Igor Krupnik
Anthropologist

Dr. Igor Krupnik joined the ASC in September 1991, first as an 'international visiting scholar' under the SI Fellowship program (1991-94) and later as a staff Ethnologist/Research Anthropologist (since 1994). He was appointed Curator of the Arctic and Northern Ethnology collections in 2005, and he is currently in charge of some 30,000 ethnological objects at the NMNH coming from Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Siberia, and the southern portion of the NW Coast.

Igor was born in Russia where he was trained as a human geographer and cultural anthropologist. He has degrees in Geography (1973, University of Moscow), ethnography/cultural anthropology (Ph.D. 1977, Institute of Ethnology, Russian Academy of Sciences), and in ecology/subsistence management (Full Doctorate, 1991, Institute of Ecology, Russian Academy of Sciences). His primary research fields are modern cultures, ecological knowledge, and cultural heritage of the people of the Arctic (primarily in Alaska and Siberia); culture change and contact history; human ecology; history of Arctic science and Arctic indigenous studies; impact of modern climate change on Arctic residents, their economies, and cultures. Igor has done extensive field research in the Western Arctic, primarily in Alaska (St. Lawrence Island, Seward Peninsula), in the Russian Bering Strait area, and along the Russian Arctic coast.

Prior to his move to the Smithsonian, Igor was a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (in 1991), and he worked for 15 years as a Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow (1976-1990). Igor is an extremely productive member of the ASC staff. He is involved in several research, publication, exhibit and community- and public-oriented initiatives that focus on the impact of global climate change, the preservation of cultural heritage, the ecological knowledge of indigenous people and the history of science in the Arctic/North Pacific region. Since joining the Smithsonian, he published 13 books, edited volumes and exhibit catalogs; guest-edited four special journal issues, and produced numerous papers in journals and collected volumes published in the U.S., Canada, UK, Japan, Russia, Germany, Denmark, Israel, Austria, and Sweden. In 2006, he was the lead science curator of the NMNH-based exhibit, Arctic: A Friend Acting Strangely, that featured the impact of climate change upon polar residents and indigenous people. He served as a member of the Advisory Committee for the NSF Office of Polar Programs (2001-2003), and is on Editorial Boards of three international Arctic journals, Arctic Anthropology, Etudes/Inuit/Studies, and Acta Borealia. He was among the founding members of the International Arctic Social Sciences Association (IASSA) and he served twice on its Council in 1990–1995 and, again in 2004–2008.

Igor’s most recent contribution to Smithsonian science is his involvement in the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007–2008. He served on the U.S. National Planning Committee for IPY in 2003–2004, before being nominated to the main international steering body for IPY, the IPY Joint Committee, in 2004. On the Joint Committee, Igor serves as one of two social scientists representing the interests of social studies and Arctic residents. He was instrumental in bringing social/human research onto the IPY agenda for the first time in its history and he played a major role in developing a Smithsonian program for IPY, which culminated in a major international workshop, Smithsonian at the Poles: Contributions to IPY Sciences (May 2007) and the subsequent publication of its proceedings (Krupnik, Lang, and Miller, eds. 2009). Igor’s personal contribution to the IPY 2007–2008 science program is an international project called SIKU (Sea Ice Knowledge and Use in the North), on which he coordinates activities of several research teams from Canada, US, Russia, Greenland, and France working in some 20 Arctic communities from Bering Strait to Greenland.

Click here to download a list of Dr. Krupnik's publications.