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Evelyn Landerer Dipl.Phys., B.A., M.Phil.

PhD student

Evelyn researches the cultural implications of changes in movement among Evenki reindeer breeders and hunters in a remote region of eastern Siberia based on long term participant observation.

Biography

Originally trained as a physicist, Evelyn became interested in the social side of things during travels on horseback among nomadic pastoralists and hunters in Mongolia and Russia. She decided to return to university to study social anthropology with a polar perspective.

Qualifications

Research

I study the cultural implications of changes in movement in a remote region of eastern Siberia, contrasting indigenous reindeer people (Evenki) who walk on foot with reindeer around the dense boreal forest with settlement-dwelling Russians and others who engage only briefly with the forest as hunters or (recently) oil prospectors and rely on mechanized transport. I shall follow the movement of each kind of inhabitant by sharing their distinctive means of transport (walking on foot for many hundreds of kilometers or riding with oil truckers on ice roads) and investigate how they conceptualise, perceive and order their movements. I shall ask questions about human-reindeer relations, enskilment and the anchoring of morality in the landscape. How does the way one moves, with or without reindeer, influence the choice of location and the attachment to places? What kind of moral messages are encoded in dymanic trajectories of movement? This research will be the first full study in Russia of the older, smaller, more fundamental use of reindeer as both the prey and the means of hunting and also of relations between indigenous people and Russian settlers set within the context of movement and changing forest use.