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"Once Upon the Permafrost is a longitudinal climate ethnography about "knowing" a specific culture and the ecosystem that culture physically and spiritually depends on in the twenty-first-century context of climate change. Through careful integration of contemporary narratives, on-site observations, and document analysis, Susan Alexandra Crate shows how local understandings of change and the vernacular knowledge systems they are founded on provide critical information for interdisciplinary collaboration and effective policy prescriptions"--

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.

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 utilize water are grounded in a belief system where water is spirit-filled, gives life, and can interplay with death. In the context of contemporary global climate change, water's solid-liquid balance is disrupted by changing seasonal patterns, altered precipitation regimes, and an overall "softening" of the extreme annual temperature range. Inhabitants are finding ways to adapt but at increasing labor and resource costs. In this paper, I analyze Viliui Sakha's adaptations to altered water regimes on both the physical and cosmological levels to grasp how water is understood in Sakha's belief system as the water of life, how it becomes "the water of death," and the implications for social resilience.

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 both the unprecedented urgency and the new level of reflexivity that climate change ushers in, anthropologists need to adopt cross-scale, multistakeholder, and interdisciplinary approaches in research and practice. I argue for one mode that anthropologists should pursue—the development of critical collaborative, multisited ethnography, which I term "climate ethnography."

AbstractThis 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 applying the theoretical framework of political ecology, the article shows how researchers can better understand how affected peoples have, in this case, "water in mind" via their histories, cosmologies, and management practices of water. Such awareness can inform research activities and findings, facilitate effective adaptation, and, ultimately, affect policy. Given the widespread emphasis on adaptation, including the urgent need for, increasing interest in, and funding support for transdisciplinary research projects on adaptation, and the facilitative role researchers and policymakers can play in adaptation, this move to understanding and integrating a population's shifting perceptions—in this case, of water in mind—into research is fundamental.

Once Upon the Permafrost is a longitudinal climate ethnography about "knowing" a specific culture and the ecosystem that culture physically and spiritually depends on in the twenty-first-century context of climate change.

The author, anthropologist Susan Alexandra Crate, has spent three decades working with Sakha, the Turkic-speaking horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia, Russia. Crate reveals Sakha's essential relationship with alaas, the foundational permafrost ecosystem of both their subsistence and cultural identity. Sakha know alaas via an Indigenous knowledge system imbued with spiritual qualities. This counters the scientific definition of alaas as geophysical phenomena of limited range. Climate change now threatens alaas due to thawing permafrost, which, entangled with the rural changes of economic globalization, youth out-migration, and language loss, make prescient the issues of ethnic sovereignty and cultural survival.

Through careful integration of contemporary narratives, on-site observations, and document analysis, Crate argues that local understandings of change and the vernacular knowledge systems they are founded on provide critical information for interdisciplinary collaboration and effective policy prescriptions. Furthermore, she makes her message relevant to a wider audience by clarifying linkages to the global permafrost system found in her comparative research in Mongolia, Arctic Canada, Kiribati, Peru, and Chesapeake Bay, Virginia. This reveals how permafrost provides one of the main structural foundations for Arctic ecosystems, which, in turn, work with the planet's other ecosystems to maintain planetary balance.

Metaphorically speaking, we all live on permafrost.

"In this third edition of Anthropology and Climate Change, Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall offer a collection of chapters that examine how anthropologists work on climate change issues with their collaborators, both in academic research and practicing contexts, and discuss new developments in contributions to policy and adaptation at different scales. Building on the first edition's pioneering focus on anthropology's burgeoning contribution to climate change research, policy, and action, as well as the second edition's focus on transformations and new directions for anthropological work on climate change, this new edition reveals the extent to which anthropologists' contributions are considered to be critical by climate scientists, policymakers, affected communities and other rights-holders. Drawing on a range of ethnographic and policy issues, this book highlights the work of anthropologists in the full range of contexts - as scholars, educators, and practitioners, from academic institutions to government bodies, international science agencies and foundations, working in interdisciplinary research teams, and with community research partners. The contributions to this new edition showcase important new academic research, as well as applied and practicing approaches. They emphasize human agency in the archaeological record, the rapid development in the last decade of community-based and community-driven research, and disaster research, provide rich ethnographic insight into worldmaking practices, interventions and collaborations, and discuss how, and in what ways, anthropologists work in policy areas and engage with regional and global assessments. This new edition is essential for established scholars and for students in anthropology and a range of other disciplines, including environmental studies, as well as for practitioners who engage with anthropological studies of climate change in their work"--