No abstract

Notwithstanding the gradual intensification of contacts across the different parts of the circumpolar North, research on gender in the Arctic is still a fragmented fieldnot the least because of language barriers. The four cases presented here, all from the Far North of Russia, are intended to complement research on gender in North America and the Nordic countries. We also hope they will encourage wider use of feminist approaches in geography and social sciences. After a first overview of how gender emerged as a topic of study in the circumpolar North, the introduction will focus on gender-specific forms of mobility and immobility. Next, gender will be discussed in relation to identity and intersectionality under colonial and post-colonial conditions. Thereafter, Feminist Political Ecology and other theoretical directions are portrayed as theoretical approaches to studying gendered economies. Such contextualization of the study of gender in the Arctic prepares the ground for short summaries of the four papers in this special issue, to be concluded by a brief statement about future directions of research. Particularly the concept of intersectionality is favored as a useful basis for examining gender, indigeneity, and economic differences.

The article is ba.sed on longitudinal fieldwork with reindeer herders in the Kola Peninsula, northwest Russia. Its main ethnographic focus is SKhPK 'Tundra' (sel'sko khoziastvennaia ptoizvoditet'naia kooperatsiia -agricultural producing cooperative) of Lovozero. The main argument is that a state of communal affairs under the dominance of the state farm isovkhoz). during the Soviet period, privileged domestic economies of the farm workers to be supported by the collective assets of the farm. The authors sec this state of "private-in-the-collective" arrangement as "sovkhoisni" and view the present variety of rural organisational forms in Russia as greater or lesser departures from it.

Reindeer herding, a tourism emblem of the European North, is also part of a longlasting tradition of objectification of Sami culture in Russia. Sustained in the popular imagination by Russian ethnography, the dominant order's agent for legitimization of Soviet ethnic policies, in the 1990s the tradition of exoticization and ''othering'' was strengthened by Western anthropological and political engagement with the indigenous debate in Russia, transposing on the Sami the imagery and ideals of the global indigenous movement. Business aspirations to utilize the persistent imagery of exotic otherness gave birth to ethnographic tourism in the Kola Peninsula, Northwest Russia, which markets indigenous culture as an attraction. In this paper, I analyze how these diverse discourses equally reify and exploit the concept of Sami reindeer herding and the effects that such representational economy has on the community.