Radio and WhatsApp. Public Space among the Eastern Khanty and the Asiatic Yupik

Abstract

The article focuses on the virtual public space created in Siberian Indigenous villages via WhatsApp chats and radio communication. These media are breaking boundaries and are creating a unique space for communication. I explore how these media form virtual public space and how they change everyday practices. Both practices create new public space, essential in the context of a lack of real public space.

Keywords:

• Public space
• media anthropology
• digital anthropology
• Arctic
• Indigenous peoples

Notes

1. Compare Pelto (1987) and Helander-Renvall (2007).

2. Compare Christensen (2003); Alexander (2009); and Wachowich and Scobie (2010).

3. The term comes from Markham (2013) and Boellstorff (2012). See Oparin (2012).

a. For background on Indigenous peoples of West Siberia, see Andrei Golovnev, Govoriashchie Kul’tury: traditsii Samodiitsev i Ugrov. (Ekaterinburg: Akademiia Nauk, 1995); Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and N. I. Novikova and D. Funk, eds., Sever i Severiane: Sovremennoe polozhenie Korennykh malochisklennykh Narodov Severa, Sibiri i Dal’nego Vostoka. (Moscow: Akademii Nauka, 2012).

b. For background on the Chukchi and Yup’ik of Chukotka, see Anna Kertulla, Antler on the Sea: The Yup’ik and Chukchi of the Russian Far East. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); and the work of Nikolai Vakhtin. For perspective on changes in telecommunication, aviation, space and personhood, see Piers Vitebsky and Anatoly Alekseyev, “Velocity and Purpose among Reindeer Herders in the Verkhoyansk Mountains,” Inner Asia, 2020, Vol. 22, pp. 28-48.

c. On Indigenous language viability, see Nikolai Vakhtin, “Iazyki Narodov Severo-Vostoka Sibiri. Sovremennaia situatsiia,” Narody Severo-vostoka Sibiri, E. P. Batianova, V. A. Turaev, eds., 19-32. (Moscow: Nauka, 2009); Olga Ulturgashaeva, Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny. (New York: Berghahn, 2012); Lenore A. Grenoble, “Language Revitalization,” The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, eds. R. Bayley, C. Cameron, and C. Lucas, 792-811. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Akulina Mestnikova “Civilian Initiatives of Indigenous Peoples in the Sphere of Language Policy.” Sibirica 2018, Vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 83-91. A relevant conference on languages of Indigenous peoples of the Arctic was announced in 2019: https://spbu.ru/news-events/calendar/novye-puti-sohraneniya-yazykov-korennyh-narodov-arktiki-obsudyat-na-kulturnom.