SILENCE

About sounds and their absence in the Arctic.
A photographic blog by Laur Vallikivi
Arctic Studies Centre, University of Tartu

THIS IS ABOUT

silence as a human and natural phenomenon in the Arctic.

It is often hard to determine whether silence is an absence or a presence. Silence in human communication can move between agreement and tension. The question is when silence is revelation, concealment, or self-defence or all of them at the same time. And because of the intense ambiguity of silence people can interpret the same silence differently, especially at the borderlines of different cultures.

As an anthropologist I have done my research in the Arctic living with indigenous people at the edge of the noisy global community. Their ways of communication differ significantly from those of the Euro-Americans who hurry to fill the silence. This blog is an attempt to give a 'voice' to the silences of Arctic minorities.

In the following, I shall tell a story of resilience, adaptation, and vulnerability among nomads in the Russian Arctic. This is a mute photographic blog on Northern soundscapes.

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

in the Arctic

THE NENETS

The Nenets live in the vast treeless plains and mountains north of the Arctic Circle. On the west-east axis, their area expands two thousand kilometres from the Kanin Peninsula to the Yenisei River, and is divided by the Ural Mountains – the range that splits Eurasia into Europe and Asia. In this area, thousands of people still live a nomadic way of life migrating hundreds of kilometres each year across the harsh, treeless tundra with no roads and temperatures that drop below minus fifty.

THE YUKAGHIR, EVEN AND CHUKCHI

The Lower Kolyma in north-eastern Siberia hosts several indigenous groups, among them Yukaghir, Even, and Chukchi. Only a few now live in reindeer-herding or fishing camps in the tundra as their (grand)parents used to, while the majority lives in multiethnic settlements where they constitute a tiny minority.

WORDS AND SILENCES

Focused on listening

When starting one’s journey from a nearby noisy Russian settlement to a Nenets campsite, what one notices straight away is that the nomads' pattern of communication in the tundra is far less verbose. When staying longer, one realises that this is not only a matter of style, differing significantly between Nenets and Russians, but also of underlying assumptions of what words do and how one can manage them. And yet at other moments, for instance when kin arrive, the camp is gradually filled with vivid talk, sometimes with epic songs, slowly resuming its habitual state of few words and long silences after they leave, occasionally interrupted by loud shouts of men who lasso reindeer or the fire cracking or a snowstorm howling.