Nous sommes heureux de vous convier à venir à la séance du séminaire des Études mongoles & sibériennes le 25 janvier 2023 pour écouter Nadezhda Mamontova (Collegium Research Fellow, Turku Institute for Advanced Studies), pour une intervention intitulée : “Process toponymy : the use of community-engaged GIS technology for documenting Indigenous geospatial knowledge among the Evenki“, au Campus Condorcet, 14 cour des Humanités, 93322 Aubervilliers cedex., de 14h à 16h, en salle 5.067 (bâtiment de recherche nord).
Il sera également possible d’y accéder en ligne, sur inscription : isacharleux@orange.fr 

Résumé

This presentation discusses the aim and the process of designing a community-engaged open-access GIS toponymic platform, based on Indigenous Evenki place names. Most projects on Indigenous toponymy available online are either oriented towards professional use among scholars or serve as enclosed repositories of Indigenous knowledge. Toponymic atlases remain the most common form of documenting and representing Indigenous place naming systems. Yet, temporal and geographic comparisons of place names have clearly demonstrated that, along with a conventional understanding of Indigenous place names as stable and conservative, there is a dynamic model of place naming to be found in nomadic societies, when the names are not only passed through generations but also modified and created. This finding required a number of methodological approaches regarding how researchers might collect and represent geospatial concepts and place names in nomadic societies, with the use of GIS technology. This project attempts to approach this issue by creating an open digital platform that combines GIS with Indigenous vernacular cartography, place names, and a great variety of data regarding the meaning and use of toponyms, their evolution, and change. I propose to call this approach a “process toponymy” and advocate for applying a semiotic approach to documenting and representing Indigenous place names’ knowledge via GIS-based platforms.

Au plaisir de vous retrouver nombreux,
I. Charleux, G. Delaplace, D. Oparin & V. Vaté