"Inimkond": Vladimir Davydov

Next week's Inimkond seminar, on November 12th from 6-8pm, will be held by Vladimir Davydov, Head of the Siberian Ethnography Department at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in St Petersburg. His seminar title is From ‘Wild’ to ‘Tame’: Reindeer Domestication in Eastern Siberia (Russia).

The seminar will take place in T-415, Tallinn University Terra building. All are welcome!

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Abstract:
Even though reindeer domestication has been perceived as a fact that occurred in the remote past, ethnographic examples from Evenki reindeer herders’ camps in Eastern Siberia show that it is an on-going process. Reindeer herders continuously invest a lot of efforts to make these animals closer to them. Moreover, human-reindeer relations are embedded into a set of interspecies relations where ‘wild’ and ‘tame’ are relative categories and the degree of remoteness or closeness of animals to people is constantly changing. In many cases, researchers have neglected how human-animal relationships were emplaced in the landscape. Domestication is never attributed to one certain place. Rather it is a process which involves movements between particular places and structures and should be described as domestication-in-practice. This paper focuses on how people employ particular parts of landscape and architecture in the reindeer domestication process and which strategies they use to make reindeer return to the same places.

Biography:
Vladimir Davydov received his PhD in anthropology at the University of Aberdeen (UK) in 2012. He works as Head of the Siberian Ethnography department at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia. He is also Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, UK and Honorary Research Fellow at CEARC, University of Versailles, France. He has conducted extensive fieldwork among Evenki and Dolgan hunters and reindeer herders. His main research interests concern human-animal-landscape relations, environmental ethics and use of space by reindeer herders and hunters.


Seminar Series:
Inimkond: Current Issues in Anthropology and Beyond
full program at http://www.tlu.ee/en/estonian-institute-of-humanities/Anthropology/inimkond

This seminar series features speakers from anthropology and related fields, and fosters discussion of their research with a transdisciplinary audience. It aims to contribute to the culture of academic scholarship and debate at Tallinn University. Speakers include both local researchers and guests from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and with various takes on anthropological theory and methods. Presentations in the seminar series will be of interest to staff and students in anthropology, cultural theory, sociology, and history, among others.