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Krupnik I., Oparin D. Ainana: from “Ethnographers’ Friend” to Partner to National Symbol

I. Krupnik
National Museum of Natural History,
Smithsonian Institution
Washington DC, USA
ORCID: 0000-0003-1954-9848
E-mail: krupniki@si.edu

D. Oparin
Passages (UMR 5319 Université Bordeaux Montaigne, Université Bordeaux, CNRS)
Bordeaux, France
ORCID: 0000-0002-1895-5564
E-mail: dimaoparin@hotmail.com

 

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ABSTRACT. A tribute to the late Yupik intellectual, political and cultural leader, Lyudmila Ainana (Aynganga, 1934–2021), this paper explores more generally the transitions in collaboration between anthropologists and their partners among Arctic indigenous people. Since the 1960s, Aynganga interacted with almost every researcher who visited Chukotka to study culture, language, and ecological knowledge of her native people, the Siberian Yupik. Thanks to her multi-faceted biography, she helped connect and transcended many cultural ‘worlds’: of the contact-traditional Yupik society and the Soviet-era Chukotka; of urban ‘intelligentsia’ in Moscow, Leningrad, and Anadyr, and the people in northern communities in Alaska and Russia, as well as academics and indigenous marine hunters. Her exceptional role as a partner and knowledge expert was in her ability to personally relate to these many ‘cultural layers’ but also to remain a researcher herself, a thoughtful person, insightful about the mission of science. She was at once a source of invaluable information but also its active performer and cultural interpreter. The article illustrates how interacting with Aynganga during her lifetime helped enrich the authors as scholars and humanists. It assesses the factors that shifted the paradigms of cooperation between academic scholars and Indigenous leaders and knowledge holders, during the late 1900s and the first decades on the 21st century.

 

KEYWORDS: patterns of research partnership, indigenous intellectuals, Asiatic Eskimo (Yupik), paradigm shift in anthropology

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8600-2022-3(17)-220-246
УДК 304.444

 

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