficult and dangerous (for a somewhat similar case from eastern Siberia, see Schweitzer and Povoroznyuk 2019). It is not surprising then that the indigenous inhabi tants of Western Siberia (and also Russians who settled there before the industrialization) still build their relations and perceive their space through the river system.…”

Malfunctioning Affective Infrastructures

“…1. The questions of mobility have a history connecting Siberia to "remoteness," "isolation," and "backwardness" (Kuklina and Holland 2018;Schweitzer and Povoroznyuk 2019). There are assumptions cutting across disciplines and contexts that "mobility" is somehow inherently more desirable than "immobility" (see Khan 2015 andSchewel 2019 seeking to dismantle it).…”

Exquisite Corpses and backward glances: European social anthropology 2019

“…As well as peonising graduate and postdoctoral research staff, this turn drives an output‐oriented, project‐based model of research that can sometimes call into question the integrity of the discipline itself by bringing back the division between ethnography (as a practice of gathering data) and anthropology (as a generalising science). A significant number of articles published in 2019, within the rubric of anthropology, inhabit that borderland that anthropology shares with neighbouring social sciences: with human geography (Saxer and Andersson 2019; Brachet and Scheele 2019; Gardini 2019; Saxer 2019; Gohain 2019; Schweitzer and Povoroznyuk 2019; Luo et al 2019; Fradejas‐Garcia 2019; Andersson 2019); area studies (Goh 2019); urban studies (Civelek 2019; Kobi 2019); development studies (Green 2019); human economics (Diggins 2019; Pied 2019; Henig 2019); and sociology (Miller 2019). Geoffrey Hughes, in his 2018 survey of European anthropology in this journal (Hughes 2018), referred to the rise of what he called ‘meta‐anthropology’, breaking down traditional boundaries between academic knowledge production and knowledge practices, both in the field and in wider political economies, a development he cautiously welcomed as prefiguring a more secure future for the discipline in the age of audit and concrete accountability for so‐called ‘deliverables’.…”