Dr Dmitry Arzyutov

I am a historian (PhD, Stockholm) who is intellectually and emotionally connected to anthropological ideas and long-term fieldwork, and an anthropologist (PhD, Saint Petersburg) who has fallen in love with diachronic interpretations of social and cultural practices. My bi-disciplinary identity is shaped by my curiosity about our everyday lives, which are inseparable from our imaginations. I am interested in how the paths, ideas, and practices of scholars and the people they collaborate with intersect, coevolve, and ultimately shape our “stable” notions of the environment, materiality, social life, and the past. This curiosity drives me to constantly move between the vibrant “field” in the Arctic/Siberia (predominantly with the Nenets and Altaians) and the secluded and dusty “archives,” where I find inspiration and develop most of my ideas. The arguments in my writings often revolve around the intertwined lives of anthropological and natural science ideas, the long-term dynamics of human-environment interactions in the circumpolar North, and how these are narrated and inscribed in the scholarship and novels of Indigenous and settler-colonial authors.