Local Approaches to Cultures of Northeastern Siberia

Abstract

Regular readers of Sibirica are surely familiar with the region of Siberia broadly construed, whether the boundaries are defined from an eco-political, geographic, or cultural perspective. Siberia covers an enormous geographic area (generally agreed to encompass the part of Russia that stretches from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east) and is home to just over 37 million people (as of 2021),1 merely one-fifth of the overall population of Russia. Scholars of the region will also know that this sparsely populated area nevertheless boasts considerable cultural and linguistic diversity, with over three dozen distinct Indigenous language groups (Vajda 2009), each with its own distinct lifeways and traditions linked largely to stewardship of the land on which the people live.