Contents -- List of Maps, Diagrams, and Figures -- Dramatis Personae -- Introduction -- 1. To the Underworld with Ononti the Shamaness -- 2. Leopard Power and Police Power, the Jungle and the State -- 3. What the Living and the Dead Have to Say to Each Other -- 4. Memories without Rememberers -- 5. Young Monosi Changes His World Forever -- 6. Doloso Complicates the Future of His Mountaintop Village -- 7. Shocked by Baptists -- 8. Christians Die Mute -- 9. Redeemers Human and Divine -- 10. Youth Economics: Life after Sonums -- 11. Dancing with Alphabet Worshippers: Once and Future Hindus? -- Interlude: Government Kitsch and the Old Prophet's New Message -- 12. Six Remarkable Women and Their Destinies -- Epilogue: Spiritual Ecosystems and Loss of Theo- diversity -- Acknowledgments -- Glossary of Ethnic Groups and Communities -- References -- Index
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The essay by Piers Vitebsky is based on the author's field research on the Tungus family of peoples in Siberia's north and, in particular, on the Eveny. The author introduces the geographic, social, ethnic, and cultural parameters of the life of the Eveny and attempts to decipher the specifically nomadic features of their life. Vitebsky ties the origin of Eveny nomadism to the reindeer-based economy. The cycle of migration and the ecologically determined routes of migration of domesticated reindeer shape the life of the Eveny. The nomadic way of life is best reflected in the desire of the Eveny to move immediately after a temporary camp is established on the route of their migration. This urge to move is reflected in religious beliefs, which reference a number of spirits by location, while the pluralism of this animistic belief is linked to the desire to change places. The author then focuses on the perception of wildness of the Tungus, which was formed as a result of Russian imperial expansion in Siberia and the encounter of the normative Russian discourse of the sedentary population with the realities of nomadic life of the Tungus peoples. He traces the influence of the discourse of wildness on Soviet transformative policies of forced modernization and sedentarization in the north. In the final part of the essay, the author explores the reproduction of the nomadic way of life in the new circumstances of the Eveny in Soviet and post-Soviet life. Even though the policy of sedentarization was largely successful, the nomadic predispostion is reflected in Eveny mobility between the village and the city. Эссе Пирса Витебского "Дикие тунгусы и духи места" основано на полевом исследовании тунгусской семьи народов, проживающих на русском Крайнем Севере, и в частности на исследовании жизни эвенков. Автор пытается идентифицировать черты социального и культурного уклада эвенков, наиболее ярко отражающие их кочевой способ жизни, зарождение которого автор связывает с оленеводческой основой экономики данного народа. Экологически обусловленная миграция одомаш ненных оленей определила кочевой образ жизни эвенков, который слож ным образом отразился в их религиозных верованиях. Эти верования содержат анимистические представления о связи духов с определенной местностью. Плюрализм анимизма эвенков, таким образом, отражает стремление к смене места и духа-покровителя. В статье также рассма тривается восприятие тунгусов через троп дикости со времен русской экспансии в Сибири. Автор прослеживает, как имперский дискурс дикости повлиял на советскую политику ускоренной модернизации и перехода эвенков к оседлости. В заключительной части эссе Витебский анализирует способы воспроизводства кочевого образа жизни в новых для эвенков условиях советской и постсоветской реальности. Хотя пере ход к оседлому образу жизни был успешно завершен в советский период, элементы номадизма продолжают характеризовать жизнь эвенков в той ее части, которая касается оси миграции от деревни к городу.
Young Sora in Orissa, India, are 'forgetting' their dead. Where the older generation used shamans in trance to negotiate with ancestors in elaborate dialogues, their newly Baptist children refuse to talk to the dead or feed them, leaving their parents afraid to die for fear of neglect. Against a background of contemporary Indian nation‐building, this article examines the differing emotional price paid for this disengagement by two young persons whom the author has known since 1975, as one becomes a Baptist and the other a shaman. Their struggles to be or to become a certain kind of person are revealed through recent extraordinary moments, precipitated by the author's presence, when verbal articulacy fails them. Their conflicts between filial attachment and repudiation, or shamanic vocation and recantation, are explored to show how changes in loving and forgetting can be revealed through new but fleeting forms of inarticulacy.RésuméLes jeunes Sora de l'Orissa, en Inde, sont en train « d'oublier » leurs morts. Alors que les anciennes générations faisaient appel aux chamans en transe pour négocier avec les ancêtres au cours de dialogues élaborés, leurs enfants, convertis au christianisme baptiste, refusent de parler aux morts et de les nourrir, laissant ainsi leurs parents appréhender une mort après laquelle ils seront négligés. Dans le contexte contemporain de la construction de la nation indienne, l'auteur examine le prix émotionnel divergent payé pour ce désengagement par deux jeunes gens qu'il connaît depuis 1975. L'un est devenu baptiste, l'autre chaman. Leur lutte pour être ou devenir un certain type de personne est révélée au cours de récents épisodes sortant de l'ordinaire, catalysés par la présence de l'auteur, où le pouvoir des mots leur fait défaut. Les conflits qu'ils connaissent entre attachement filial et répudiation, entre vocation chamanique et abjuration, sont explorés pour montrer comment les changements dans l'amour et le pardon peuvent être révélés à travers de nouvelles formes fugaces d'inarticulation.
Piers Vitebsky, Centralized decentralization: the ethnography of remote reindeer herders under perestroïka. What are the implications of perestroika for the native groups in the most remote and outlying areas of the USSR? Rather than speak of "traditional" and "modern" strands in the lives of such peoples, they should be seen as citizens of a modern state making well-informed choices about their own future. This is illustrated through the example of the Eveny of north-eastern Siberia, who live mainly by reindeer herding. Though this is highly economical, since collectivization it has progressively separated the nomadic herders from their families in the centralized villages. This leads to a low birth-rate and the estrangement of children from herding. Under perestroika, labor is being reorganized into a system of contracts. Though the aim is to increase efficiency, this may also allow families to live and work together again. However, logistic problems, such as schooling, remain. These developments are taking place against a background of increasing ethnic consciousness and open public debate on policy. Though one of the main tendencies is towards decentralization, this takes place within an overall political climate determined at the centre, in Moscow.
Abstract Why would anyone want to travel fast? This paper places local evaluations of velocity in the context of purpose, distinguishing between the excursion of the hunter, the perpetual annual circuit of the reindeer herder and the one-off journey. Reindeer hooves and sledge runners enhance human velocity on the ground. In its extreme reduction of friction, aviation mimics the soul-flight of shamans and compresses distance, but also creates new purposes and concepts of destination, while telecommunication abolishes distance altogether. In generating their own purposes and rhythms, reindeer, aircraft and radio each generate different kinds of personhood and ways of feeling.
Siberia is a vast and varied region, linked horizontally to the circumpolar Arctic and vertically to Mongolia and Central Asia. Nineteenth-century anthropological fieldwork was important abroad, particularly in America. From the 1920 to 1980s, Siberia was almost totally isolated from outside research and from comparative anthropology. However, Soviet anthropologists conducted lengthy fieldwork, producing a huge corpus of valuable material in Russian. Their questions were specific to their ideological situation, for example placing indigenous peoples in a Marxist evolutionary framework, and during the 1930s, many suffered imprisonment and execution. Topics became more sociological in the 1960s, and when the region opened to foreigners around 1990, a new wave of young researchers conducted long-term fieldwork, producing a flourishing new literature in English and shifting the emphasis from historical reconstruction to current issues. Topics in this new literature include the state, agency, modernization, shamanism, animal spirits, resource development, and empowerment. Throughout all periods, indigenous people themselves have also been involved in research.
