The Social Worlds of the Karakan Pine Forest: Prospects for Rapprochement and Imperatives of Justice

Abstract

This study concerns the interaction of various orders of worth that produce a distinct social landscape in the Karakan pine forest in Southwest Siberia. The data, which consist of diary entries and interview transcripts, were acquired during three sociological expeditions in 2021–2022. The article accounts for three core problem strands of contemporary economic and social life in the forest which encompass most of the tensions between different orders of worth. (1) The relationship between seasonal and year-round residents; (2) the coexistence of vacationing outdoorsmen and foragers; and (3) the organization of lumber harvesting. These storylines help to draw an analytic scheme of discursive tendencies guiding the emergence of new economic and communicative practices. The most general tendency results in the formation of a coherent situation between the civic, scientific, and market orders of worth to consider the forest as a priority value as a whole, as opposed to patriarchal modes of assessment rooted
in particular relationships and tacit knowledge of forest users