Homewarding Remoteness: Representations, agency and everyday life in a tundra village (NW Russia)

• Main Author: Mankova, Petia
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: UiT Norges arktiske universitet 2018
• Subjects: Northwestern Russia; everyday life; remoteness; rural tundra village; Komi people; VDP::Samfunnsvitenskap: 200::Samfunnsgeografi: 290; VDP::Social science: 200::Human geography: 290; DOKTOR-001; Izhma; Kola Peninsula; Lovozero; Murmansk; Izhma-Komi; kola peninsula; sami; Tundra
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10037/12107

The papers of this thesis are not available in Munin. Paper I: Mankova, P. (2017). The Komi of the Kola Peninsula within ethnographic descriptions and state policies. Available in Nationalities Papers, 46(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2017.1345882 Paper II: Mankova, P. (2017). A Safe Harbour in Stormy Winds: Educational Reforms and Social Poetics in a Russian Tundra Village. (Manuscript). Paper III: Mankova, P. (2017). Making sense of the remote areas: films and stories from a tundra village. (Manuscript). Paper IV: Mankova, P. (2017) Heterogeneity and Spontaneity: reindeer races, bureaucratic designs and indigenous transformations at The Festival of the North in Murmansk. Available in Acta Borealia, 34(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/08003831.2017.1397440 In remote geographical areas, state power and modernization processes often slow down, become subverted or fail. For the people who live there the everyday life usually brings other worries and concerns. Based on anthropological fieldwork in Krasnoshchelye, a remote tundra village in Murmansk region, the dissertation addresses questions of remoteness. Inspired by the spatial theories of Michel de Certeau and Doreen Massey, it describes the village as an open space where the trajectories of governmental strategies, popular representations, collective projects and individual undertakings exist simultaneously. They intersect in different ways through time. Such approach embosses the temporary and transient nature of all human agency and shows that the village is never isolated or backward. The thesis consists of an introductory essay and four articles. In the introductory essay I address the dynamic nature of the relationship between abstract ideas of remoteness and everyday life. The four articles show how this relationship affects ethnographic descriptions, educational institutions, mass media, local storytelling, and public events as the Festival of the North. At the same time, by focusing on the century old Izhma Komi diaspora in an area considered and recognized as traditional for the indigenous Sami people (Lovozero District), in a region (Murmansk region) where the majority today is constituted of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and many other nationalities, I also question ideas of home and belonging.