Floating Shops in the Ob North: Landscape of Mobility and Modes of Temporality

Abstract

Floating shops are an important part of the social landscape and life in northern villages located on water traffic ways. The role of the latter is especially important for settlements in the Ob North, where the “Northern supply haul” (deliveries of goods to the Northern Territories) has always been carried out from the south by the Ob-Irtysh River Shipping Company. Floating shops were actively used during the oil and gas development of the Ob North in the late Soviet period, but their “golden age” came in the 1990–2000s, when private entrepreneurs created flotillas of floating shops, which became an important factor in ensuring transport accessibility and improving the socio-economic status of local communities. The study is based on the materials of a field expedition trip conducted in the summer of 2019 in the water area of the Middle and Lower Ob. The conceptual framework of the study is built on the basis of the social philosophy of Latour, Urry and Law, with its characteristic axiomatics of a heterogeneous, hybrid world in constant motion, and with an orientation toward the study of networked, mobile, and variable forms of social life. In this article, special attention is paid to the use of the landscape conditions and affordanсes for the formation and functioning of the mobile trade infrastructure. In the present case, we observe the elimination of borders between the landscape and the transport infrastructure until their merger into a unified functional system in the terminology of Ingold. An essential condition for the success of this system is a spatio-temporal synchronization of the information, commodity-money, and raw flows achieved by the hybrid nature of the floating shop’s mode of temporality. This case offers opportunities for the theoretical conceptualization of the interconnection between mobility, landscape, and modes of temporality.