Based on extensive research in the Arctic Russian region of Chukotka, Settlers on the Edge is the first English-language account of settler life anywhere in the circumpolar north to appear since Robert Paine's The White Arctic (1977), and the first to describe the experience of Soviet migrants in the Russian Arctic. Covering a span from the beginning of mass settlement in the 1950s to the present day, Niobe Thompson's ethnography is based on settler life-histories, archival research, and close participant observation over five years. Following a description of the high modernist project of Northern settlement in the Soviet years, Settlers on the Edge offers a unique portrait of an oligarchic "take-over" in the contemporary Russian Arctic. This original treatment of an almost unknown subject powerfully challenges the image of the indifferent and transient "newcomer" evident in the existing anthropology of the Arctic. Settlers on the Edge describes the remarkable transformation of a population once dedicated to establishing colonial power on a northern frontier into a rooted community of "locals" now resisting a renewed colonial project. Thompson provides unique insight into the future of identity politics in the Arctic, the role of resource capital and the oligarchs in the Russian provinces, and the fundamental human questions of belonging and transcience.
