Department seminars: Professor David G. Anderson

This paper builds on my earlier work on Arctic Domestication to think around the concept of food sovereignty.  The idea, which was framed by peasant autonomy movements in Latin America has come to dominate official development discourse through its adoption into sustainable development indicators.  In the paper I wish to take a step back and to reflect on the notions of self, place and society as articulated by hunting societies across the circumpolar Arctic.  I will put forward and distinguish the idea of Arctic Food Sovereignty from the authoritative variants.  Finally I will reflect on how the idea of responsibility and care within food chains could help imagine a collaborative and “neighbourly” type of social theory as distinct from the authoritarian versions of liberal market politics.

David G. Anderson Professor in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK, and is currently chair of The Anthropology of The North research specialization. His ethnographic research spans the arctic region and is thematically concerned with political ecology, human-animal relations, development theory, landscape studies and ethnohistory. He is the author of  Identity and ecology in Arctic Siberia: the number one reindeer brigade (Berghahn 2000), the key ethnographic monographic of an Indigenous people in arctic Russia, and co-editor of  Perspectives on the Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North (Berghahn 2013, w\ R.P. Wishart and V. Vaté) and The Healing Landscapes of Central and Southeastern Siberia (UAlberta Press 2011).