Susan A Crate
Biographic Data
| ID | 93057 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan A Crate |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan A |
| FAMILY NAME | Crate |
| SIGNATURE | CRATE S A |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2127-4812 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 119 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
What does Permafrost mean to you? Inuvialuit and Gwich’in Knowledge Holders’ Perceptions of a Thawing Relation
While climate scholarship has detailed the biophysical impacts of Arctic permafrost thaw, less attention has been paid to how permafrost is perceived and lived with. Drawing on community-based research with Inuvialuit and Gwich’in knowledge holders in the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in Settlement Regions of the Western Canadian Arctic, we argue that permafrost is more than frozen ground: it sustains mobility, subsistence, and cultural continuity; and it…
Sakha and Alaas: Place Attachment and Cultural Identity in a Time of Climate Change
In this article, I explore the relationship of Sakha, horse and cattle pastoralists of northeastern Siberia, and alaas, permafrost ecosystems that Sakha depend on for their subsistence. I show that this relationship is both physical and spiritual. In a time of climate change, alaas are changing due to the thawing permafrost, making them unusable for Sakha people. I argue that we must consider and accommodate the reverberations of such change for …
Using Cultural Framings to Disentangle Viliui Sakha Perceptions, Beliefs, and Historical Trauma in the Face of Climate Change
This article explores how a community’s perceptions of a changing climate may shift over time, and the ways in which certain cultural predilections emerge in the process. Through replicating the same focus group method with Viliui Sakha in 2008 and again in 2018, the analysis reveals both continuity in cited changes as well as new emergent ones. Following this comparative exercise, the article further probes two culturally specific phenomena: how…
Ohuokhai: Transmitter of Biocultural Heritage for Sakha of Northeastern Siberia
Sakha, a Turkic-speaking people of northeastern Siberia, Russia, practice a circle dance called ohuokhai that is fueled by improvisatory song. Although it is typically bracketed by regular introductory and closing stanzas, its improvisatory middle is a communicative forum for the lead singer to report, critique, and prophesize on issues relevant to the dancers she/he leads. In Soviet times, this middle section often contained expressions of disco…
Climate Change
Anthropology's engagement with climate change spans the life of the field, with most of that engagement in archaeology and environmental anthropology investigating interactions of climate change and societies past. The past several decades have seen a steadily increasing development of anthropology engaging contemporary, anthropogenic climate change, using the discipline's earlier foundations with climate change in the past but also increasingly …
Climate Change Adaptation and Traditional Cultures in Northern Russia
Northern Russia's physical vulnerability to climate change is at best severe, considering the underlying permafrost and the threat that warming presents to that foundation
Permafrost livelihoods: A transdisciplinary review and analysis of thermokarst-based systems of indigenous land use
In a context of scientific and public debates on permafrost degradation under global climate change, this article provides an integrated review and analysis of environmental and socio-economic trends in a subarctic region. It focuses on Sakha (Yakut) animal husbandry as an example of indigenous land use. Within Sakha-Yakutia’s boreal forests, animal husbandry takes place in thermokarst depressions containing grassland areas (alaas) that formed in…
Anthropology and Climate Change
An Ethnography of Change in Northeastern Siberia: Whither an Interdisciplinary Role
Using longitudinal ethnographic material, anthropologists are skilled to discern how change, in its many forms, interacts with the livelihoods of affected communities. Furthermore, multi-sited ethnography can show how local change is both a result of global to local phenomena and of origins affecting similar local contexts. Ethnographic material is therefore critical to interdisciplinary understandings of change. Through case study in native vill…
A Methodological Model for Exchanging Local and Scientific Climate Change Knowledge in Northeastern Siberia
This paper analyzes findings from “Knowledge Exchanges,” which engaged communities of Viliui Sakha, native horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia, Russia, with regional scientific specialists, a cultural anthropologist, and a permafrost scientist. Our process of knowledge exchange involved first gathering ethnographic data from affected communities, through focus groups, interviews, and surveys, and analyzing how people perceiv…
Reflexive Shifts in Climate Research and Education: Toward Relocalizing Our Lives
This article is concerned with the way in which indigenous place-based knowledge and understandings, in a time of global climate change, have the potential to challenge researchers to self-reflexively shift the focus of their research toward those technological and consumer practices that are the cultural context of our research. After reviewing some literature on the emergence of self-reflexivity in research, the authors offer two case studies f…
From Living Water to the “Water of Death”: Implicating Social Resilience in Northeastern Siberia
Rural inhabitants of the Arctic sustain their way of life via refined adaptations to the extreme climate of the North, and subsequent generations continue to adapt. Viliui Sakha, Turkic-speaking horse and cattle breeders of northeastern Siberia, Russia, have been successful through their ancestral adaptations to local water access, in both a solid and liquid state, at specific times and in specific amounts. Viliui Sakha’s activities to access and…
Climate and Culture: Anthropology in the Era of Contemporary Climate Change
This review provides an overview of foundational climate and culture studies in anthropology; it then tracks developments in this area to date to include anthropological engagements with contemporary global climate change. Although early climate and culture studies were mainly founded in archaeology and environmental anthropology, with the advent of climate change, anthropology's roles have expanded to engage local to global contexts. Considering…
A Political Ecology of “Water in Mind”: Attributing Perceptions in the Era of Global Climate Change
This article explores how researchers can apply social science methods and theoretical frames to capture how place-based communities are perceiving and responding to the immediate effects of global climate change. The study focuses on research with Viliui Sakha—native horse and cattle breeders of northeastern Siberia, Russia, who are increasingly challenged by one of global climate change’s most prevalent effects: altered water regimes. By applyi…
Documenting COP-15: Modes of Participation and Knowledge Flows
Investigating Local Definitions of Sustainability in the Arctic: Insights from Post-Soviet Sakha Villages
Contemporary survival for post-Soviet Russia’s indigenous communities is complicated both by a Soviet legacy that undermined local ecological knowledge, kinship settlement patterns, land and resource rights, and robust ecosystems, and by the contemporary effects of globalization and modernity. Efforts to achieve sustainability lack a focus on local contexts, although recent research, especially in anthropology, underscores the need to develop sus…
Climate Change and Human Rights: 2007 AAA Public Policy Forum
Gone the Bull of Winter: Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology's Role(s) in Global Climate Change
Because global climate change is intimately linked to culture, anthropologists are strategically well-placed to interpret it, communicate information about it, and act in response to it both in the field and at home. Fieldworkers are increasingly encountering reports of the local effects of climate change from their research partners, and it is becoming apparent that indigenous peoples' recognized capacity for adaptation to change may not be suff…
Eating Hay: The Ecology, Economy and Culture of Viliui Sakha Smallholders of Northeastern Siberia
Ohuokhai: Sakhas' Unique Integration of Social Meaning and Movement
This article explores the forms and functions of Sakhas' ohuokhai circle dance. Historically, Sakha are Turkic-speaking agropastoralists inhabiting the subarctic Sakha Republic of Russia. Originating as the opening communal prayer during Sakhas' yhyakh festival, ohuokhai has both maintained an original sacred function and, over time, assumed others. This article defines ohuokhai origins and its evolving functions through the pre-Soviet, Soviet, a…
Elder Knowledge and Sustainable Livelihoods in Post-Soviet Russia: Finding Dialogue across the Generations
Russia's indigenous peoples have been struggling with economic, environmental, and socio-cultural dislocation since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In northern rural areas, the end of the Soviet Union most often meant the end of agro-industrial state farm operations that employed and fed surrounding rural populations. Most communities adapted to this loss by reinstating some form of pre-Soviet household-level food production based on huntin…
The Russian North in Circumpolar Context
Russia is the world's largest Arctic country and since the break up of the Soviet Union has become an even more decidedly northern country, with almost all of its territories lying to the latitudes north of the conterminous United States. Although Russia shares similar concerns with its Arctic neighbors related to environmental change and sustainable development, the country is undergoing a geopolitical transition and is having to deal with envir…
The Great Divide: Contested Issues of Post-Soviet Viliui Sakha Land Use
THE MAIN OBJECTIVE OF THIS ARTICLE is to inform the larger discourse on post-Soviet property rights by discussing the land issues of agropastoralist Viliui Sakha, a Turkic-speaking people of northeastern Russia. I argue that Viliui Sakha are struggling to find a place in the drastically changed post-privatisation context not by accessing land through the official allocations made after state farms were dissolved but by pooling land with kin in th…
Viliui Sakha Post-Soviet Adaptation: A Subarctic Test of Netting's Smallholder-Householder Theory
Co-option in Siberia: The Case of Diamonds and the Vilyuy Sakha
A specialist on the Vilyuy Sakha, a native non-Russian people of northeastern Siberia, Russia, examines the public health and environmental challenges threatening the livelihood of the group. The paper presents a case study of political activism among the Vilyuy Sakha in the immediate post-Soviet period, as regional citizens were able to gain access to information on the pollution caused by diamond mining and other forms of industrial development…
Gone the Bull of Winter: Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology's Role(s) in Global Climate Change
Because global climate change is intimately linked to culture, anthropologists are strategically well-placed to interpret it, communicate information about it, and act in response to it both in the field and at home. Fieldworkers are increasingly encountering reports of the local effects of climate change from their research partners, and it is becoming apparent that indigenous peoples' recognized capacity for adaptation to change may not be suff…
Ohuokhai: Sakhas' Unique Integration of Social Meaning and Movement
This article explores the forms and functions of Sakhas' ohuokhai circle dance. Historically, Sakha are Turkic-speaking agropastoralists inhabiting the subarctic Sakha Republic of Russia. Originating as the opening communal prayer during Sakhas' yhyakh festival, ohuokhai has both maintained an original sacred function and, over time, assumed others. This article defines ohuokhai origins and its evolving functions through the pre-Soviet, Soviet, a…
Viliui Sakha Post-Soviet Adaptation: A Subarctic Test of Netting's Smallholder-Householder Theory
Sakha and Alaas: Place Attachment and Cultural Identity in a Time of Climate Change
In this article, I explore the relationship of Sakha, horse and cattle pastoralists of northeastern Siberia, and alaas, permafrost ecosystems that Sakha depend on for their subsistence. I show that this relationship is both physical and spiritual. In a time of climate change, alaas are changing due to the thawing permafrost, making them unusable for Sakha people. I argue that we must consider and accommodate the reverberations of such change for …
Elder Knowledge and Sustainable Livelihoods in Post-Soviet Russia: Finding Dialogue across the Generations
Russia's indigenous peoples have been struggling with economic, environmental, and socio-cultural dislocation since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In northern rural areas, the end of the Soviet Union most often meant the end of agro-industrial state farm operations that employed and fed surrounding rural populations. Most communities adapted to this loss by reinstating some form of pre-Soviet household-level food production based on huntin…
The Great Divide: Contested Issues of Post-Soviet Viliui Sakha Land Use
THE MAIN OBJECTIVE OF THIS ARTICLE is to inform the larger discourse on post-Soviet property rights by discussing the land issues of agropastoralist Viliui Sakha, a Turkic-speaking people of northeastern Russia. I argue that Viliui Sakha are struggling to find a place in the drastically changed post-privatisation context not by accessing land through the official allocations made after state farms were dissolved but by pooling land with kin in th…
From Living Water to the “Water of Death”: Implicating Social Resilience in Northeastern Siberia
Rural inhabitants of the Arctic sustain their way of life via refined adaptations to the extreme climate of the North, and subsequent generations continue to adapt. Viliui Sakha, Turkic-speaking horse and cattle breeders of northeastern Siberia, Russia, have been successful through their ancestral adaptations to local water access, in both a solid and liquid state, at specific times and in specific amounts. Viliui Sakha’s activities to access and…
An Ethnography of Change in Northeastern Siberia: Whither an Interdisciplinary Role
Using longitudinal ethnographic material, anthropologists are skilled to discern how change, in its many forms, interacts with the livelihoods of affected communities. Furthermore, multi-sited ethnography can show how local change is both a result of global to local phenomena and of origins affecting similar local contexts. Ethnographic material is therefore critical to interdisciplinary understandings of change. Through case study in native vill…
Documenting COP-15: Modes of Participation and Knowledge Flows
Eating Hay: The Ecology, Economy and Culture of Viliui Sakha Smallholders of Northeastern Siberia
Using Cultural Framings to Disentangle Viliui Sakha Perceptions, Beliefs, and Historical Trauma in the Face of Climate Change
This article explores how a community’s perceptions of a changing climate may shift over time, and the ways in which certain cultural predilections emerge in the process. Through replicating the same focus group method with Viliui Sakha in 2008 and again in 2018, the analysis reveals both continuity in cited changes as well as new emergent ones. Following this comparative exercise, the article further probes two culturally specific phenomena: how…
Climate Change and Human Rights: 2007 AAA Public Policy Forum
Co-option in Siberia: The Case of Diamonds and the Vilyuy Sakha
A specialist on the Vilyuy Sakha, a native non-Russian people of northeastern Siberia, Russia, examines the public health and environmental challenges threatening the livelihood of the group. The paper presents a case study of political activism among the Vilyuy Sakha in the immediate post-Soviet period, as regional citizens were able to gain access to information on the pollution caused by diamond mining and other forms of industrial development…
The Russian North in Circumpolar Context
Russia is the world's largest Arctic country and since the break up of the Soviet Union has become an even more decidedly northern country, with almost all of its territories lying to the latitudes north of the conterminous United States. Although Russia shares similar concerns with its Arctic neighbors related to environmental change and sustainable development, the country is undergoing a geopolitical transition and is having to deal with envir…
The Great Divide: Contested Issues of Post-Soviet Viliui Sakha Land Use
THE MAIN OBJECTIVE OF THIS ARTICLE is to inform the larger discourse on post-Soviet property rights by discussing the land issues of agropastoralist Viliui Sakha, a Turkic-speaking people of northeastern Russia. I argue that Viliui Sakha are struggling to find a place in the drastically changed post-privatisation context not by accessing land through the official allocations made after state farms were dissolved but by pooling land with kin in th…
Viliui Sakha Post-Soviet Adaptation: A Subarctic Test of Netting's Smallholder-Householder Theory
Ohuokhai: Sakhas' Unique Integration of Social Meaning and Movement
This article explores the forms and functions of Sakhas' ohuokhai circle dance. Historically, Sakha are Turkic-speaking agropastoralists inhabiting the subarctic Sakha Republic of Russia. Originating as the opening communal prayer during Sakhas' yhyakh festival, ohuokhai has both maintained an original sacred function and, over time, assumed others. This article defines ohuokhai origins and its evolving functions through the pre-Soviet, Soviet, a…
Elder Knowledge and Sustainable Livelihoods in Post-Soviet Russia: Finding Dialogue across the Generations
Russia's indigenous peoples have been struggling with economic, environmental, and socio-cultural dislocation since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In northern rural areas, the end of the Soviet Union most often meant the end of agro-industrial state farm operations that employed and fed surrounding rural populations. Most communities adapted to this loss by reinstating some form of pre-Soviet household-level food production based on huntin…
Climate Change and Human Rights: 2007 AAA Public Policy Forum
Gone the Bull of Winter: Grappling with the Cultural Implications of and Anthropology's Role(s) in Global Climate Change
Because global climate change is intimately linked to culture, anthropologists are strategically well-placed to interpret it, communicate information about it, and act in response to it both in the field and at home. Fieldworkers are increasingly encountering reports of the local effects of climate change from their research partners, and it is becoming apparent that indigenous peoples' recognized capacity for adaptation to change may not be suff…
Eating Hay: The Ecology, Economy and Culture of Viliui Sakha Smallholders of Northeastern Siberia
Investigating Local Definitions of Sustainability in the Arctic: Insights from Post-Soviet Sakha Villages
Contemporary survival for post-Soviet Russia’s indigenous communities is complicated both by a Soviet legacy that undermined local ecological knowledge, kinship settlement patterns, land and resource rights, and robust ecosystems, and by the contemporary effects of globalization and modernity. Efforts to achieve sustainability lack a focus on local contexts, although recent research, especially in anthropology, underscores the need to develop sus…
Documenting COP-15: Modes of Participation and Knowledge Flows
Climate and Culture: Anthropology in the Era of Contemporary Climate Change
This review provides an overview of foundational climate and culture studies in anthropology; it then tracks developments in this area to date to include anthropological engagements with contemporary global climate change. Although early climate and culture studies were mainly founded in archaeology and environmental anthropology, with the advent of climate change, anthropology's roles have expanded to engage local to global contexts. Considering…
A Political Ecology of “Water in Mind”: Attributing Perceptions in the Era of Global Climate Change
This article explores how researchers can apply social science methods and theoretical frames to capture how place-based communities are perceiving and responding to the immediate effects of global climate change. The study focuses on research with Viliui Sakha—native horse and cattle breeders of northeastern Siberia, Russia, who are increasingly challenged by one of global climate change’s most prevalent effects: altered water regimes. By applyi…
A Methodological Model for Exchanging Local and Scientific Climate Change Knowledge in Northeastern Siberia
This paper analyzes findings from “Knowledge Exchanges,” which engaged communities of Viliui Sakha, native horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia, Russia, with regional scientific specialists, a cultural anthropologist, and a permafrost scientist. Our process of knowledge exchange involved first gathering ethnographic data from affected communities, through focus groups, interviews, and surveys, and analyzing how people perceiv…
Reflexive Shifts in Climate Research and Education: Toward Relocalizing Our Lives
This article is concerned with the way in which indigenous place-based knowledge and understandings, in a time of global climate change, have the potential to challenge researchers to self-reflexively shift the focus of their research toward those technological and consumer practices that are the cultural context of our research. After reviewing some literature on the emergence of self-reflexivity in research, the authors offer two case studies f…
From Living Water to the “Water of Death”: Implicating Social Resilience in Northeastern Siberia
Rural inhabitants of the Arctic sustain their way of life via refined adaptations to the extreme climate of the North, and subsequent generations continue to adapt. Viliui Sakha, Turkic-speaking horse and cattle breeders of northeastern Siberia, Russia, have been successful through their ancestral adaptations to local water access, in both a solid and liquid state, at specific times and in specific amounts. Viliui Sakha’s activities to access and…
An Ethnography of Change in Northeastern Siberia: Whither an Interdisciplinary Role
Using longitudinal ethnographic material, anthropologists are skilled to discern how change, in its many forms, interacts with the livelihoods of affected communities. Furthermore, multi-sited ethnography can show how local change is both a result of global to local phenomena and of origins affecting similar local contexts. Ethnographic material is therefore critical to interdisciplinary understandings of change. Through case study in native vill…
Anthropology and Climate Change
Climate Change Adaptation and Traditional Cultures in Northern Russia
Northern Russia's physical vulnerability to climate change is at best severe, considering the underlying permafrost and the threat that warming presents to that foundation
Permafrost livelihoods: A transdisciplinary review and analysis of thermokarst-based systems of indigenous land use
In a context of scientific and public debates on permafrost degradation under global climate change, this article provides an integrated review and analysis of environmental and socio-economic trends in a subarctic region. It focuses on Sakha (Yakut) animal husbandry as an example of indigenous land use. Within Sakha-Yakutia’s boreal forests, animal husbandry takes place in thermokarst depressions containing grassland areas (alaas) that formed in…
Climate Change
Anthropology's engagement with climate change spans the life of the field, with most of that engagement in archaeology and environmental anthropology investigating interactions of climate change and societies past. The past several decades have seen a steadily increasing development of anthropology engaging contemporary, anthropogenic climate change, using the discipline's earlier foundations with climate change in the past but also increasingly …
Ohuokhai: Transmitter of Biocultural Heritage for Sakha of Northeastern Siberia
Sakha, a Turkic-speaking people of northeastern Siberia, Russia, practice a circle dance called ohuokhai that is fueled by improvisatory song. Although it is typically bracketed by regular introductory and closing stanzas, its improvisatory middle is a communicative forum for the lead singer to report, critique, and prophesize on issues relevant to the dancers she/he leads. In Soviet times, this middle section often contained expressions of disco…
Using Cultural Framings to Disentangle Viliui Sakha Perceptions, Beliefs, and Historical Trauma in the Face of Climate Change
This article explores how a community’s perceptions of a changing climate may shift over time, and the ways in which certain cultural predilections emerge in the process. Through replicating the same focus group method with Viliui Sakha in 2008 and again in 2018, the analysis reveals both continuity in cited changes as well as new emergent ones. Following this comparative exercise, the article further probes two culturally specific phenomena: how…
Sakha and Alaas: Place Attachment and Cultural Identity in a Time of Climate Change
In this article, I explore the relationship of Sakha, horse and cattle pastoralists of northeastern Siberia, and alaas, permafrost ecosystems that Sakha depend on for their subsistence. I show that this relationship is both physical and spiritual. In a time of climate change, alaas are changing due to the thawing permafrost, making them unusable for Sakha people. I argue that we must consider and accommodate the reverberations of such change for …
What does Permafrost mean to you? Inuvialuit and Gwich’in Knowledge Holders’ Perceptions of a Thawing Relation
While climate scholarship has detailed the biophysical impacts of Arctic permafrost thaw, less attention has been paid to how permafrost is perceived and lived with. Drawing on community-based research with Inuvialuit and Gwich’in knowledge holders in the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in Settlement Regions of the Western Canadian Arctic, we argue that permafrost is more than frozen ground: it sustains mobility, subsistence, and cultural continuity; and it…
Indigenous Studies and Ecology (20 works) · Geography (18 works) · Political science (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Ecology (14 works) · Archaeology (12 works) · Climate change (11 works) · Indigenous (9 works) · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology (9 works) · Agriculture (7 works)