Water, Water Everywhere: Perceptions of Chaotic Water Regimes in Northeastern Siberia, Russia
This paper explores applied anthropological research examining perceptions, understandings and responses to increasing water on the land, one of the major effects of global climate change for native Viliui Sakha agropastoralist communities of northeastern
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Water, Water Everywhere: Perceptions of Chaotic Water Regimes in Northeastern Siberia, Russia Susan A. Crate Abstract This paper explores applied anthropological research examining perceptions, understandings and responses to increasing water on the land, one of the major effects of global climate change for native Viliui Sakha agropastoralist communities of northeastern Siberia, Russia. The paper draws on fieldwork investigating perceptions, understandings and responses to the local effects of global climate change for native Viliui Sakha agropastoralist communities of northeastern Siberia, Russia. For Viliui Sakha, global climate change translates locally into a highly altered climate system and water regime. 2008 fieldwork shows Inhabitants observing warmer winters, increased snowfall, excessive precipitation, changed seasonality, and the transformation of their ancestral landscape due to increased water on the land and degrading permafrost. One urgent change is how the increased water on the land is turning hayfields into lakes, inundating households and ruining transportation networks. The increasing water on the land interferes with subsistence and threatens to undermine settlement. Beyond these physical changes, what does the increased water on the land mean to Viliui Sakha? Inhabitants expressed not only concern about their future but also common fear that they would ‘go under water.’ Water has visceral meaning to Sakha, based on their historically-based belief system, their adaptation to their environment, and knowledge system. In response, 2009 field research looked in more depth at communities’ perceptions of water, and worked to bring those perceptions and beliefs into our 2010 knowledge exchange exercise. This paper will present our initial findings and make suggestions on how these findings can be understood more broadly for other peoples unprecedentedly affected by water crises in the face of global climate change. Keywords Climate change • Anthropology • Local perceptions • Water • Viliui Sakha • Siberia • Russia
S.A. Crate (*) George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 T. Hiyama, H. Takakura (eds.), Global Warming and Human - Nature Dimension in Northern Eurasia, Global Environmental Studies, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4648-3_1
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1.1 Introduction The climate is definitely different from before … For people who live with a short summer when there needs to be the right weather to accomplish all for the winter, and there are cool rainy times so that the hay does not dry and has to sit and sit and the quality is bad because of that … it is the right time for haying but the conditions are all wrong. – Sakha elder
At the end of a 2003–2005 research project1 focusing on understanding local definitions of sustainability in Viliui Sakha villages of northeastern Siberia, Russia (Crate 2006a), our research team administered a survey to gauge the extent that what inhabitants expressed concern about in focus groups and semi-str
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