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In pre-Soviet and early Soviet times, the northern areas of East Siberia and the Russian Far East that today are crossed by the Baikal-Amur Mainline were more or less exclusively the domain of semi-nomadic Evenki reindeer herders and rarely traversed by Russian or other European travelers. The decision to build a railroad line through this region during the 1970s and 1980s could not but have tremendous social, demographic, and ecological impacts. The specific impacts of the BAM cannot be understood, however, without considering the political and economic environments in which construction took place. This chapter is based on archival materials and interviews collected during multiple fieldwork visits during the 2010s, with a focus on the city of Tynda, the "capital" of the BAM, as well as the city Severobaikal'sk and the town of Novaia Chara along the railroad, and the Indigenous villages of Pervomaiskoe and Chapo-Ologo located not far from the BAM. The chapter's aim is to provide tentative answers to the title question and to explore the opportunities and constraints, or "affordances," of infrastructure as an agent of change.

The town of Tiksi came into being in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union intensified its efforts to industrialize the Arctic. A critical element of that policy was to make the Northern Sea Route a viable Arctic shipping lane and Tiksi, located where the Lena River meets the Arctic Ocean, became an important transportation hub on that route. Post-Soviet transformations led to a rapid decline in population numbers and economic significance of the town, while climate change opened up new opportunities for shipping and mammoth tusk collecting. Today, the situation seems to have stabilized but the promises of a bright future pronounced in strategic papers by the government are yet to be realized. The article explores the socio-economic, infrastructural and environmental changes of recent decades in order to explore future development prospects for Tiksi. The infrastructural legacies of the Soviet past, combined with the environmental conditions of the region, result in the intertwined material dependencies of built and natural environments. Still, these material dependencies are neither straitjackets nor unchangeable. It is the interplay between global climate change, national policies, and local initiative that will challenge the material dependencies of the past and present.

The Soviet Union and its successor states have been avid supporters of a modernisation paradigm aimed at 'overcoming remoteness' and 'bringing civilisation' to the periphery and its 'backward' indigenous people. The Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) railroad, built as a much‐hyped prestige project of late socialism, is a good example of that. The BAM has affected indigenous communities and reconfigured the geographic and social space of East Siberia. Our case study, an Evenki village located fairly close to the BAM, is (in)famous today for its supposed refusal to get connected via a bridge to the nearby railroad town. Some actors portray this disconnection as a sign of backwardness, while others celebrate it as the main reason for native language retention and cultural preservation. Focusing on discourses linking the notions of remoteness and cultural revitalisation, the article argues for conceptualising the story of the missing bridge not as the result of political resistance but rather as an articulation of indigeneity, which foregrounds cultural rights over more contentious political claims. Thus, the article explores constellations of remoteness and indigeneity, posing the question whether there might be a moral right to remoteness to be claimed by those who view spatial distance as a potential resource.

Die russische 'Mittelschicht' ist seit dem Ende der Sowjetunion ein wissenschaftlich wie gesellschaftlich viel beachtetes Thema. Im Kontext der postsozialisten Umbrüche galt sie im politischen Diskurs als Indikator für eine erfolgreiche Transformation hin zur Marktwirtschaft. Doch kann es im heutigen Russland, einem Land, in dem die reichsten 10 Prozent der Bevölkerung über 83 Prozent des Haushaltsvermögens verfügen, überhaupt eine 'Mittelschicht' geben? Bernhard Braun löst sich in seinem Buch von eurozentrischen Entwicklungsnarrativen und nähert sich der Moskauer 'Mittelschicht' durch ethnographische Forschung an. Das Buch ermöglicht einen Blick hinter die Fassade eines viel zitierten Begriffs. Es zeigt die Vielfalt der Moskauer Mittelschichten auf und stellt die sie charakterisierenden Prozesse sozialer Abhängigkeiten und die respektiven Adaptionsstrategien in den Mittelpunkt. So ermöglicht Brauns Analyse ein tiefgreifenderes Verständnis der russischen Gesellschaft und ihrer Dynamiken.

This report is a result of and follow-up to the Arctic Human Development Report (AHDR), which appeared in 2004 and had been conducted under the auspices of the Arctic Council's Sustainable Development Working Group (SDWG). The AHDR marked processes of maturation within the Arctic Council and beyond. On the one hand, the AHDR represented the first social science-driven report prepared for the Arctic Council, indicating that various stakeholders, from politicians to Arctic residents, understood the importance of the "human dimension" for sustainable development in the Arctic. On the other hand, the processes leading to the AHDR marked new developments in the relationship between Arctic governance and scholarship, including coordinated support for the report from the Standing Committee of Parliamentarians of the Arctic Region (SCPAR).

Der Verhaltensforscher Niko Tinbergen verbrachte 1932/33 vierzehn Monate bei den grönländischen Inuit, die damals noch als Jäger und Sammler lebten. Sein faszinierender Bericht, der 2017 wiederentdeckt wurde, fesselt bis heute durch die genaue Beobachtung von Menschen und Tieren in einer lebensfeindlichen Umgebung und ist zugleich ein Lehrstück über die Beschränktheit des modernen Europäers.

A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things and the Natural Fringes of
Qing Rule
Jonathan Schlesinger
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 288 pp. ISBN: 9780804799966Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Stalin's Soviet Union:
New Dimensions of Research
Andrej Kotljarchuk and Olle Sundström, eds.
(Stockholm: Elanders, 2017), 283 pp., paperback $27.00. ISBN: 978-91-7601-777-7.Kosmologiia i praktika sibirskogo shamanizma
Elena V. Nam
(Tomsk: Tomskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2017), 296 pp. ISBN:
978-5-7511-2521-9.Kul'tura i resursy. Opyt etnologicheskogo obsledovaniia sovremennogo
polozheniia narodov Severnogo Sakhalina
Dmitrii Funk, ed.
(Moscow: "Demos," 2015), 272 pp. ISBN 978-5-9904710-6-1.Maritime Hunting Culture of Chukotka: Traditions and Modern Practices
Igor Krupnik and Rachel Mason, eds.
(Anchorage, AK: National Park Service, Shared Beringian Heritage Program,
2016), 343 pp. ISBN: 9780990725251.
Litsom k moriu: Pamiati Liudmily Bogoslovskoi
Igor Krupnik, ed.
(Moscow: Moskva, 2016), 647 pp. ISBN 9785600013650.T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks: Cooking with Two Texans in Siberia
and the Russian Far East
Sharon Hudgins
(Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2018), 448 pp. ISBN: 9781574417142.Bij de Joekagieren. Het oudste toendravolk van Noord-Oost Siberië /
Life with the Yukaghir: Northeast Siberia's Oldest Tundra People
Cecilia Odé
(Lias, Uitgeverij: Verschijningsjass, 2018), 240 pp., €29.95 (paperback). ISBN:
978-90-8803-099-4.