The Siberian World provides a window onto the expansive and diverse world of Siberian society, offering valuable insights into how local populations view their environments, adapt to change, promote traditions, and maintain infrastructure. Siberian society comprises more than 30 Indigenous groups, old Russian settlers, and more recent newcomers and their descendants from all over the former Soviet Union and Russian Federation. The chapters examine a variety of interconnected themes, including language revitalization, legal pluralism, ecology, trade, religion, climate change, and co-creation of practices and identities with state programs and policies. The book's ethnographically-rich contributions highlight Indigenous voices, important theoretical concepts, and practices. The material connects with wider discussions of perception of the environment, climate change, cultural and linguistic change, urbanization, Indigenous rights, Arctic politics, globalization, and sustainability/resilience. The Siberian World will be of interest to scholars from many disciplines, including, Indigenous studies, anthropology, archaeology, geography, environmental history, political science, and sociology.

Climatic conditions, economic development strategies, health and education concerns, social relationships, and shifting political agendas all contribute to a sense of ongoing change in Arctic societies. This volume presents twenty-two chapters that address various forms and issues of (in)security in the Arctic. The work shows that the outcomes of resource scarcity or abundance are equally important to consider, that disparities in income as much as opportunities deserve our attention, and that the movement of populations to and from the Arctic is meaningful for those who leave as well as for those who stay.

What does it mean to speak Sakha in the city? Words Like Birds, a linguistic ethnography of Sakha discourses and practices in urban far eastern Russia, examines the factors that have aided speakers in maintaining-and adapting-their minority language over the course of four hundred years of contact with Russian speakers and the federal power apparatus. Words Like Birds analyzes modern Sakha linguistic sensibilities and practices in the urban space of Yakutsk. Sakha is a north Siberian Turkic language spoken primarily in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) in the northeastern Russian Federation. For Sakha speakers, Russian colonization in the region inaugurated a tumultuous history in which their language was at times officially supported and promoted and at other times repressed and discouraged. Jenanne Ferguson explores the communicative norms that arose in response to the top-down promotion of the Russian language in the public sphere and reveals how Sakha ways of speaking became emplaced in villages and the city's private spheres. Focusing on the language ideologies and practices of urban bilingual Sakha-Russian speakers, Ferguson illuminates the changes that have taken place in the first two post-Soviet decades, in contexts where Russian speech and communicative norms dominated during the Soviet era. Weaving together three major themes-language ideologies and ontologies, language trajectories, and linguistic syncretism-this study reveals how Sakha speakers transform and adapt their beliefs, evaluations, and practices to revalorize a language, maintain and create a sense of belonging, and make their words heard in Sakha again in many domains of city life. Like the moveable spirited words, the focus of Words Like Birds is mobility, change, and flow, the tracing of the situation of bilinguals in Yakutsk.