Patty A. Gray

Office: Eielson 312B
Phone: (907) 474-6188
Email: ffpag@uaf.edu

C.V. (downloads pdf file)

Patty Gray joined the anthropology faculty at UAF in January 2003. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin Madison in 1998, and taught for one year at in the Department of History and Anthropology at Central Missouri State University (1999). She went on to become a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany (2000-2002), where she was coordinator of the Siberia Project Group (since 2001) and was engaged in research on changing property relations in the postsocialist transition in Eurasia, working within the research group of director Chris Hann (www.eth.mpg.de).

Since 1995, Dr. Gray has conducted research on the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug in the the far northeast of Russia, with field trips in 1995-96, 1998, 2000 and 2001, focusing on two issues. The first research focus kept her primarily in Chukotka's capital city of Anadyr', working among indigenous intellectuals to investigate the preemption of an indigenous social movement following the collapse of the Soviet Union. This occurred in a changing local political context where the rheoric of democracy was used to disenfranchise targeted groups. This work highlights issues of domination and resistance, and discursive practices of power, and is featured in her book from Cambridge University Press titled The Predicament of Chukotka's Indigenous Movement: Post-Soviet Activism in the Russian Far North.

The second research focus took her into several tundra villages of western Chukotka, where she investigated the impact of Russia's privatization program on reindeer herding in Chukotka, which was organized within the system of Soviet state collectives (sovkhozy).The reorganization of these state reindeer farms and the period of economic and political crisis in the early 1990s was disasterous for the communities who practice reindeer herding. Her research investigates both the bureaucratic level of state reinder herding management as well as the lived experience of those in villages and tundra camps whose lives have been radically transformed by this process.

In 2001, Dr. Gray visited a second research site in the Republic of Marii El in the Volga River region of central Russia, where she began to comparatively investigate similar issues of changing property relations in the context of collective farm reorganization in a farming village.

In 2006, Dr. Gray is beginning a new three-year project titled "Missionaries, Humanitarian Aid, and Accompanying Ideologies in the Russian Far East," which will entail research in Magadan. The project is one component of a larger international collaborative project titled "New Religious Movements in the Russian North: Competing Uses of Religiosity After Socialism" (NEWREL), of which Dr. Gray is also the Project Leader. NEWREL brings together 9 PIs from Estonia, Finland, France, Russia, Switzerland and the United States, all of whom will be conducting research in different parts of the Russian North. The project is one of the finalists in the competition of the European Science Foundation's BOREAS program ("Histories from the north: Environments, movements, narratives").

Selected Publications:

Book

• The Predicament of Chukotka's Indigenous Movement: Post-Soviet Activism in the Russian Far North. 2005. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • "Gray has demonstrated her talent for balancing evocative personal stories with a sweeping and incisive study that makes a fundamental contribution to the literature on native peoples in the post-Soviet north. The analysis of Chukotka is meticulous, but the book will have a much wider appeal due to its masterful contribution to debates on Soviet approaches to ethnicity and nationality, indigenous resistance, and social movements. This outstanding study will have lasting appeal to a very broad readership." - Peter Jordan, University of Sheffield, in Slavic Review
  • "Gray's rich ethnography not only contributes to the study of social movements; it also fills a gap in post-Soviet studies by detailing how the scripted roles of the Soviet civil society were being rewritten (and by whom)... A great strength of the book is the way in which the autor narrates this process." -Patrick Plattet, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in American Anthropologist
  • "The Predicament of Chukotka's Indigenous Movement tightly integrates thick ethnography with a theoretical contribution to political movements. It doesn't suffer from the typical structure of first ethnographies – theoretically sophisticated introductions and conclusions bracketing ethnographic discussion which seems unconnected to the ideas tossed around in chapter 1." -Alexander King, University of Aberdeen, on the website of Soyuz: The Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies
  • "Scholars and students of the Russian North should read this eye-opening account of Chukotka's geopolitics, history, economics and culture..." -Jane E. Knox-Voina, Bowdoin College, in The Russian Review

Articles and Book Chapters