Embracing uncertainty: porous and actionable responses to climate change at the borders of Indigenous and scientific expertise(s) in Siberia

Abstract

This article explores uncertainty as an onto‐epistemological concept that reveals integrative capacities of Indigenous and scientific knowledge. Looking at official scientific approaches to climate change in Russia, it traces how Indigenous peoples in Siberia navigate their lives as they continue to witness anthropogenic causes of climatic degradation intertwined with forceful denial of Indigenous needs and sociopolitical turbulence. By focusing on two ethnographic accounts involving Indigenous Eveny and Nanai, the article explores how uncertainty, and in particular environmental uncertainty, can be dealt with, acted upon, and deployed productively while broadening our understandings of vulnerability, agency, and resilience. Drawing on discrete Indigenous strategies of hariok among Nanai and nyamnin among Eveny, the analysis reveals a pathway to think about adaptive potentialities of uncertainty as a mode of responding to rapidly shifting environmental and sociopolitical conditions.