Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Petra Rethmann is assistant professor of anthropology at McMaster University. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropologica, and TheAnthropology of East-Europe Review.

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TUNDRA passages

The Pennsylvania State University Press

Contents

Transliteration....................................ixPreface: Orientations..............................xi1 Departure.......................................12 History of the Periphery........................253 Dissecting Histories............................474 Distant Voices, Still Lives.....................695 Research Connections............................956 Agency in Dire Straits..........................1017 Skins of Desire.................................1338 And Tradition...................................1559 Arrival?........................................175Notes..............................................183Bibliography.......................................189Index..............................................207

Chapter One

This book describes how, in the mid-1990s, an indigenous people in the northern Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East experienced, interpreted, and struggled with the changing living conditions of post-Soviet Russia. It describes how Koriak women and men actively negotiated the manifold historical and social processes-from tsardom to the Soviet state to a democratic beginning-by protesting, accommodating, and reinterpreting the conditions by which their existence was continually made and remade. It also examines how Koriak women today creatively engage with-and fight-regional configurations of power to challenge and contest formations of social inequality and male domineering. This book is about both the present and the past. It is an ethnography in the sense that it stresses the specificity of local practices and discourses of history, gender, and agency. At the same time, it attempts to contribute to discussions about the predicaments and struggles of marginalized and indigenous people and the issues they face in broad contexts of regional to global relationships.

My interest in exploring issues of gender, history, and agency at Kamchatka's northeastern shore emerged when I found that I rarely had conversations about any of the topics I was interested in-rituals, traditions, tundra uses-without paying attention to the contexts of historical changes and regional and community differentiation. The most important source of insight for recognizing the significance of these aspects for Koriak lives was that the people themselves regularly brought up such topics: cultural idiosyncrasies and distinctions between Koriaks and Russians and among Koriaks; administrative power and divisions; regional economic inequalities; femaleto-male social positionings-all were issues that made local culture worth talking about for them. As these issues were never entirely absent from our discussions, I found that Koriak women and men frequently connected them to extraregional historical and social developments. A starting point for the analyses in this book is the recognition that local meanings and interpretations are never entirely divorced from global processes and change.

A consequence of this recognition involves the reluctance to situate Koriak women and men in frameworks of either radical cultural difference or social assimilation. Koriaks were frequently described as primitives. They subsisted on reindeer herding, fishing, and hunting in extensive tundra lands. They lived in difficult, hardly accessible terrain, often several weeks' hike away from the coast or settlements. They recognized waters, animals, humans, and plants as parts of a closely interconnected world. In conjunction with these kinds of understandings, they asked spirits for help and brought their sick to shamans. These forms of existence and knowledge have invited sets of conventional imagery that described Koriaks as backward and ignorant, frequently in contrast to those who lived in urban centers. These understandings also incited forms of social policing intended to bring Koriak women and men as assimilated citizens under the sponsorship of the state.

Stereotyped understandings of cultural difference easily invite a set of imagery that positions subjects, communities, and cultures in categorical structures of "us" and "them." As both process and notion, assimilation allies different peoples under the umbrella of one homogenous, ethnicity-transcending identity, enshrouding them in an overarching category of personhood. Both understandings, difference and assimilation, leave only little room for recognizing the possibility of commonality and differentiation in the modern world. The Koriak women and men I knew did not think of themselves as a "cultural Other"; yet neither would they have agreed that they have become like the Russians and Ukrainians who had moved into the Kamchatka Peninsula. Together with anybody who reads this book, Koriak women and men share a world of expanding capitalism and natural resource depletion. Like many others, they contend with excruciating poverty, increasing social violence, and domestic abuse. As Koriak women and men, they may speak from vantage points that are distinct from those of, for example, urban or rural Russians and other citizens of the world. Instead of describing Koriak perspectives as a site of cultural difference or assimilation, it is challenging to place them within a wider web of local-global cultural politics and regional positions. By taking up this challenge, I hope to demonstrate that Koriak perspectives are not a site of cultural difference or isolation but are continually forged in response to, and in dialogue with, various social and historical developments. In such a view, I believe, lies promise as well as social and political possibility for many of the Koriak women and men I know: The challenge is to appreciate difference not as routine lip service to diversity but as a creative intervention in a world we share.

History

To describe Koriak women and men as primitive others across an abyss of space and time means to ignore their contemporary predicaments and the complex social issues with which they struggle. On the other hand, to describe them as conformist or assimilated citizens in the context of the Russian nation is to deny them the possibility of difference in the modern world. Between these two positions lies a terrain that addresses the questions mostly obscured by these classic contrasts-radical cultural difference, on the one side, and homogenous or assimilated identities, on the other side. History, I believe, is one such place. In breaking down the extreme categorical differentiations between difference and assimilation, it becomes possible to see how contemporary Koriak understandings of themselves are neither the result of cultural identities nor the sum total of cultural specificities and idiosyncrasies. For example, chronicling the encounter, the dialogue, among Koriak women and men, regional neighbors, and the state makes it possible to see how "Koriaks" were formed in the imagination of the state, regional majorities, and visiting anthropologists who learned to know "them." It makes it possible to see how such powerful discourses that form and authorize Koriak identities do not have an unquestioned hegemony. It makes it possible to show how Koriak women and men respond, reinterpret, and challenge them even as they accept and are shaped by these forms of knowledge.

In taking Koriak involvements and concerns with past events and the contemporary world as my starting...