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ОглавлениеIntroduction
Fieldwork, Socialism in Crisis, and Identities in the Making
For years political concerns covered up the real history of the people of our country. While it was proclaimed that the history of the USSR was the same as the history of the people, in fact this official history did not represent the people’s history. Numerically small ethnic groups especially suffered in this respect. It is not surprising that we do not know our history; customs and traditions are being forgotten, and knowledge of material and spiritual culture is disappearing. Our children are losing a sense of ethnic identity; they do not know the real value of their heritage and culture.
—From the preface to Evenk Ethnography Program (Shchapeva 1994: 3)
I arrived to carry out long-term research in the town of Tura in fall 1993, several days following President Yeltsin’s decree to disband the Russian Parliament. Following my flights from North America to Moscow and then to Krasnoiarsk, the central Siberian city about 300 miles south of Tura, I sat with friends and watched the live CNN broadcast of the armed crisis back in Moscow. The predominantly Communist members of Parliament refused to abide by the unconstitutional decree to disband Parliament, and in the confrontation that ensued Yeltsin’s forces eventually took the building by siege (Khronika smutnogo vremeni 1993). At the time I did not fully appreciate how the political standoff, which continued to unfold and be televised nationwide in the days following as I began my fieldwork, affected my project. In part, President Clinton’s support for Yeltsin’s violent actions jeopardized my research because Communists in Tura were already seething about U.S. “interventionist” tactics when I arrived in the town. When I accepted a gracious offer to stay in the temporarily vacant apartment belonging to the representative from the Evenk District, I did not realize how much this man was disliked by many anti-Communists and reformers. Only after living in this apartment for nearly a month did I learn that this representative to the People’s Congress of the Russian Federation was one of the 100 representatives who barricaded themselves inside the Parliament building for days as Yeltsin’s anti-Communist supporters bombarded the building with gunfire.
My fieldwork seemed to be off to an uneasy start, but then this fit with the expected initial phase of ethnographic projects, reified in accounts of fieldwork as a time for “gaining rapport.” As many authors have described, anthropological fieldwork is practically defined by a requisite period of gaining the trust of consultants (Kligman 1988: 20; Scheper-Hughes 1979: 11). Nita Kumar has written, “Fieldwork is by its very nature an ambitious, optimistic, very personal effort to woo over indifferent strangers” (1992: 2). Such descriptions of the process of “gaining rapport” appear as a common thread in fieldwork accounts, and ethnographers are increasingly dedicating a portion of their work to considering how their presence in communities intersects with shifting balances of power, heightened social inequalities, and allegiances to be made and, sometimes, lost.
I initiated my research in Tura with a keen interest in the role of education, particularly residential schooling, in defining relationships between indigenous people and the Soviet state. This topic soon came to articulate with broader issues of identity because a major preoccupation of the community revolved around competing ideas about Evenk identities and the future relationship of the state to “small peoples of the North” (malochislennye narody Severa). This Soviet government designation encompassed those indigenous groups considered to be numerically “small,” with the implied comparison being to the “large” ethnic groups of Russians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, and others living in the former Soviet Union.1 Community members frequently discussed the future of government affirmative action policies toward “small peoples of the North.” An equally prevalent topic of debate among Evenki revolved around ways to ensure their rights, including access to land for subsistence practices, native language education, and benefits from the privatization of natural resources in the region. The contemporary contest over Evenk identities was tightly related to the rapidly shifting political-economic context in the community. Overall, my research focus on Evenk identities resonated with those with whom I spent hours in conversation, and for those who ultimately had control over my access to archives, statistics, and travel.
As a citizen of the United States, or Amerikanka as I was usually referred to, I was not quickly absorbed into the everyday life of Tura. These were the early days of satellite broadcasts of U.S. media, and this incessantly reminded my consultants of the relative wealth and opportunity from which I had only temporarily disengaged. As Roger Lancaster reflects in his work on Nicaragua (1988: 6), given the legacy of anthropology as a discipline often historically allied with government surveillance, it is not surprising that those who become its subjects of study find the projects to be suspect. Furthermore, given my origins as a citizen of the country in most direct opposition to the Soviet Union in the tug-of-war known as the Cold War, it was inevitable that I was perceived as closely related to this global power struggle.
Images of the “West” and Dreams of Consumption
“Gaining rapport” as a North American doing research in a central Siberian town in the 1990s was complicated by the fresh history of the Cold War, which invoked a binary view of geopolitics, with Soviet culture posed in opposition to all things viewed as “Western.”2 After more than sixty years of official open antagonism toward the “West” (zapad) and its “decadent bourgeois culture,” by the late 1980s, U.S. popular culture was being widely rebroadcast and reimagined throughout Russia.3 In the 1990s in the Evenk District capital of Tura, youth were especially smitten with Western media images and market glitz, but people of all ages and backgrounds eagerly anticipated weekly television shows such as Santa Barbara, MTV, and Dallas, as well as a Mexican serial The Rich Also Cry, depicting the tribulations of contemporary Mexican aristocrats. Turintsy, residents of Tura, often spoke in terms of the relative poverty surrounding them in comparison to what they perceived as the wealth of the West.
One reflection of the fascination with the West was an active appreciation for the bright colors and appealing design features of Western packaging. In 1992–93 many apartments in Tura had a shelf displaying boxes or containers with the English labels facing out; some displayed empty cookie boxes, others perfume bottles or candy wrappers. Rural central Siberians were not, however, the only ones smitten with Western products and bright packaging in the early 1990s. In the apartment in Moscow where I briefly stayed, the owners had arranged a wide array of Western packaging, including Folgers coffee cans, Stridex facial wipes, and soap wrappers in a prominent glass-fronted cupboard in the center of the apartment. While the impact of market forces in Moscow and outlying regions differed in degree at this time, irrespective of geography or political affiliation there was a widespread fascination with commodities and the new material possibilities suggested by an expanding consumer culture in Russia.
The array of packaging could be viewed as embodying the aspirations to consume that were burgeoning in the early 1990s in Russia (Humphrey 1995). The packaging was also part of how Turintsy were imagining their new lives in a different political order with open borders; they were able to envision global connections to geographically distant others through foreign consumer goods unavailable in Russia until the early 1990s (see Appadurai 1996). Consumer goods linked a wide range of people to the modernity that many believed had eluded Russia in the late Soviet period. Frequently images of “civilization,” kul’tura, were invoked in contrast to what was commonly termed as the “backward,” ner-azvitaia or ostalaia, life in Russia and in the town of Tura in particular.4 It was not uncommon for people to display pages torn from Western, English-language magazines on their walls. Among the popular images displayed were advertisements for home furnishings and bath fixtures. In one case an advertisement for Finnish bath fixtures was hung opposite the chamber pot in a water closet that, like most of those in town, lacked running water. The squeaky clean, blond Finnish kids depicted in the immaculate bath chamber seemed to exemplify the view Turintsy tended to have toward the West as a place to envy for its opulence and basic amenities.
As scholars have written about housewares and status elsewhere (Rosenberger 1992), in the early 1990s housewares in Russia increasingly appeared to announce individual aspirations to become more “Western” and thereby increase status levels. The prominent display of wrappers and the aspiration to install a Finnish toilet could both be understood as examples of what Bourdieu (1984) describes in other contexts as the simulation of higher classes’ tastes, or cultural capital, by households with insufficient income, or economic capital. In short, throughout Russia in the 1990s consumerism was extensive; some have hypothesized this was the result of an earlier inaccessibility of goods, a sort of thirst created by an earlier dearth of consumer products (Verdery 1996: 26–29). In this area of Russia, consumerism seemed to be at least equally the result of the sudden appearance of advertising on television and sheer curiosity as the result of some sort of flaw in socialist ideology.
An all-pervasive sense of insufficient consuming power was shared by people of diverse ethnic backgrounds in the town of Tura. Russians, Evenki, Ukrainians, Sakha, and the few Azeris and Tadzhiks (displaced by civil war) all tended to share this sense. This was intensified by an insecurity about financial sources and inflation; as soon as much-awaited paychecks were received, Turintsy would seek a means of transforming the cash into the material goods that were available. For those with paychecks funded directly from federal budgets, mostly Russians and Ukrainians working in the local radio and television station or with the local aviation, these were luxury goods such as radios, telephones, and video players. Those subsisting largely on locally issued paychecks or subsidies that were sometimes months late could generally only afford foodstuffs. My presence in the field at a time when such schisms around consumption were beginning to be intensified by television advertising and growing disparities of wealth significantly affected my attempt to “gain rapport.”
A Researcher’s Cultural Baggage: MTV, Bush’s Legs, and the Cold War
As a range of ethnographers (for example, Abu-Lughod 1993; Lancaster 1988; Rosaldo 1989) have attested, the subject position of a researcher is critical to how research is conceived and conducted, and in turn, how communities react to or engage with projects. In my case, “the West” loomed as an icon that often took on far more importance than my stated research project for the people with whom I worked. The legacy of restricted travel both outside Russia and within the country was in part responsible for creating this intense interest but more important was the imagery of binary cultural frameworks established during the Cold War. This historical influence resonates in the lyrics of a late 1980s rock song by the acclaimed Soviet group Nautilius Pompilius. As the chorus of one song laments: “Goodbye America, oooo, where I will never be. Farewell to your faded jeans and your forbidden fruits” (“Goodbye Amerika, ooooo, gde ia nikogda ne budu. Goodbye Amerika, ooooo, proshchai tertye dzhinsy i tvoi zapretnye plody”). The song incorporates a sense of the officially “forbidden” West prior to the onset of Perestroika in the mid-1980s. As in this song, in the popular imagination in central Siberia in the early 1990s, Amerika, meaning the West, continued to occupy a central place in a cultural landscape, both figuratively and literally.
The jarring disjuncture between a time when Amerika was a forbidden fruit and a time when its images and products were colonizing the cultural landscape further heightened the attention paid to me as an ethnographer. Various people looked to me as the definitive source of information on the West, and specifically the United States. At one point, for instance, the director of the Office for the Defense of the Family, Children, and Motherhood (Otdel po delam zashchity semei, detei i materinstva), an office established in the early 1990s combining social welfare and housing concerns, asked me to comment on a local community event being termed the “Celebration of the Family.” She was interested in what types of activities would be planned for a similar celebration in the United States, but also in how “family” might be construed there. At another point I was asked by students of a local vocational school to give a television interview reflecting on contemporary adolescence and family dynamics. And in the residential school and in several organizations in the town of Tura, I was frequently queried about Alaska. “Do towns there have running water? How much do they get for a sable pelt? Do children there know their native languages? Are there reindeer in Alaska?” and “How much are their [teachers’, herders’, doctors’, etc.] paychecks?”
The knowledge of the United States and its high standard of living relative to the rest of the world was also invoked by Russians and Evenki who sought to align the project of anthropology more with their pressing concerns (compare with Rethmann 1999). In various contexts they questioned my lack of personal complaints regarding the rough living conditions which they faced on a daily basis. Many jokingly inquired if I had been exiled or at least assigned by my academic supervisor to work in the town. While I sometimes grumbled to myself about the unkempt public outhouses or the poor drainage system that sometimes caused spring melt and waste water to flow over the sidewalk and road, for the most part I did not comment on these aspects of daily life; I viewed myself as a guest in Tura.
Following a radio broadcast of an interview in which I was asked how I felt about the town, and specifically about the lack of indoor plumbing, several Turintsy stopped me in the street to talk. These listeners were dissatisfied that I had answered the radio correspondent’s question without criticizing the local politicians who had not seen to improving basic amenities. Some people emphasized that as an international researcher I could potentially publicize and perhaps assist in improving social conditions in the region. I took their criticism as a commentary on how anthropology is far too often disengaged from addressing the pain and suffering so widespread in the world. The local sense that research should be tied to direct improvements in social conditions is a reminder to social scientists and echoes Scheper-Hughes’s concerns. As she explains, anthropology’s “time-honored conventional stance of ‘cultural relativity’ … dedicated to seeing the ‘good’ in every culture” (1979: 12) is closely linked to a narrow functionalist view of human societies prevalent in the discipline and in need of scrutiny.
Shifting Sites of Power: Political Parties, Spies, and Methods
In the initial stages of fieldwork, I learned that establishing rapport needs to be rethought as not simply an individual’s decision to “woo” as Kumar (1992) indicates but as a matter of the complex web of sociopolitical relations into which one enters as a researcher. Furthermore, as I quickly learned, methods of research must be carefully fitted to both research projects and shifting situations in the field. In my effort to use a range of methods, I supplemented semistructured interviews with a household survey. My thinking was that a survey of households would give me a broader sample of perspectives than I could gain in structured interviews. I completed a survey of eighty households, but, ultimately this approach threatened to intensify the dichotomy I had sought to reduce of “us” (social scientists) and “them” (subjects). More importantly, the survey had a detrimental affect on the rapport established with members of the community in the prior months of research. The survey approach was inextricably associated with a strong dichotomy within Russian society between the government (pravitel’stvo) and the people (narod). As Roger Lancaster found in his work in Nicaragua (1988: 15), the survey approach was associated with an “officiousness” and “social distance” of bureaucrats, or worse, intelligence officers. This misguided attempt to employ such an empiricist method led me both to refocus my efforts on qualitative approaches and to reconsider the dynamics of power in the specific post-Soviet context.
Perhaps the recent break with the Soviet government caused people to be even more suspicious of any official attempts to collect data and quantify their lives, particularly in the privacy of their apartments.5 The survey emphasized a distancing of researcher from community and reminded Turintsy that the fieldwork was part of a much larger academic enterprise that potentially had little to do with them. Furthermore, the survey reminded Turintsy of the need to “guard” their speech. Other scholars have also noted sharp distinctions between “guarded” and “unguarded” speech in Soviet society resulting from the suspicion that often pervaded social life in the former Soviet Union (Humphrey 1994b: 69). Ultimately, I set aside this method following the completion of a pilot survey; a more extensive survey would have jeopardized the trust of those with whom I sought to consult for more qualitative perspectives. The data collected even in the brief pilot survey has proven useful, however, particularly regarding subsistence practices among Turintsy, and in Chapter 2 I have drawn upon it.
In general, Turintsy welcomed me by inviting me to their homes for meals, taking me out on fishing trips, and introducing me to relatives. Many people eagerly assisted me in my research by introducing me to elderly relatives, loaning me books, sharing photographs, and locating copies of old newspaper clippings. There were some, however, who took umbrage with my project or were at least ambivalent about my presence in the community. For instance, one woman who rented me an apartment for several months—and whose child I tutored in English—quite vehemently announced to me over tea one day that Russia had no need for charity from the United States. This opinion was widely found throughout Russia in the 1990s. Older people especially begrudged the fact that the United States, so recently an official enemy, was now providing what they viewed as charity. This sentiment intensified when spoiled U.S. goods such as sour butter and moldy “Bush’s legs” (drumsticks) appeared on the market in 1992–93.6
My project met the most resistance from an older generation of both Evenki and Russians who had much to lose in the radical transformations related to the emerging market economy. While the Association of Peoples of the North, a newly established, local indigenous rights organization, had approved my project and invited me to focus my research on residential schooling and youth culture, not everyone was in agreement that I should be present in the town. At several points during my research, old guard Communists accused me of being a CIA agent, despite the fact that from the very outset I described my work as an ethnography project under the aegis of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The presence of an American, who only three years before would not have received a visa to visit the nearest large city, let alone the town of Tura, was both incredible and a direct challenge to local Communists’ authority.7
These old guard Party members had followed the political and economic changes initiated in Moscow. But, unlike those more powerful urban Communists who had something to gain (for example, positions as CEOs in companies) by quickly acquiescing to the shifting power and opportunities of capitalist mechanisms and appropriating state capital for personal investment, the local Communists were largely isolated from the potential personal benefits of a shift to capitalism. My presence brought them no concrete benefits and merely reminded them of their loss of authority over national policy and cultural production. For instance, in the Soviet period these old guard Communists had wielded considerable authority over deciding what was printed in the newspaper, broadcast over the radio, or advertised in a public space. During my research these spheres became increasingly open and even included notices for previously illegal religious gatherings. The radio and newspaper continued to be government controlled and therefore subject to new restrictions that were no longer defined by local Communist Party leaders.
As has been described for regions of Eastern Europe like Romania, the concept of “centralized accumulation” that operated in the Soviet period allowed a select Communist guard to control the allocation of resources (Kideckel 1993). Through control over everything from access to vacations to housing to freedom of worship, an elaborate hierarchy of Communist Party members and affiliates ensured compliance with cultural norms set by the Central Committee. These “nested hierarchies” of power, as Caroline Humphrey calls them in her examination of former socialist Mongolia (1994b), implicated all levels of society. In the mid-1990s, and especially in 1993 when the Communist Party was briefly outlawed, members of the old Communist guard were acutely aware of their waning authority.
Gendered States
Other segments of the population also felt a loss of power with the shift from state socialism. For instance, women in the former Soviet Union had disproportionately less access than men had to spheres of influence and power. Lapidus (1993) argues that during the Soviet period women were concentrated in the lower levels of organizational and pay hierarchy, and they thus now have less access to the spheres of government being privatized. While across Siberia seventy percent of women were reported to be unemployed in 1994 (Statistika 1994: 1), in Tura there were also large numbers of unemployed male oil-exploration workers.8 Thus the numbers of unemployed men and women were more equal than elsewhere in Russia. Women in Tura were hard hit by the slashing of government funds supporting the public sector—schooling, medicine, and government stores—in which they formed a majority of those employed. In Tura this trend was evident in the levels and types of unemployment. While all those formerly employed in state organizations and agricultural cooperatives (sovkhozy) were in danger of losing their jobs as reorganizations took place, women generally fared worse than men. Men’s labor was in demand as the construction of private buildings and housing grew in Tura, while women’s labor was widely devalued. Some women with financial resources had the option of seeking additional training as bookkeepers, an emerging sphere of employment as the new federal tax inspection office (nalogovaia inspektsiia) began requiring each business or organization to keep careful accounts. The most marginal women resorted to low-paid extra-domestic work of washing floors in town organizations and businesses.
This aspect of restructuring, along with my own gender identity, certainly had implications for my research. First, I became aware of the ways women in particular were often suffering from the shift in political and economic systems, and this led me to focus my research on women’s lives, as I discuss further in Chapters 3 and 4. Second, I became acutely conscious of gendered aspects of my interaction with Turintsy. As a number of scholars have suggested (Linnekin 1998; Turner 1996; Back 1993), generational subjectivities and related life course patterns significantly affect research.9 As I was carrying out my research, there was a striking contrast between my relative lack of responsibility for family and household (or reproductive labor) and the heavy load carried by nearly all young women over sixteen or seventeen years old in Tura. Women were overwhelmingly responsible for childcare, caring for the sick, hauling household water, and shopping for food. The divergence in life courses was not missed by even young girls, who upon first meeting me would invariably ask why I was not married and why I did not have any children.
Like Jean Briggs, who found herself in a daughter role in her fieldwork among the Inuit (1970), as a young woman I was expected by older men and women to conduct myself with what they viewed as proper comportment. The idea of “proper” included both a “feminine” physical appearance—that is, dresses or skirts and make-up—and behaving in culturally appropriate gendered ways, including graciously accepting when men opened doors or insisted on carrying parcels. Moreover, as a young woman with little status from a gendered perspective, my interactions with high status segments of the population, both Evenki and Russians, were less than comfortable because they sometimes demanded what seemed to me to be inordinate amounts of deference. This certainly influenced my decision to interact more with middle and lower status people. In this way practice and theory merged in influencing the direction of my research.
In sharp contrast to the suspicion I sometimes encountered from Communists with firm convictions, most Turintsy welcomed me and were eager to assist me in carrying out my project. As a foreigner I was also assisted by a range of kind Turintsy who worried about my welfare and especially food supplies. I was rarely left without fresh fish or reindeer meat and was regularly invited to social functions. People thoughtfully invited me to their homes for meals and for bathing in their saunas. These occasions were invariably followed by tea with varen’e, jam made from local berries, and lively conversation. I was also asked to teach English courses for several hours a week at the residential school. By the end of my fieldwork, I could comfortably shift between interviewing and visiting bureaucrats to interviewing and visiting with the relatively marginalized segments of the population. While this type of role juggling was not always easy, once I established my identity as an ethnographer, someone interested in learning about everyday life, I was able to shift between being the “American representative”—when my presence was requested at official events such as the banquet dinner celebrating the 63rd anniversary of the founding of the Evenk District—and being a less marked member of the community, as when I would join in the residential school outings or help a neighbor pick berries.
Methods in Process
For the first two months of my fieldwork, I observed as many aspects of Tura society as possible while also collecting some basic statistical data. Although I had official letters of introduction from the Russian Academy of Sciences and several key contacts in the town, I felt awkward going through overly official channels each time I wanted to “observe” in a given setting. First of all, in a town such as Tura that exists largely as a bureaucratic center, I was worried that my presence might become too closely allied with official personalities and thereby endanger the trust of “common” people. Second, I was hesitant to impose myself on people merely because their superiors had approved the interaction. Therefore I established my entrée by introducing myself to the immediate superior in a given setting, such as to the head doctor in the pediatric division of the hospital or the head administrator in the orphanage. Occasionally she or he requested to see my letters of introduction, but more often than not, after our brief discussion, he or she simply approved my request to observe on an informal basis. Thereafter, I made individual arrangements to meet with specific people in the organization.
During the early months of my research, I visited day care centers, became acquainted with the schools and divisions of the hospital, shopped and waited in line in small stores and kiosks, attended the first Russian Orthodox church services ever held in Tura,10 bathed in the public bath house, toured the oil exploration headquarters, attended birthday parties and funerals, dined with new friends, and regularly attended festivals and concerts at the House of Culture (dom kul’tury), the Soviet version of a community center. Gradually I began spending increasing amounts of time in the residential school, orphanage, and pediatric/obstetric division of the hospital as I narrowed the focus of my research.
As my research progressed, it centered around informal and structured interviews with people invested in the relationship of the Evenk community to the Soviet and post-Soviet state. I found “casual chat” to be an invaluable research method permitting the speaker to be in more control, for as Humphrey has written, in this way the interviewee “evokes her own attitudes and draws her interlocutor into relationship with them” (1994b: 77). I conducted extensive interviews with activists and local administrators, but the more compelling material that forms the crux of this book was gathered in conversations with ordinary people drawing on and thinking about the place of government structures in their everyday lives. In an attempt to meet a range of people who were interested in thinking about identity and socialization, including ideas about motherhood, family, and schooling, I visited the orphanage, residential school, and pediatric/obstetric division twice a week. In each domain, I engaged in informal conversations, observation, and interviews with parents, staff, and administrators. The residential school and clinic were especially key as places where I was able to meet Evenki from various segments of the population. Evenki from different regions of the Evenk District and, more importantly, Evenki belonging to both high-status and more marginalized social strata frequented these institutions.
In the residential school, I became familiar with the daily routines, the interactions between teachers and students, and the broader place of the institution within the town. The residential school also provided me with an initial identity as a teacher that was comprehensible for the community at large. Most people quickly grasped the purpose of my research in Tura as a social science study. They could not fathom, however, what a young woman without a research team was doing in their town. Although ethnography and sociology are disciplines well understood by the broad public in Russia, the standard conception is that such studies focus on “traditional” culture, like shamanism or reindeer herding, take a few months at most, and are done in teams of researchers.11 This was the pattern followed by Soviet ethnographers. Although I taught only two English classes a week for a total of one and one-half hours, people in Tura came to think of me as the American who teaches in the residential school.
While the school provided me with a locally meaningful identity, the pediatric clinic was important for expanding my contacts. The clinic was a point of entrée for contacting parents, and predominantly young women, who had attended the residential school recently (in the past ten years or the early 1980s). These parents often had children who were currently attending the school as well. Twenty out of twenty-four women approached agreed to be interviewed in the privacy of a room provided by the clinic, and a few invited me to their homes. The initial structured interviews were conducted in the clinic, on occasion with a tape recorder, but generally women asked that this not be used. In the subsequent open-ended life histories with the six women who chose to take part, they all felt comfortable with the tape-recorder. For these more extensive interviews, we met regularly in each woman’s apartment. Usually we met alone, but on occasion the women were joined by family members or friends.
Attending public meetings and social gatherings provided a broader sense of the place of Soviet cultural practice and a sense of the collective in Evenk lives. Through the contacts developed at these gatherings, I was able to collect life histories of older Evenk women. I collected eight extensive life histories of Evenk women aged 65–75. All of them attended residential schools in the Evenk District from the late 1930s to 1940s. Ultimately, these narratives about lives lived over decades of radical change in central Siberia gripped my imagination and propelled me toward writing this book.
Locating the Project in Theoretical Frameworks
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.
It is a paradox that so many people in the nearly 75 years of Soviet power suffered government-sanctioned injustices of various degrees and yet by the late 1980s relatively few were seeking to jettison their allegiance to the nation. In fact, by the mid-1990s in various regions of Russia only a handful were openly decrying the former Soviet way of life, and more commonly there was widespread support for reinstituting aspects of the Soviet system. This book examines this paradox, specifically asking how a common sense of belonging to a Soviet society took shape in a region of Russia in which indigenous people suffered a specific form of repression—the dispossession of their land, cultural practices, and rights to self-government. Instead of homogenizing indigenous Siberians’ experience of Soviet power as one of belonging, this book also considers the ways in which resistances to state power, particularly in schooling contexts, took shape and why resistance was not automatic.
From another perspective the book is an examination of “habitus,” the creation of social patterns and structures through the everyday practice of actors (Bourdieu 1977). I am also critical, however, of how the idea of habitus tends to homogenize actors (see Bourdieu et al. 1973). In this book I aim to demonstrate that individuals’ actions and beliefs are shaped in society but not in a homogenous way. Specific subject positions influence how individuals transform society, for instance, by mobilizing constituents or by contributing to the smooth workings of institutions such as the residential school. I draw on perspectives of individual indigenous Siberians, specifically central Siberian Evenki, and especially women and men from a range of social strata, to consider the way relations of power are being reconfigured in this post-Soviet Siberian town.
Waning Socialism, Recent Ethnography, and Gendered Lives
The experience of the Evenki, one of the largest indigenous Siberian groups in the Russian Federation today, in many ways exemplifies how the Soviet Union as a socialist state sought to promote its own distinct path of “modernization,” including in regard to indigenous peoples.12 As I argue throughout this book, a focus on one Evenk community in the town of Tura provides insight into the unique ways in which a specific group experienced the Soviet era and continues to understand its identity as a distinct indigenous Siberian group. Set in the post-Soviet era, this book is about consciousness in flux and about the place of indigenous Siberians in broader social movements, both within the Russian Federation and beyond. As Kay Warren has noted, “revitalization” or “ethnic revindication,” is an important trend to turn our attention to throughout the world (1991: 103). Warren has cautioned that studies of such new social movements have often short-changed their subjects; they have tended to overlook the internal dynamics of the movements, de-emphasize the remaking of culture through activism, overly celebrate “choice” and individuals, and in general gloss over the complexities of people as having multiple identities and allegiances (1991: 103–4). Following Warren, I seek to reflect the internal dynamics and multiple levels of identities in one central Siberian community, while rooting this in a broad sociopolitical context.
It seems impossible to reflect on any group of people within Russia without considering the place of socialist practices in their lives. Purely socialist governments have decreased in number with the fall of the Soviet Union, and some—like Russia, China and Vietnam—have begun to incorporate aspects of market economies. Socialist cultural practices and ideals of egalitarianism (even if not realized in many ways) are recognizable, however, across cultural expanses and continue to play a role in contemporary societies.13 In the context of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, recent scholarship has addressed a wide range of issues related to these ideals of egalitarianism. First, scholars have focused on negotiations around land reform, primarily in Eastern Europe (Hann 1996; Kaneff 1996; Pine 1996; Lampland 1995; Verdery 1999). Second, scholars have examined gender ideologies under socialism and post-socialism, emphasizing the ways in which women have been marginalized in both eras (Einhorn 1993; Kligman 1998; Gal and Kligman 2000). Most significantly, scholars have indicated that the demise of socialism clears the way for societies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to move on to establish alternative civic entities (Verdery 1996).
Some scholarship on the former Soviet Union is less eager to point out the inherent flaws of socialist culture as a whole and instead focuses on the ways in which people are interpreting their historical experiences. In Russia, much of this research has been conducted in cities (mostly Moscow and St. Petersburg). It has focused on ethnic identity (Starovoitova 1987), youth culture (Markowitz 2000; Pilkington 1996; Cushman 1995), structures of education (Lempert 1996), and queer culture (Essig 1999). Ries’s work (1997) on Muscovite discourses centering around suffering, poverty, and gender politics especially points to widespread contours of cultural practice in the former Soviet Union. Urban Russian intellectual circles have certainly defined a large part of what it means to be Soviet, or now post-Soviet, in a social system that has a tradition of highly centralized media, scholarship, and educational curricula.
Social practices in outlying regions, or the vast majority of Russia that stretches over eleven time zones and is not predominantly urban, have received less attention from Western scholars until recently. Perhaps one of the most important works that has served as a benchmark for studies in dispersed, outlying, or “peripheral” regions has been Humphrey’s Karl Marx Collective (1983) about a Buriat collective farm. Humphrey’s updated and expanded work (1999a) further explores the tensions created by the intersection of an individually oriented market economy and the collectively rooted Buriat society in southern Siberia. Several scholars have also examined the historical development of the intricate historical webs of Russian and Soviet political-economic development projects among indigenous Siberians (Golovnev and Osherenko 1999; Grant 1995a; Slezkine 1994; Vakhtin 1994). In general, this work has tended toward policy and structural analysis, with less emphasis on local experience.
Increasingly scholars are engaging in nuanced ethnographic work in Siberia that reflects the experiential nature of cultural expression in a specific time and place (Rethmann 2001; Kerttula 2000; Anderson 2000; Ssorin-Chaikov 1998). In these works, individual lives take center stage to varying degrees. They remind us that broad-ranging debates in anthropology—regarding tradition, gender roles, emotion, knowledge systems, and relations between periphery and center—are most compelling when they are illustrated not by the policy initiatives of governments but through the practices of people. In a similar manner, in this book I seek to dislodge an image of monolithic Soviet power. My argument revolves around the idea that Soviet power was differentially experienced, depending on the ways in which people were engaging with the state, as people who were urban or rural, men or women, indigenous or Russian. As explored in the narratives at the center of analysis in the book (and particularly in Chapters 2, 3, and 4), the residential school is a setting in which the Soviet structures of power—and the ambivalences around it, the resistances to it, and the accommodations of it—can be vividly examined.
This book integrates perspectives on schooling, Evenk intellectuals, life histories, and the place of material culture and museums in the definition of Evenk identities. Throughout I engage in what Rethmann aptly calls “positioned storytelling” (2000: 2), in an attempt to allow the individual lives of those often overlooked in social science writing on the Russian Federation—women, children, and rural communities, among others—to become central. “Positioned storytelling” is a discursive practice frequently employed by anthropologists (for example, Abu-Lughod 1993; Constable 1997; Wolf 1992); as Rethmann explains, it “disrupts the possibility of reading for certainty and fixed meanings” (2001: 177). Applying this approach to ethnographic writing on post-Soviet contexts is one powerful way of countering a prevalent policy-oriented body of literature that tends to homogenize local experience, leaving out the divergence of views and the ways that people negotiate daily lives.
Contemporary ethnography on Siberia is increasingly turning its attention to gendered experience (Kerttula 2000; Balzer 1993; Chaussonnet 1988). Only Rethmann (2001), however, has made this the crux of her work. As in anthropological writing more broadly, the tendency in writing on Siberia has been toward homogenizing experience as if members of a community or ethnic group share perspectives and social roles irrespective of gender.14 I aim to demonstrate in different ways throughout this book how Evenk men and women encountered the Soviet state in distinctly gendered ways. Furthermore, I examine gendered experience as it was cross-cut by regional, educational, generational, and emerging class differences in the 1990s.
Here I seek to highlight the ways in which Soviet cultural practice continues as a signpost for many, and perhaps especially for Evenk women, who were both the particular focus of Soviet efforts to transform indigenous social practices, and in some ways the most significant beneficiaries of the social supports offered by the Soviet system. As explored throughout the following chapters, Evenk women’s experience of Soviet power structures was distinct from that of men; social mobility within Soviet structures was facilitated for indigenous women through affirmative action and emphasis on women’s labor within Soviet systems of knowledge. In contrast, Evenk men easily found employment herding and working close to the land, and while they were not discouraged from avenues of social mobility beginning with higher education, they tended to avoid these.
The following chapters seek to reflect on the differential ties indigenous Siberians had and continue to have to Soviet structures of power such as residential schooling. In this endeavor, however, this book aims to avoid homogenizing “Soviet power,” “the Evenki,” “the Russians,” or “indigenous Siberians.” For decades Evenk men’s and women’s lives were subject to an institution that was quintessentially Soviet and based on ideals of creating an egalitarian society, albeit through rigorous means of assimilation. In paying attention to the experiences of Evenk individuals, we can learn how people negotiate power and interpret and reframe ideologies in their lives.
Schooling, False Consciousness, and Resistance
In my first trip to the Evenk District, in the summer of 1992, the Soviet Union had recently given way (in December 1991) to the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose consortium of many of the former republics belonging to the Soviet Union, and the Evenk District was now part of the Russian Federation. I spent the summer traveling to various reindeer herding brigades and villages in the Evenk District, meeting with people and listening to them as they began to make sense of the possibilities for political change and restructuring of economic and social life. The legacy of residential schools was one topic widely discussed. In this time of optimism and idealism, some Evenki thought that the schools should be shut down and students should be educated at home. One scholar suggested creating new practices of child socialization rooted in “traditional” family forms (Popov 1993).15 Others considered returning to the early Soviet practice of a roaming teacher who would visit reindeer herding brigades and small villages periodically; this would allow children to live in the taiga while not missing out on formal education so essential for social mobility (Shebalin 1990: 78).
By 1993, when I returned to conduct long-term fieldwork in the Evenk District, talk of alternatives to the residential school and other radical transformations in the local relationships to the federal structure had diminished. Federal financing for education was severely curtailed, and there was no money for fundamental reorganization. Money that did reach the regions was not going to be released by regional administrations and departments of education for any experimental projects. What could have been a radical departure from Soviet systems of schooling for indigenous peoples was stymied by bureaucratic channels. As examined in the chapters that follow, however, in the mid- to late 1990s, Evenki began renegotiating a relationship to the nation-state and turned to transforming existing structures such as the residential school to meet their needs.
Around the world, schooling has served as a critical element in state-building and molding citizens (Reed-Danahay 1996; Stambach 1996; Chatty 1996).16 Indigenous peoples in particular have been subjected to mass education as a key instrument of colonial domination and nation-state consolidation. In North America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, a system of state-run boarding schools operated from the 1920s until at least the 1970s and sometimes the 1980s; numerous accounts exist detailing the pain of detachment from families and the trials of forced assimilation (Simon 1990; Haig-Brown 1991; Lomawaima 1994; Child 1998; Kelm 1996). In the case of western and southern Africa, a widespread system of boarding schools continues to operate as the legacy of colonial pedagogy is widely absorbed and transformed in the context of post-colonial administration (Stambach 1996; Bledsoe 1992). In the Middle East, and specifically Oman, compulsory schooling for many groups that were nomadic until recent decades only became established in the 1970s as oil profits expanded and the government sought to link nomadic populations into the world economy (Chatty 1996). Across the world, however, not only governments are involved in designing schooling. Indigenous groups are also becoming involved in designing systems of education to meet the needs of their communities and to replace old models of education that were tools for state hegemony (Battiste 1999; Regnier 1999; Thies 1987; Cojtí Cuxil 1996).
In the extensive literature on the anthropology of schooling, the portion of work addressing dynamics of power and concepts of difference within school settings is especially instructive in thinking about residential schooling in central Siberia (see Giroux 1981; Ogbu 1991; Gibson 1988; Wax et al. 1989). The discussion about types of consciousness, resistance to institutional structures, and the social reproduction of educational behaviors is particularly relevant. For instance, Ogbu’s work (1991) provides a compelling critique of the idea that educational “failures” of children in school contexts can be viewed as the result of a deficit in knowledge about the system, cultural capital, or language use. Ogbu writes about the types of cultural difference at stake in schooling and how cultural difference, along with active strategies, determines educational success.17 In this way, Ogbu’s work suggests that focusing attention on schooling as an instrument of the state also requires us to pay attention to the role cultural difference plays in the strategies families employ for interacting with school institutions.
In contrast to Ogbu’s focus on cultural difference and active family strategies, Willis’s work (1977) emphasizes how class structures are reproduced in schooling. Willis’s study, focusing on working-class boys in a British school, dissects the broad social relations of power maintained by and reproduced in school settings. While this ethnography of schooling remains unparalleled in its intricate detail of the social reproduction of class among young men, it denies the dynamism of cultural practices and appears deterministic. From Willis’s perspective, schooling is an instrument of dominant class sensibilities and the “false consciousness” of the “lads” prevents them from veering from the preordained confines of class.
This central concern in educational anthropology about the degree of agency people have in educational settings and in transforming their life worlds more broadly is at the crux of this book as well. The concept of “false consciousness” sits uneasily in a context in which the state is in crisis and people are engaged in rethinking structures of state power, such as schooling. While people do not necessarily redirect dominant power structures, they are not the mere cogs of preordained social systems. Tsianina Lomawaima (1994) makes a similar point about agency in her work with Lakota Sioux oral histories focused on residential schooling. She argues that while residential schooling for her consultants was generally a painful period when they were separated for extended periods from family and friends and subjected to the disciplinary and civilizing forces of missionary schools, these students were not merely oppressed. Lomawaima shows how these experiences did not preclude a range of effective resistances to the system; these efforts ranged from girls’ avoiding wearing the bloomers required by the school dress code to some students running away from the schools. Furthermore, Lomawaima demonstrates that there was a range of interpretations of the system, with some students who excelled in academics and sports recalling their time in the schools fondly. Lomawaima does not invoke “false consciousness” to explain this range of experience but instead concludes that the system imposed its grip unevenly, with some people in positions to accommodate it consciously or even resist it, while others were subsumed and transformed by it. In particular, Lomawaima suggests that girls in the residential schools were “domesticated,” while boys did not fall as severely under the purview of the institution.
Parallel to Lomawaima’s findings, the experience of indigenous Siberians suggests that the degree of interaction with the institution of the residential school is gendered. In the case of indigenous Siberians, it is widely recognized that girls tend toward success in secondary education while boys have more difficulty succeeding. For the Evenki, this pattern appears to be related to the ways in which the state transformed subsistence practices and instituted residential schooling. As is discussed further in Chapter 3, in the Soviet era women’s labor in reindeer herding was devalued while men’s remained more constant. The Soviet state’s ideology of emancipation of women, inspired by Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1972), attached social value to women as wage laborers employed outside the household; and in the context of the Evenk District, this Eurocentric valuation significantly shaped the gendered contours of Soviet structures of power. In the 1990s, girls were expected to complete twelve grades and go on for higher education, while it was socially acceptable, and even respectable for boys to leave school after grade nine and return to villages and herding. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, these collectives of herders were generally comprised of family members, but there was only one paid position for a woman as the “tentworker” in charge of domestic responsibilities; in effect the state’s reorganization of herding that was established in the Soviet period edged women out of the taiga.
Much of the literature on the anthropology of education focuses on the school contexts and glosses over community, and particularly family interactions with schools. As Reed-Danahay (1996: 37) writes, school ethnography tends to “[work] either exclusively within the school or [look] from the school outward.” This book seeks to depict men and women’s relationship to schooling as an instrument of the state. In the context of post-Soviet Siberia, the reach of the state is not viewed in the same way, however, that it is in Reed-Danahay’s analysis set in rural France. In the 1990s, more often the state was chastised for its lack of involvement than for its overinvolvement in Evenk lives. A simple equation of power and resistance to it, even in Foucault’s “mobile and transitory” forms (1990: 96) cannot describe the relationship when, as discussed further in Chapter 5, there is a prevalent sense of the state abdicating responsibility, including for funding schooling.
The following chapters seek to provide a portrait of power dynamics in a Siberian community in the 1990s and the myriad ways that people were renegotiating relationships with the state and within their communities with the transformation of the former Soviet Union. Drawing on these sources, I do not seek to create an exact representation of an enclosed community but instead to provide a dynamic portrait of a community with internal contradictions, individuals with a range of allegiances, and alliances in transformation. Evenki themselves have recently written their own versions of contemporary life and local history (Amosov 1998; Monakhova 1999; Shchapeva 1994), and prominent Evenk author Alitet Nemtushkin has depicted Evenk lives in literature for decades.18 While I have chosen to write about identities in flux, this is just one of many ethnographies that could have been written based on the complex and vibrant lives of central Siberian Evenki in the 1990s.
Chapter 1 carries the reader through analyses of “identity” as a concept and the ways Evenk identities have taken shape historically. Chapter 2 moves to an overview of Tura as a central Siberian town crosscut by a range of social divisions, particularly illustrated through the portraits of five households. Evenk women’s narratives on residential schooling form the crux of Chapter 3, laying the foundation for understanding the way in which Soviet collective culture has informed Evenk identities and resulted in distinct understandings of power among women. In this chapter, I also examine dynamics of power and resistance through the prism of residential schooling accounts. Chapter 4 builds around the narratives of young Evenk women who recently completed their education in the residential school. This chapter considers how generational differences are significant in discussing relationships to the residential school and how the context of emerging market relations influences the place of residential schooling in women’s lives. Chapters 5 and 6 shift to the residential school itself, with Chapter 5 focusing on daily life in the school and Chapter 6 shifting to Evenk intellectuals’ efforts to transform the institution. Chapter 7 looks toward another important institution in the landscape of Soviet and post-Soviet social life, the museum, to reflect on intergenerational tensions around the way material culture is invoked to represent Evenk identities. The last and concluding chapter revisits ideas about Soviet and post-Soviet collective identities and about shifting hierarchies of power in this central Siberian town.
