Is this the same nature we used to know? Assessing Local Knowledge in the Sakha Republic

The ISARS 2022 conference titled “Shamanism and crisis: Seeking Human Identity” aimed to investigate the multifaceted nature of crisis and uncertainty in the relationship between humans and non-human others. In line with the theme of the conference and on a broader scale existential crisis, both meant as an ecologically, socially, economically driven process, also affects modes and means of relating to other entities and ecosystems: one of such ways encompasses the production, transmission and use of local knowledge. My paper wishes to analyse how local knowledge is produced and transmitted in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), a Sovereign Republic within the Russian Federation. Based on fieldwork trips led in 2009, 2011, 2017, 2019 and devoted to the investigation of life histories of women healers, my paper addresses the following questions: how does folk knowledge transforms when it copes with environmental, social, economical, political changes? In such changing settings is it still passed on from generation to generation or is it switching to a more “horizontal” mode of transmission? And, eventually, what new body of indigenous knowledge is produced and who is “entitled” to use it (shamans, healers, ritual experts?).