The making of a home in a changing northern context: an ethnographic account of contemporary housing practices among Russian reindeer nomads

Abstract

The article offers an ethnographic account of contemporary housing practices among nomadic reindeer herders in the Russian North. We draw on the results of an extensive fieldwork in several locations to describe how the making of mobile homes incorporates traditional and advanced technologies, and implicitly reflects the ongoing changes in the living and working environment of the communities under study. By observing the actions of planning, building, inhabiting and resettling embodied in a variety of dwelling designs, we have identified and documented three distinctive modes of resilience expressed in variations of mobile housing in a changing northern context, as follows: (1) facilitating full-time, family-based migration by exercising a well-established local practice of making and using a traditional conical tent; (2) maintaining full-time mobility under changing social and economic circumstances by inventing/developing a genuinely new type of portable dwelling; and (3) compensating the increasing mechanization of work with spontaneously growing complexity of the structure of stationary houses. The article aims to contribute to the emerging field of local adaptation and resilience by shedding light on the materiality of adaptive strategies and human creativity involved.