Dmitry Arzyutov

I am a historian who is intellectually and affectively attached to anthropological ideas and long-term fieldworking (PhD, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) and an anthropologist who is fallen in love with history (Candidate of Sciences, Museum of Ethnography and Anthropology, Saint Petersburg). My bi-disciplinary identity is forged through the curiosity about our mundane life which is inseparable from our imaginaries. I am interested in how the paths, ideas and practices of scholars and people they collaborate with cross one another, coevolve and consequently shape the "stable" notions of the environment, social life, and the past. All this spurs me on to constantly nomadize between the Arctic/Siberian lively "field" and secluded and dusty "archives", where I seek and come up with most of my ideas. The arguments of my writings revolve around the entangled lives of anthropological and natural science ideas and the long-term dynamics of human-environment interactions in the circumpolar North.

At the moment, I am working on two projects. The first is on the histories and ethnographies of seeds and Arctic agricultures and the second is dedicated to the digitisation and repatriation of old wax cylinders and tape recordings to "source communities" in Northern Eurasia.