Beyond wilderness: towards an anthropology of infrastructure and the built environment in the Russian North
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. A...
| Published in: | The Polar Journal |
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| Main Authors: | , , |
| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Routledge
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5632953/ https://doi.org/10.1080/2154896X.2017.1334427 |
| Summary: | 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. |
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