No 6 (2025)

This article is an introduction to the issue’s special theme on “Housing and Communal Services in the North: Living Environment in the Conditions of Remoteness and Deficit”, featuring contributions by Nikolai Goncharov, Vasilisa Bobrova, Vladimir Davydov, and Olga Shulgina. The proposed selection of articles is aimed at the ethnographic study of public utility in the Arctic and Subarctic. The unifying goal of the publications is to determine the place of public utility in the system of subsistence of the communities of the Arkhangelsk Oblast’, Taimyr, the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) and Chukotka. Based on their own field materials, the authors study regional gaps and affordances of public utility, problematizing the very concept of this sector of the economy, considering the heterogeneity of sources of electricity, heat and water, studying the hybridization of local and centralized systems, and analyzing solid waste disposal strategies in the Arctic. The conclusions made in the article, reflecting the specifics of the relationship between people and public utility, allow us to reconsider the set of adaptive strategies and responses of the permanent population of the North to emerging socio-economic and ecological challenges.

The article discusses the issue of landfills and recycling municipal solid waste in settlements of the Arctic. In the conditions of the Far North, aggravated by severe climates, landscape features, and insufficiently developed infrastructure for waste disposal, this issue is crucial and often difficult to solve in practice. The article is conceived as an attempt to consider the local experience of Taimyr residents in regard to waste disposal. Responding to arising challenges, local residents devise various strategies for solving the issue and dealing with the increase in the amount of municipal solid waste, the organization of technological landfills, the logistics of waste removal, and the lack of recycling plants. These strategies range from arranging specialized places for recycling to mobilizing volunteer movements for cleaning. The article draws on field materials collected over the past few years in the Taimyr Dolgano-Nenets municipal district of the Krasnoyarsk Krai in the following settlements: Khatanga, Kresty, Novaya, Kheta, Katyryk, Zhdanikha, Novorybnaya, Ust-Avam, Volochanka, Levinskiye Peski.

Drawing on archival materials, local periodicals, photographs from the Soviet period, as well as field materials collected in 2023–2025, I examine the principal goals and reasons for the development of the Lorino Hot Springs area in the Chukotskii district of the Chukotka Autonomous Region over a period since the mid-1930s. I argue that the infrastructure built around the thermal springs came to be beneficial in the fields of food and energy security, agriculture and greenhouses, recreation and tourism (a pioneer camp, a sanatorium and a hotel were located in the immediate vicinity of the village). I further discuss various Soviet projects (for example, that of hot water supply for the village of Lorino), which were envisaged but never implemented, as well as the current state and meaning of the hot springs area in the life of the local community.

The article examines the complex issues within the field of “difficult heritage,” tracing its development in both practical application and academic analysis. It argues that current research approaches are often driven by political and ideological agendas, hindering a more nuanced understanding of how societies grapple with the past. While diverse interpretive models have emerged, the field remains largely rooted in moral judgments and ethical imperatives. I propose critical questions to stimulate discussion and move beyond the confines of existing “difficult heritage studies”, which are often burdened by moralistic perspectives. By prompting a shift in focus, this work aims to encourage a more subtle analysis of the multifaceted ways we engage with difficult past.

Due to the enormous technological progress, experts predict that in the near future people will share public spaces, streets and buildings with mobile autonomous robots. They already help people with their daily tasks at home and at work. In addition to technical functions, robots are expected to have social capabilities. Developers strive to create robots that will not disturb, irritate or frighten people. But what should these new robots be like in order to comfortably, reliably and effectively cooperate with people? Should a robot take into account and obey human norms of spatial behavior? Should such interactions take place within the framework of socially and culturally acceptable norms? The solution to these questions is the central research goal of a young scientific discipline Human-Robot Interaction. This review examines modern research of proxemic interaction between robots and humans.

The article dives into biographies of Russian scientific labs in the context of infrastructure work, where infrastructure work is taken to mean practical activities aimed at developing scientific infrastructure and solving the problems arising along the process. This helps focusing on mobilization procedures (rather than on “structures”) that are built into relations with institutions of science management, practices of lab operation, material resources, and individual research strategies. I attempt to explore the infrastructural makeup of the Russian scientific lab and the changes it has been undergoing in the period marked by economic and political transformations and alterations in the access to global technological markets as a result of sanction policies. The research draws on the comparative analysis of two case studies based on field interviews with lab managers and staff, conducted in 2012–2024. Trying to trace the biographies of these labs from the point of their origins through the present day, I argue that the infrastructure of the regular Russian lab is essentially prone to instability, which requires specific forms of adaptation to the ever-changing conditions. That adaptation, however, may be seen as instrumental in the success of reshaping lab work – particularly after 2022 when stricter sanctions began to be imposed – and developing new collaborations with Asian institutions. The cases under examination, nevertheless, show that there has been certain shift toward applied studies at the expense of more fundamental studies in the lab work, followed, for instance, by a move away from more traditional research themes in physics or chemistry toward more interdisciplinary medical research.

The article presents research of one of about two dozen (known to the author) St. Petersburg communes based on living together in large apartments. The commune is considered by the concepts of scale by Marilyn Strathern and the concept of nonscalability by Anna Tsing. Scaling refers to the homogenization of practices and actors by integrating them into a broader system of practices. Most communards avoid scaling practices, representing themselves not as a commune as a whole, but as individuals, abandoning the system of those on charge of in favor of an individual choice of one occupation or another and creating the interior decor of the commune as fundamentally stylistically heterogeneous. At the same time, communards who strive to scale establish common rules and “unifying” rituals. Their attempts are ignored or ironically deconstructed, but no objections are raised against them, so they become only the practices of individual communards. In the described commune, the reverse scaling process takes place – the de-scaling of scaling practices. Scaling practices not only fail, but, if they persist, they themselves become nonscalable. Some informants describe this situation with the emic term “collective irresponsible”.