Human-Reindeer Well-Being Under Threat in the Arctic: The Case of Kola Peninsula Indigenous Communities
摘要
This chapter critically analyzes the governance of Indigenous people and reindeer in the Russian Arctic. Building on Indigenous descriptions, I construct an anthropological understanding of human-reindeer relations as emplaced shared existence. I focus on the well-being of Indigenous reindeer herding communities through their relationships with non-humans. Attention to resilience helps uncover the capacity of social-ecological systems to cope with disturbances and destructive effects of deteriorating climatic-environmental and political-social conditions in the Arctic. I employ post-structuralist criticism of resilience and a frame of biopolitics developed in the analysis of nature conservation and climate change interventions in political ecology. The chapter describes the transformation of the only protected natural territory in the Kola Peninsula, Russia, which aimed to revive, protect, and support Sami environmental practices, culture, and livelihoods like reindeer herding, through a series of interventions seeking to improve resilience and Sami rights. However, Sami protested these changes, and Russia's authorities and mine industry displaced interdependent human-reindeer existence and replaced it with subjectivities and relations that align with industrial exploitation and commoditization.