Red Ties and Residential Schools
Описание книги
In this book Alexia Bloch examines the experiences of a community of Evenki, an indigenous group in central Siberia, to consider the place of residential schooling inidentity politics in contemporary Russia. Residential schools established in the 1920s brought Siberians under the purview of the Soviet state, and Bloch demonstrates how in the post-Soviet era, a time of jarring social change, these schools continue to embody the salience of Soviet cultural practices and the spirit of belonging to a collective. She explores how Evenk intellectuals are endowing residential schools with new symbolic power and turning them into a locus for political mobilization. In contrast to the binary model of oppressed/oppressor underlying many accounts of state/indigenous relations, Bloch's work provides a complex picture of the experiences of Siberians in Soviet and post-Soviet society. Bloch's research, conducted in a central Siberian town during the 1990s, is ethnographically grounded in life stories recorded with Evenk women; surveys of households navigating histories of collectivization and recent, rampant privatization; and in residential schools and in museums, both central to Evenk identity politics. While considering how residential schools once targeted marginalized reindeer herders, especially young girls, for socialization and assimilation, Bloch reveals how class, region, and gendered experience currently influence perspectives on residential schooling. The analysis centers on the ways vehicles of the Soviet state have been reworked and still sometimes embraced by members of an indigenous community as they forge new identities and allegiances in the post-Soviet era.
Отрывок из книги
Red Ties and Residential Schools
Indigenous Siberians in a Post-Soviet State
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Throughout the early and mid-twentieth century, the creation of socialist societies brought about radically new ways of life for populations across the world. In establishing revolutionary governments, socialist nations also radically altered the shape of every day life and the sense of belonging for each and every person. In the case of the Soviet Union, the country was configured out of vastly different regions and the government sought to forge a completely new national identity. Incorporating peoples of different backgrounds and languages, such as indigenous Siberians, was a monumental task facing the Soviet Union when it sought to create a new nation. A painful legacy of collectivization of lands and animal herds, nationalization of private property, and compulsory schooling for indigenous people were all part of this Soviet campaign to sweep the population into a new society and establish the contours of a new nation-state.
The Soviet attempts to create a new society, including altered social hierarchies and imposed structures of learning, were rife with challenges. As a range of authors have documented (Serge 1937; Pika 1989; Conquest 1990; Nove 1993), in the wake of enthusiasm for creating an equitable society, vast injustices took place and political idealism gave way to opportunism. By the late 1930s, millions had lost their lives as the newly entrenched Soviet policies drove apparatchiks and citizens at all levels of the social hierarchy to exercise power against their rivals and those people perceived as endangering the national interest. By the mid-1940s, which brought the devastation of World War II, the country was in ruins, but a nation of “Soviet” people had emerged.
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