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 some inhabitants continue to attribute change to a long-disproven driver, de facto perpetuating a cultural myth, and how others expressed starkly contrasting perceptions of change. For both, the analysis reveals the importance of using a cultural framing founded in a people’s vernacular knowledge system with a focus on historical precedence for the former case, and on sacred beliefs for the latter.

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 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.