"Where do you get fish?": Practices of individual supplies in Yamal as an indicator of social processes

Abstract

While there have long been communities in the Arctic where natives and incomers live together, many anthropological works on the region focus either on the natives or on the incomers exclusively. This article based on field data collected in the three points of the Yamal (Iar-Sale, Salekhard, and Salemal) where natives and incomers have long lived together, shows how this default distinction often employed by researchers and local authorities works differently in actual everyday practices of mixed communities. The author describes the practices aimed at compensating for the infrastructural deficits and insufficient supplies in the Yamal through the use of social networks to acquire necessary food and goods. The analysis shows that mixed communities of Yamal are more complex than previously thought and that the dichotomy of "incomers/ natives" is not adequate to describe them.