Abstract
The article examines the process of production and change of place names based on data collected in 2017 among the Okhotsk Ewenki, the easternmost Indigenous community in Siberia, Russia. Through ethnographic and semiotic analysis, we show that Ewenki place names are not simply reproduced, but rather generated and transformed through empathic contact and engagement within a semiotic circle of shared knowledge and praxis among humans and other beings encountered, especially in ambulatory travel. We consider place names as complex signs which evolve from landscape, mobility as a spatial practice, and relationships with nonhuman beings. Through ecosemiotics and nonhuman ontology, we examine how the concept of shifting landscapes and interactions with different environmental agents, especially animals, contribute to the production of space and place names and their changes. We also show that the responsible voicing of the land with place names is related to Ewenki understandings of territorial prerogatives, and rights, which are perceived as being shared with other beings.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 875-895 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 17 Jun 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Sept 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Acknowledgments:Nadezhda Mamontova's work on this article was made possible by the financial support of the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships programme, administered by the Government of Canada. Her fieldwork in the Khabarovsk Territory was financed by an ECI Small Grant, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. The authors would like to thank Fiona McConnell, Piers Vitebsky, and David Zeitlyn, for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. We are grateful to Stepan Safronov from Torom village for providing us with a hand-drawn map for this research, and Elena Klyachko for her assistance in producing the map in Figure 1. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions, which helped tremendously to improve the final version of this article.