About the Hearth: Perspectives on the Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North

Due to changing climates and demographics, questions of policy in the circumpolar north have focused attention on the very structures that people call home. Dwellings lie at the heart of many forms of negotiation. Based on years of in-depth research, this book presents and analyzes how the people of the circumpolar regions conceive, build, memorialize, and live in their dwellings. This book seeks to set a new standard for interdisciplinary work within the humanities and social sciences and includes anthropological work on vernacular architecture, environmental anthropology, household archaeology and demographics.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgements Chapter 1. Building a Home for Circumpolar Architecture, an Introduction Robert Wishart Chapter 2. The Conical Lodge at the Centre of the Earth-Sky World Tim Ingold Chapter 3. Mobile Architecture, Improvisation, and Museum Practice: Revitalizing the Tli cho Caribou Skin Lodge Thomas D. Andrews Chapter 4. Building Log Cabins in Teetl'it Gwich'in Country: Vernacular Architecture and Articulations of Presence Robert Wishart and Jan Peter Laurens Loovers Chapter 5.The Mobile Sami Dwelling - From A Pastoral Necessity to an Ethno-political Master Paradigm Ivar Bjorklund Chapter 6. The Devitalisation and Revitalisation of Sami Dwellings in Sweden Hugh Beach Chapter 7. Family matters: Representation of Swedish Sami households at the turn of the nineteenth century Isabelle Brannlund and Per Axelsson Chapter 8. The Life Histories of Intergenerational Households in Northern Norway 1865-1900: Gender and Household Leadership Hilde L. Jastad Chapter 9. Hunters in Transition: Sami Hearth Row Sites, Reindeer Economies, and the Organisation of Domestic Space AD 800-1300 Petri Halinen, Sven-Donald Hedman and Bjornar Olsen Chapter 10. Building a home for the hearth: An analysis of a Chukchi reindeer herding ritual Virginie Vate Chapter 11. The Perception of the Built Environment by Permanent Residents, Seasonal In-Migrants and Casual Incomers in a Coastal Village in the Northwest of Russia Maria Nakhshina Chapter 12. The Hearth, the Home, and the Homeland: An Integrated Strategy for Memory Storage in Circumpolar Landscapes Gerald A. Oetelaar, David G. Anderson, and Peter C. Dawson Chapter 13.. The Fire Is Our Grandfather: Virtuous Practice and Narrative in Northern Siberia John P. Ziker Chapter 14. Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North David G. Anderson References Notes on the Contributors

About the Author :
David G. Anderson is Professor of Anthropology and Chair in Anthropology of the North at the University of Aberdeen. He was the leader of the collaborative research project entitled BOREAS Homes, Hearths and Households in the Circumpolar North and is presently the PI of an ERC-funded advanced grant entitled Arctic Domestication: Emplacing Human-Animal Relations in the Circumpolar North. He is the author of a monograph on Taimyr Evenkis and Dolgans, and the editor or co-editor of several collections published by Berghahn Books, most recently, The 1926/27 Soviet Polar Census Expeditions (2011). Robert P. Wishart is Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. his ethnographic work has been on the Gwich'in-Dene of the Mackenzie Delta in Northern Canada, with the Ojibwe of Ontario, and with Scottish fishers. He led an associated project on vernacular architecture in the Gwich'in settlement area for the HHH research consortium. Virginie Vate is an anthropologist and a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. Since 1994, she has been doing research in Chukotka (Northeastern Siberia) and, since 2011, in Alaska. Within the ESF/BOREAS collaborative framework, she led an associated project on conversion to Christianity in Chukotka for the research program NEWREL (New Religious Movements in the Russian North). She is a co-editor of the NEWREL volume, currently in preparation.

Review :
"A very exciting book that addresses classical topics of anthropology of the North: housing, hearth and household, with a completely renewed approach. Chapters reconsider central issues in the study of material culture and social organization with a vivid ethnography and a compelling theoretical questioning." * Charles Stepanoff, Sorbonne