30 September 2013: Double lecture

Peter Jordan: Reconstructing cultural dynamics in Northwest Siberia: archaeology, history and ethnography

This talk will examine the rich cultural history of Northwest Siberia, which lies just behind the Ural Mountains, and consists of the extensive wetlands and floodplains of the Ob River. Although Siberia is often perceived in Europe as being a remote and uninhabited land, this region has been inhabited for many millennia by various hunting, fishing and gathering cultures. Using a combination of archaeological evidence, historical archives and recent ethnographic data, this lecture will look at some of the long-term cultural transformations that have taken place in the region. These include the arrival of new technologies into the area, the incorporation of Siberia into the medieval fur trade, the Russian conquest and colonial period, as well as later Soviet and post Soviet transformations. Specific attention is directed at understanding the history of one ethnic group; the Khanty. Lecture themes include adaptation to northern ecology, historical geography, circumpolar colonisalism, shamansim and spirituality, sacred landscape geography, environmental change, modern Siberian indigenous peoples and cultural resilience.

Roza Laptander: Oral history of Nenets people

My research is called "Socio-cultural change of Uralic languages' minority in 20-21st century Siberia analyzed through Nenets life stories". I do collecting, documenting, describing and analyzing the oral history of Nenets people. The idea of the project is that all Nenets people's memories are part of their national history. Methods of oral history help to open the alternative unknown history of Nenets, one of 2

the Uralic language speaking Northern Minority nations of the Russian Federation. In the transitional periods when one political regime changed to another, people's memories tell us about this time of socio-cultural and political changes in a way how they remember it. By telling stories about the past Nenets make these events come alive again not just for themselves, but also for young members of their society. Every oral story, every narrative of individuals contains rich information about the previous time, which is usually not available in any written form and they transfer lessons about experiences of the past to the present time, for e.g. how locals intersected with larger social, historical and political processes in a big country such as Russia in the transitional periods when one political regime changed to another. These collected sources tell about the life of Nenets at the beginning of the 20th century until today.