What can be done when the increasingly unpredictable climatic degradation continues to affect people around the world, distorting their ways of engaging with and thinking about the environment? In her ethnographically rich book about the Sakha from the Russian Far East, Susan Crate considers this question by exploring the entanglements between scientific and indigenous knowledge as they encounter one another in the presence of the Siberian permafrost thaw. Focusing on the Sakha concept of alaas—both a physical and a cultural phenomenon—the book traces the ways in which definitions and experiences of alaas have changed over the last century for both Sakha and Russian scientists. The book argues that to address the current climatic crisis a balanced approach, which includes both scientific and indigenous expertise, is needed.
The breadth and richness of ethnographic detail intertwined with the author's personal observations are the most compelling aspect of the book, as the narrative weaves through historical, transformational, and collaborative angles of the indigenous and scientific knowledge of permafrost. Opening with the history of Sakha origins, Crate invites her readers to get to know the Siberian environment and landscape by diving into the Sakha's fascinating knowledge of permafrost as exemplified in mythical, linguistic, and shamanic heritage. Offering an abundance of ethnographic detail focused on, for example, weather prediction practices, pasture making, and fishing, the book reveals the importance of Sakha's relationship with alaas. Alaas, situated on permafrost, refers to an open area filled with hayfields, pastures, lakes, and forests. While it is a physical entity, it also embodies relationships that Sakha maintain with humans and non-humans, including plants, lakes, glades, spirits, and ancestors. Stressing the importance of alaas for Sakha's identity, Crate effectively illustrates how climate change distorts the practices of managing alaas while, at the same time, revealing the breadth and importance of indigenous knowledge of the environment. This is further intertwined with scientific approaches to alaas, starting with Soviet perceptions of it as serving the goals of economic development to further studies of alaas as a specific type of permafrost ecosystem. Pointing to the dominant tendencies of scientific approaches, Crate clearly shows how alaas in scientific frameworks represents a technically defined landscape subjected to instrumental measuring and modelling, deprived of any cultural or spiritual recognition.
Moving on to the question of social, political, and ecological change, Crate proposes the concept of “complexity of change.” This, the author argues, indicates how climate change cannot be understood without taking into account the diverse variables that communities recognize and prioritize. Offering a unique gallery of personal stories from the Sakha that span from the Soviet Union to current times, these variables are described as changes in intergenerational approaches, wider demographic and economic changes (such as the youth leaving villages to live in cities), changes in management practices surrounding alaas, and weather and climate changes. The complexity of climate change as a field of study is further reinforced by introducing scientific approaches to dynamically changing permafrost and alaas today, in the era of the Anthropocene.
In this way, the author brings the readers to the final theme of the book: a possible collaboration and exchange between scientific and indigenous knowledges on the matters of permafrost and climatic degradation in general. Through discussing a concrete event where such an exchange took place, the author reintroduces her key argument in the book. She stresses that in order to fully grasp the experience and implications of climate change, a better recognition of knowledge shared by the people affected by most climatic degradation must be established. This, in turn, should take place along with a scientific approach and a wider recognition that to address climate change we should finally acknowledge the inherent connection between dynamic biosphere and the interacting ethnosphere.
While the argument calls for collaborative interactions between scientific and indigenous knowledges, there is very little discussion dedicated to why such projects remain problematic, what kind of dynamics, tensions, and inequalities they evoke not only around the world, but also, specifically, in Russia. The way collaboration is presented in the book would benefit from a wider consideration of methods and mechanisms through which such productive interweavements can be achieved or fail. Moreover, there is very little discussion on animism and, in particular, of recent debates and fresh definitions of animism, pivotal for the wider understanding of climate change and indigenous knowledges. Overall, however, the book's ethnographic richness and detail will be of great appeal to anyone concerned with climatic dynamics and indigenous communities in Siberia.
