On June 20th, Princeton Anthropology graduate student Kamal Kariem successfully defended his dissertation “Believing Conservation: Altering Land Relations, Hunting, and Indigeneity on the Bikin River.”
This dissertation investigates a conflict around nature conservation and the Bikin National Park in Krasnyi Yar, a small taiga village in Primorskii krai within the Russian Federation. Founded in 2015, the Bikin National Park officially protects both nature and traditional Indigenous ways of life, especially Udege ways of life as the largest Indigenous people in the village and in the region. While this conflict is often framed as between those who help nature conservation efforts and those who are antagonistic to them, it has much deeper implications because there are Udege on both sides of it. Within this conflict, the Udege who are for the Bikin National Park are understood as being for conservation, while those Udege who are against the Bikin National Park are understood as being against conservation.
Kamal’s dissertation defense committee included his co-advisers Julia Elyachar and Serguei Oushakine, as well as his two examiners Agustín Fuentes and Bruce Grant (NYU).
Kamal will be joining the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Williams College as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow this July. Congratulations, Dr. Kariem!
