Anastasia Ulturgasheva: Crafting Futurities on Thawing Grounds: Climate Change, Terrafrontiering, and Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Siberian Arctic

Abstract

This PhD thesis examines how Eveny reindeer-herding communities in northeastern Siberia negotiate the converging pressures of climate change, extractive expansion, and settler colonial governance. The analysis is based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork (2021–2022) in two Eveny villages in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), supported by participant observation in kin networks, cohabitation with multigenerational households, and conversations. 

The thesis makes three contributions. First, it introduces terrafrontiering as an original concept to capture how extractive regimes simultaneously saturate and abandon Indigenous territories, treating lands as empty resource zones and Indigenous villages as logistical hubs. These oscillations, historically rooted in Soviet Gulag infrastructures and persisting in post-Soviet mining economies, produce lasting social and ecological disruptions. Second, it develops a cosmopolitical approach that recognises permafrost and ice as active participants in shaping mobilities and more-than-human relations in the Siberian Arctic. Third, it focuses on the gendered dimensions of thawing permafrost, showing how women’s mobility is affected by climate change and the influx of rotational mining labour. 

The thesis is methodologically informed by ethnographic attention to relationality, engaging with Indigenous thought through a cosmopolitical lens that foregrounds obligations between human and more-than-human beings. It draws on Marisol de la Cadena’s (2015) notion of enacted presence to demonstrate how Eveny material practices unsettle the one-world doctrine (Law 2015) and articulate Indigenous futurities that resist colonial temporalities of progress.

The study contributes to the anthropology of climate change and the Anthropocene, Indigenous scholarship and decolonial studies of Arctic extractivism, and debates on more-than-human relations. In doing so, it challenges both technocratic narratives of linear progress and museum-like portrayals of Indigenous practice as static heritage. Instead, it demonstrates how Eveny hybrid technologies, such as the strategic combination of snowmobiles and reindeer sledges, constitute adaptive, future-oriented practices. The thesis thus highlights Eveny future-making as a form of cosmopolitical practice grounded in relational ethics that persist despite, and against, colonial and extractive disruptions.