The Book Antler on the Sea and Community Perspectives from Sireniki, Anna’s Home Village in Chukotka, Russia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Nearly three decades after her dissertation fieldwork in the village of Sireniki, which she conducted in the late Soviet period, anthropologist Anna Kerttula de Echave continues to be closely entangled within the life and social relationships of the community. In many Sireniki households, Anna’s book 'Antler on the Sea: the Yupik and Chukchi of the Russian Far East' is a proudly displayed heirloom. Its Russian translation was completed years ago by a self-taught local resident, and the book is highly regarded as an accurate and sensitively captured account that continues to be relevant for the concerns and experiences of the post-Soviet times. This paper shares the Sireniki community perspectives on Anna’s contribution, documented by the authors in the course of ethnographic research in Chukotka conducted between the years 2001 and 2017. We focus on the core issues that Anna Kerttula de Echave tackles in her anthropological research and writing. In doing so, we aim to discuss the place of community-situated ethnography in today’s anthropological landscape, and to turn the attention of the Arctic archaeology community to the issues of cultural resource management in Sireniki – the longest continuously occupied Yupik village in the Arctic and Anna’s forever Chukotkan home.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24368