This presentation will explore two interrelated efforts: Pleistocene Park, an experimental nature reserve in Arctic Siberia, which aspires to restore the so-called mammoth steppe ecosystem from the late Pleistocene as a way to preserve the melting permaforst and slow down climate change, and the efforts of the American and global de-extinction movement to produce a "mammoth" or rather its ecological proxy through genetic engineering with its subsequent reintroduction to Pleistocene Park. A third, independent Russian-Korean initiative to resurrect the mammoth through cloning will also be discussed. Lunch provided.
As an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, Anya Bernstein’s main work has been on the changing geopolitical imaginaries of mobile religious communities across Eurasia. Her book, Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism (Chicago, 2013), explores the transformation of Buddhist practice among a Siberian indigenous people known as Buryats, foremost through their post-Soviet renewal of transnational ties with their fellow co-religionists across north and south Asia. To capture these issues ethnographically, Bernstein conducted multi-sited field research in Buryat communities in Siberia as well as in Tibetan monasteries in India where some Buryat monks currently receive their religious education. The book focuses on the ways in which religion and politics have intersected under conditions of rapid social change in terms raised by recent work on sovereignty and postsocialism. As a visual anthropologist Bernstein has directed, filmed, and produced several award-winning documentary films on Buryat Buddhism and shamanism, including Join Me in Shambhala (2002) and In Pursuit of the Siberian Shaman (2006). Bernstein's current project is titled "The Post-Soviet Culture Wars: Blasphemy, Iconoclasm, and the Secular in Contemporary Russia".