Kyril Kantirov Works with Atlas Project Team to Prepare a Detailed Map of His Hunting Area
A two-year, international collaborative research project in applied social sciences, between faculty at New Mexico State University and Urals State University in Ekaterinburg, Russia, with the support of the Ministry of Nationality Affairs and Regional Policy of the Russian Federation, to create the first ethnohistoric atlas of traditional land use, following well-established Western models, for a Siberian indigenous people. The Khanty Traditional Land Use Atlas will serve not only as an invaluable historical and anthropological record, but as a fundamental planning document for native leadership, central and regional government officials, and regional oil companies in a region where intensive petroleum development threatens to crush Khanty culture by undermining the traditional land uses on which it is based.
The Atlas will use a series of 1:200 000 base maps for identifying sites in the following categories: traditional and contemporary settlements, both individual extended family settlements and villages; individual family hunting territories; places of cultural significance, including cultic sites, sites with mythical associations, traditional cemeteries; archaeological sites; other land-use features, such as reindeer trails, communal hunting lands, fishing, hunting, gathering and pasturing areas and so on. Additional maps will highlight the development of industrialization and infrastructure associated with these lands. All identified sites will be accompanied by an ethnohistoric description. As a complement to these comprehensive area maps of the region, three intensive studies of traditional land use on family hunting territories reflecting the wide regional differences in Khanty cultural patterns will be undertaken, and mapped on 1: 200 000 base maps. All data will be compiled into a computerized database (Paradox), copies of which will be made available to scholars upon request; the database will be designed so that it can later be integrated with a GIS computerized mapping progrram, such as ARCView. Finally, the Atlas will be prefaced by scholarly essays, keyed to the mapped data, which describe archaeological, historical, traditional-economic and -cultural resources, and the nature, causes and consequences of changing patterns of settlement and industrial exploitation in this region in the twentieth century.
The situation in Western Siberia focuses with a terrible urgency all the forces that are now at work in the former Soviet Union: the chaos caused by the privatization and restructuring of Russian industry, the tense relations between the central and regional governments, and ambiguous, inconsistent, even self-contradictory policies on land tenure, local self-government, human rights, and the cultural and political autonomy of minorities. And West Siberia is only perhaps the most dramatic example of how these forces are working throughout the Russian North and Far East. The Khanty Atlas will collocate widely disparate forms of data, including interviews with representatives of all parties involved in this struggle, and provide an invaluable tool for any comprehensive planning and for the development of mitigation programs that would take into account indigenous Khanty interests in an environment of intensive industrialization. By providing a scientific, not ideological or self-interested, common basis for discussions between representatives of industry, government and Khanty, the Atlas would also serve a useful social and political purpose, by fostering a broader dialogue over complex issues that now tend to be settled simply by an overdetermining preemptive action on the part of one of the parties. The Atlas is thus not only an invaluable record of what has happened, but a powerful vehicle for focusing a public articulation of the perceptions, plans and options of the major actors in this arena.
The goal of the Khanty Traditional Land-Use Atlas is to create an accurate cartographic representation of historical and contemporary Khanty land-use in the basin of the Upper Ob' which is both valuable as an historic and ethnographic record and useful to government and industry officials and Khanty leaders as a planning document.
Objectives: Cartographic representations of the following types of data, linked to a comprehensive computerized database, and framed by interpretive, scholarly essays: