Beyond wilderness: towards an anthropology of infrastructure and the built environment in the Russian North

Abstract

Public and academic discourses about the Polar regions typically focus on the so-called natural environment. While, these discourses and inquiries continue to be relevant, the current article asks the question how to conceptualize the on-going industrial and infrastructural build-up of the Arctic. Acknowledging that the “built environment” is not an invention of modernity, the article nevertheless focuses on large-scale infrastructural projects of the twentieth century, which marks a watershed of industrial and infrastructural development in the north. Given that the Soviet Union was at the vanguard of these developments, the focus will be on Soviet and Russian large-scale projects. We will be discussing two cases of transportation infrastructure, one of them based on an on-going research project being conducted by the authors along the Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) and the other focused on the so-called Northern Sea Route, the marine passage with a long history that has recently been regaining public and academic attention. The concluding section will argue for increased attention to the interactions between humans and the built environment, serving as a kind of programmatic call for more anthropological attention to infrastructure in the Russian north and other polar regions.

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.…”

“…Among various objects of infrastructure, communication routes and facilities and particularly roads (including railways) have been attracting the strong interest of anthropologists. Research has been published on the social, cultural, and political role of roads (e.g., Harvey and Knox 2015;Kaschuba 2004;Snead 2009), including several studies conducted in Siberia (e.g., Argounova-Low 2012; Argounova-Low and Prisyazhnyi 2016; Kuklina, Povoroznyuk, and Saxinger 2019;Povoroznyuk 2016;Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk, and Schiesser 2017;Zuev and Habeck 2019). Chinese anthropologists even announced the birth of a new scientific discipline called "roadology" (Chinese: luxue), an interdisciplinary analysis of roads and their role in the social sphere (Zhou 2016).…”

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

“…Northern regions have a long history of being represented as wilderness and ignoring their built environments (Schweitzer et al . ).…”

“…Such documents are often illustrated with photos of 'unspoiled' nature and of Evenki people in national costumes, emphasising the otherness of Evenki culture. Northern regions have a long history of being represented as wilderness and ignoring their built environments (Schweitzer et al 2017).…”

Mobilizing Benefit-Sharing Through Transportation Infrastructure: Informal Roads, Extractive Industries and Benefit-Sharing in the Irkutsk Oil and Gas Region, Russia

“…Some forms of traditional mobilities are disrupted and hindered by new infrastructural development which is sometimes conceptualized as "infrastructural violence" [13,16]. There are numerous examples illustrating roads as undesirable for local communities and harmful for the environment [17]. Remoteness and extreme climate conditions lead to use of non-local workforces in extractive development areas and result in changes in mobilities [18][19][20][21].…”