Dominant technosciences often advance “one-world” logics, it is universalizing assumptions that treat technoscientific description as reality, while reducing Indigenous world-making as cultural perspective. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Eveny reindeer herders in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Russia (northeastern Siberia), this presentation challenges dominant technoscience approach through maut (Eveny for lasso): a lasso made from reindeer hide that reindeer herders insist one must always carry in the taiga. I argue that the lasso is not a relic from the past, but a future-making technology that gathers humans, reindeer, materials, and place-spirits into reciprocal obligations.The making of a lasso is slow and relational process. Because this knowledge is learned through embodied apprenticeship rather than written instruction, it pushes for a different knowledge order – a challenge to the hierarchy that treats technoscience as the only rigorous way of knowing.

Anastasia Ulturgasheva is an Indigenous (Ewen/Lamut) scholar from Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), she earned PhD degree from Uppsala University in cultural anthropology, and her scholarly inquiry lies at the intersection of museum anthropology, human/other-than-human relations, Indigenous futurities, and the impacts of climate change in Arctic and Subarctic regions.

Zoom: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/61683974966

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Organised by Arramat Pathway T5 Decolonizing Science and Education, at Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism, CEMFOR, Uppsala University; Univ of British Columbia; Univ of Alberta; Univ of Minnesota