Olga Ulturgasheva – författare

A new direction for collaborative climate science, grounded in Indigenous concepts of togetherness, sharing, and generative convergenceAcross universities, labs, NGOs, and public agencies, collaboration has become a compulsory virtue, especially in climate and environmental science. Many such partnerships with Indigenous communities, however, are largely performative, with Indigenous participation merely tokenistic. These collaborations are often rushed by funding cycles, shaped by prestige hierarchies, and organized so that Indigenous expertise is consulted, extracted, or translated into “data,” while scientific agendas stay largely unchanged. In Reimagining Collaboration, social anthropologist Olga Ulturgasheva offers a new analytic and practical model for collaborative climate science: coupling, a deliberate, mediated convergence of distinct knowledge traditions that does not erase difference but uses it to generate new capacities for action.Ulturgasheva emphasizes the importance of the skilled facilitator or “human interface” (often an Indigenous scholar) as a catalyst for the encounter between scientific and Indigenous knowledge. Drawing on fifteen years of fieldwork and close engagement with cross-disciplinary projects, Ulturgasheva—herself a member of the Eveny Indigenous community of Siberia—shows that these collaborations succeed or fail at the level of method: how problems are framed, who gets to define evidence, what counts as proof, and how authority is silently reproduced. She proposes a set of principles, grounded in Eveny concepts of togetherness, sharing, and generative convergence, for designing collaborations that are ethical, scientifically robust, and aligned with the values of decolonization.Olga Ulturgasheva is associate professor in social anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Narrating the Future in Siberia and the coeditor of Risky Futures.

A new direction for collaborative climate science, grounded in Indigenous concepts of togetherness, sharing, and generative convergenceAcross universities, labs, NGOs, and public agencies, collaboration has become a compulsory virtue, especially in climate and environmental science. Many such partnerships with Indigenous communities, however, are largely performative, with Indigenous participation merely tokenistic. These collaborations are often rushed by funding cycles, shaped by prestige hierarchies, and organized so that Indigenous expertise is consulted, extracted, or translated into “data,” while scientific agendas stay largely unchanged. In Reimagining Collaboration, social anthropologist Olga Ulturgasheva offers a new analytic and practical model for collaborative climate science: coupling, a deliberate, mediated convergence of distinct knowledge traditions that does not erase difference but uses it to generate new capacities for action.Ulturgasheva emphasizes the importance of the skilled facilitator or “human interface” (often an Indigenous scholar) as a catalyst for the encounter between scientific and Indigenous knowledge. Drawing on fifteen years of fieldwork and close engagement with cross-disciplinary projects, Ulturgasheva—herself a member of the Eveny Indigenous community of Siberia—shows that these collaborations succeed or fail at the level of method: how problems are framed, who gets to define evidence, what counts as proof, and how authority is silently reproduced. She proposes a set of principles, grounded in Eveny concepts of togetherness, sharing, and generative convergence, for designing collaborations that are ethical, scientifically robust, and aligned with the values of decolonization.Olga Ulturgasheva is associate professor in social anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Narrating the Future in Siberia and the coeditor of Risky Futures.

Amazonia and Siberia, classic regions of shamanism, have long challenged ‘western’ understandings of man’s place in the world. By exploring the social relations between humans and non-human entities credited with human-like personhood (not only animals and plants, but also ‘things’ such as artifacts, trade items, or mineral resources) from a comparative perspective, this volume offers valuable insights into the constitutions of humanity and personhood characteristic of the two areas. The contributors conducted their ethnographic fieldwork among peoples undergoing transformative processes of their lived environments, such as the depletion of natural resources and migration to urban centers. They describe here fundamental relational modes that are being tested in the face of change, presenting groundbreaking research on personhood and agency in shamanic societies and contributing to our global understanding of social and cultural change and continuity.

The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian indigenous peoples, it presents the young people's narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study brings a new perspective to the anthropology of childhood and uncovers a quite unexpected dynamic in narrating and foreshadowing the future while relating it to cultural patterns of prediction and fulfillment in nomadic cosmology. Olga Ulturgasheva is Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the Scott Polar Research Institute and Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.She has carried out fieldwork for a decade in Siberia on childhood, youth, religion, reindeer herding and hunting and coedited Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn Books 2012).

Amazonia and Siberia, classic regions of shamanism, have long challenged ‘western’ understandings of man’s place in the world. By exploring the social relations between humans and non-human entities credited with human-like personhood (not only animals and plants, but also ‘things’ such as artifacts, trade items, or mineral resources) from a comparative perspective, this volume offers valuable insights into the constitutions of humanity and personhood characteristic of the two areas. The contributors conducted their ethnographic fieldwork among peoples undergoing transformative processes of their lived environments, such as the depletion of natural resources and migration to urban centers. They describe here fundamental relational modes that are being tested in the face of change, presenting groundbreaking research on personhood and agency in shamanic societies and contributing to our global understanding of social and cultural change and continuity.

The volume examines complex intersections of environmental conditions, geopolitical tensions and local innovative reactions characterising ‘the Arctic’ in the early twenty-first century. What happens in the region (such as permafrost thaw or methane release) not only sweeps rapidly through local ecosystems but also has profound global implications. Bringing together a unique combination of authors who are local practitioners, indigenous scholars and international researchers, the book provides nuanced views of the social consequences of climate change and environmental risks across human and non-human realms.