Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny 9780857457677

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Characters
Introduction
Chapter 1 Future Autobiographies and Their Spaces
Chapter 2 Eveny Childhood and Adolescence
Chapter 3 Forest and Village
Chapter 4 Three Future Autobiographies
Chapter 5 Reindeer and Child in the Forest Chronotope
Chapter 6 The Village as Domain of Unhappiness: Broken Families and the Curse of the GULAG
Chapter 7 Cosmologies of the Future in the Shadow of Djuluchen
References
Index

Citation preview

Narrating the Future in Siberia

Narrating the Future in Siberia Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among Young Eveny

Olga Ulturgasheva

Berghahn Books N e w Yo r k • Ox f o r d

First Published in 2012 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2012 Olga Ulturgasheva All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-0-85745-766-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-85745-767-7 (ebook)

To my parents, Vasily Bargachan and Alexandra Davydovna Keymetinova

Contents

Acknowledgements ix List of Characters

xi

Introduction 1 Narrating the future My own return The Eveny and the village of Topolinoye Previous literature on the Eveny and other indigenous communities of Siberia Summary of the book

Chapter 1. Future Autobiographies and Their Spaces

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Research in the field: introducing case studies Contact for case studies and sampling Gender and kinship Age cohorts Oral and written Narrative and ‘future autobiography’

Chapter 2. Eveny Childhood and Adolescence 43 Djuluchen: the composition of child and adolescent personhood Childhood and narrative Coming of age

Chapter 3. Forest and Village 56 Forest and village in local cosmologies of movement The social world of the forest The village: social context today Complexities of engagement with antagonistic spaces

Chapter 4. Three Future Autobiographies 77 The story of Tonya, a forest girl The stories of village adolescents: Vera and Grisha

Contents

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Chapter 5. Reindeer and Child in the Forest Chronotope 109 Reindeer as a non-human component of child personhood Reindeer as child: Tonya on learning and teaching The forest chronotope in narrative

Chapter 6. The Village as Domain of Unhappiness: Broken Families and the Curse of the GULAG 131 Wandering spirits of the dead and the curse of the GULAG Unhappy families: children’s futures and parents’ pasts

Chapter 7. Cosmologies of the Future in the Shadow of Djuluchen 154 Personhood: hero and shaman Time: cycles with and without destination ‘Future autobiography’ as an activator of djuluchen Conclusion

References 173 Index 185

Acknowledgements

I am hugely indebted and grateful to all my young informants and their parents who generously shared with me their valuable time and precious insights. Their warm hospitality and incredible patience will always remain in my heart. I hope this book does justice to them. I extend my heartfelt gratitude to my mentor Piers Vitebsky, who has been a great source of knowledge, helpful advice and an inspiration all the way through. There are several anthropologists and senior colleagues to whom I owe a special debt. In Cambridge I am particularly thankful to Marilyn Strathern, Barbara Bodenhorn and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov for their generosity, intellectual guidance and support of my work. Julie Cruikshank, Heather Montgomery and Elizabeth Tonkin read separate chapters of the manuscript and helpfully commented upon them with precious advice and kind encouragement. I have gained valuable insights and much inspiration from the audience of various seminars and conferences, particularly those given at the University of Manchester, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, Brunel University, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Aarhus University, University of Greenland (Ilisimatusarfik), the University of Tartu and Tsaritsyno Museum in Moscow. Over the years in Cambridge I have been immeasurably fortunate to have wonderful friends and colleagues who have always been an invaluable source of moral support and camaraderie – Madeleine Reeves, Katie Swancutt, Marc Brightman, Vanessa-Elisa Grotti, Rane Willerslev, Tim Bayliss-Smith, Inga-Maria Mulk, Carole Pegg, Elena Khlinovskaya Rockhill, Emma Wilson, Otto Habbeck, Marcel Chabot, Elana Wilson-Rowe, Kathleen Richardson, Janne Flora, Laur Vallikivi, Hatice Tuncer, El’vis Beytullaev and Eleanor Peers. I also wish to impart to Sally Wolfe, Yarjung and his family my profound thanks for being my extended family in the UK. In Topolinoye, north-east Siberia, I am most grateful to Sergei Golikov, Anatoly and Vera Neustroevy, Timofey Neustroyev, Leonid Prokopiev, Valery and Marusia Golikovy, Nikolai Neustroev (Kangalas), Stepan and Viktoria Lebedevy, Zhanna and Vasily Sleptsovy, Alexander and Mar-

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Acknowledgements

garita Vinokurovy, Tatiana Zakharova, Maria Nikolaievna Neustroeva, Nadezhda Sleptsova, Anna Osenina, Petr Dmitrievich Olesov, Anna Lebedeva, Rimma and Andrey Zamiatiny, Elena Vasilievna Efimova-Baisheva, Evdokia Vasilievna Semenova, Semen and Dora Zabolotsky, Baldan and Antonina Demidovy, Evdokia Diagileva and Sargylana Efimova. In Khandyga, my special thanks go to the families of Efimovy and Delaboska for their cordial hospitality. They provided me with accommodation, everyday necessities and safety during my research trips and made me comfortable at their warm and welcoming places. I wish to extend my sincere gratitude to Ekaterina Nikolaevna Mestnikova, Tamara Spiridonovna Imeneva, Innokenty Evseievich Imenev, Natasha and Vera Imenevy, Elena Petrovna Ulturgasheva, Petr Petrovich Petoukhov, Ekaterina Petrovna Andreyeva, Elena Innokentievna and Yura Starostiny for their kindness and help in dealing with my numerous requests and various needs. I express my deepest and immense gratitude for my parents, Vasily Spiridinovich and Alexandra Davydovna Keimetinovy, who have always been an endless source of help and unquestioning support despite being far away; and to my own family, my husband Sayan and my daughter Anastasia Ulturgashevy, for their unconditional love and care. I owe special thanks for generous research awards from Cambridge Oversees Trust, BB Roberts Fund and Lundgren Fund. I want specifically to mention that the final stages of the research would not have been possible without financial support from the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs (ARC-00756211). I would like to express my special gratefulness to my colleagues from the international project ‘Collaborative Research: IPY: Negotiating Pathways to Adulthood: Social Change and Indigenous Culture in Four Circumpolar Communities’ Stacy Rasmus, Lisa Wexler and, particularly, Anna M. Kerttula de Echave for their enormous support and productive collaboration. Last but not least I sincerely thank Marion Berghahn, Ann Przyzycki DeVita and Charlotte Mosedale at Berghahn Books for their dedication, patience, amazing professionalism and superb work in guiding me through the process of book production.

List of Characters* (in alphabetical order)

Aida, a girl, 17, village childhood. See Chapter 1 Anya, a girl, 17, forest childhood. See Chapter 3 Diana, a girl, 15, village childhood. See Chapter 6 Galya, a girl, 11, village childhood. See Chapter 6 Grisha, a boy, 15, village childhood. See Chapter 4 Ilona, a girl, 10, forest childhood. See Chapter 5 Ira, a girl, 12, forest childhood. See Chapter 1 Ivan, a boy, 15, village childhood. See Chapter 1 Karina, a girl, 11, village childhood. See Chapter 6 Kira, a girl, 13, forest childhood. See Chapter 5 Kirill, a boy, 17, forest childhood. See Chapter 5 Kostia, a boy, 15, village childhood. See Chapter 1 Oktia, a girl, 11, forest childhood. See Chapter 1 Olya, a girl, 14, forest childhood. See Chapter 1 Petya, a boy, 10, village childhood. See Chapter 1 Sveta, a girl, 10, forest childhood. See Chapter 1 Tamara, 14, forest childhood. See Chapter 3 Taras, a boy, 12, village childhood. See Chapter 6

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List of Characters

Tonya, a girl, 16, forest childhood. See Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 Vera, a girl, 17, village childhood. See Chapter 4 Vitalik, a boy, 16, village childhood. See Chapter 1 Vitia, a boy, 10, forest childhood. See Chapter 5 Volodia, a boy, 15, forest childhood. See Chapter 1 * All real names have been changed for the purpose of anonymity and protection of subjects.

Introduction

Narrating the future In 2003–2004 I conducted twelve months’ fieldwork studying ideas of their own future among young Eveny in the village of Topolinoye, in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) in north-east Siberia (Figure 1), a village which has a population of seven hundred. While interviewing local children and adolescents on the matter of their future lives, I was particularly interested in how children’s and adolescents’ ideas about the future were shaped, what attitudes and expectations were generated under the conditions and situations contemporary children and adolescents had to face, and what choices they were likely to make in the future and why. The starting point for my research was the local discourse of ‘futurelessness’ throughout this region (Vitebsky 2002). The term vymiraiushiy narod – a people who are dying out – has become a rhetorical tool used by representatives of the intelligentsia from Northern indigenous minorities on the political level in the 1990s. I wished to explore how far this claim became an integral part of young people’s identity, what social resources they were drawing on and what strategies they might be devising for dealing with this discourse. When I was asking my child and adolescent informants to talk about their own future lives, I was not aiming at literal forecasting or any sort of diagnostics of their life-trajectories. My inquiry was aiming at eliciting young Eveny representations of their everyday lives through the medium of the story about one’s own future life. I was observing how their narratives about imagined futures may reflect their perceptions of themselves, family histories and how their narratives could unfold the connection between their imagined futures and the community’s present and its past. All of this was done in order to look at the ways Eveny children and adolescents reflected the situation of social and economic instability that has emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and what impact this situation exerted on their plans for the future. I returned for follow-up study six years later in summer 2010. During my first visit in 2003 I was not aware that the stories of their future lives which were shared with me particularly by my adolescent informants were part of a much broader process that was beyond simply the percep-

Narrating the Future in Siberia

2

tions of themselves as products of the recent drastic social changes. When I revisited the research area in 2010, the most surprising thing for me was that those young authors who narrated their future autobiographies have already fulfilled the next imagined stage of their future life scenarios. Though the rest of their stories are yet to be fulfilled, the present outcomes of their lives indicate that the futures they were narrating emerged as a strikingly predictive blueprint for their possible actions in the future. This made me realize that they were narrating their future lives as if they knew what would happen to them and they envisioned themselves in the future as if they had already become the persons they were talking about. Figuratively speaking, they were narrating the past disguised as their future. This aspect of the future in this ethnographic material reminds me of an episode from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, in which Alice is astonished and puzzled after she learns from the White Queen that memory can work both ways: ‘ … one’s memory works both ways.’ ‘I’m sure mine only works one way,’ Alice remarked. ‘I can’t remember things before they happen.’ ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked. ‘What sort of things do you remember best?’ Alice ventured to ask. ‘Oh, things that happened the week after next,’ the Queen replied in a careless tone … (1974: 177)

Just as in the White Queen’s time dimension, the sequence in which young Eveny narrate their own future lives and their fulfilment six years after is directed backwards, and contradicts the usual order of memory production in which the knowledge or memory of an event is generated only after the event has happened. Since I was the one who devised such a type of inquiry I also played a certain role in shaping the children’s and adolescents’ futures. But I was not to know what I had done until six years later. Only now do I realize that my research question inverted the order of things, as the events unfolded as if in a reversed mirror image that corresponded to the time sequence in Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass world. That is to say, the standard narratological sequence in which it is the experience (event) that comes first, and the later oral or written report of the lived experience (narrative) that follows, goes around in a circle or backwards, i.e., the future event is narrated in the first instance and the actual experience happens after (cf. Shuman 1986). Since the usual narratological sequence is inverted, the respective connection between the narrative and the event confronts us with a distinct set

Introduction

3

of questions. What is the role of the narrative in forging or shaping young Eveny’s life-trajectory? What has been so powerful in the young Eveny’s narratives about their future lives that made them almost fulfilled? What ideologies and practices activate such connection between the narrative and experience? What ontological framework underlies the Eveny concept of destiny and personal agency? What category of person or personhood is involved in such a conception of the future? What constitutes Eveny childhood and adolescence? And how are social experiences of Eveny children and adolescents manifested in their own narratives about the future? What practices of socialization and what processes of learning contribute to the process of growing up and becoming a person in this society? The material that I shall present in this work will allow us to examine how, borrowing from Karin Barber, ‘personhood, webbed and precipitated out of social relationships, is mediated through the text’ (2007: 107). The sequence in which the events will unfold will also question analytical perception of the narrative as secondary or complementary to some primary reality from which it is alienated (Kristeva 1980; Barthes 1984 [1977]). In the course of the discussion we shall see that the primacy of the narrative about one’s own future will yield surprising insights into the notion of time, space and destiny. Furthermore, in their stories Eveny children and adolescents were not simply negotiating particular versions of their own selves, as might be interpreted in some narrative studies (Bakhtin 1981; Linde 1993), but in fact they were sharing and presenting me with an actual glimpse of their lives in the future. Besides my ethnographic observations as well as interactions and conversations with them six years earlier, my young informants have given me a rare opportunity to capture what Raymond Williams would call ‘structures of feeling’. They are, as he puts it: a set of relations defined as a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics … They are often more recognizable at a later stage, when they have been (as often happens) formalized, classified … But that time the case is different; a new structure of feeling will usually already have begun to form, in the true social present. (1977: 132)

These visions of the future are in a sense ‘structures of feeling’ which serve as emergent or pre-emergent articulations of living process that have not yet been defined, classified or rationalized ‘before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action’ (1977: 132). Hence, this work is both an exploration of the process of emergence during which Eveny children and adolescents are envisioning their own future lives and an analysis of what happened later, i.e., how their ac-

Narrating the Future in Siberia

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tual lives unfolded in the course of the following six years. Processually, I caught my main informants narrating their future lives at the stage when they were just about to step into their adult lives and made them speak about their future experience. Then, they moved on to turn that narrated future into the present. My discussion of Eveny personhood, specifically the element of djuluchen, will show that the narrative has the capacity to set the event horizon that a young narrator cannot escape, as he or she will be drawn into the event horizon, actualizing what has been envisaged and narrated in the story. The case studies I shall present in this work will show that the future-oriented narrative may also work as a constitutive element and mediator of a narrator’s personhood which implicates and forges fulfilment and actualization of the events in the future that was envisioned in a young person’s future autobiography.

My own return I myself grew up in this village and left for education in the city in 1991 at the age of sixteen, so this fieldwork has been a return to my roots in order to understand the place in which I myself was young. Given that doing anthropological ‘study at home’ has become a legitimate undertaking over the last several decades (Jackson 1987; Peirano 1998), I view my study in the community where I grew up as a particular kind of enterprise which involved a specific type of Batesonian ‘culture contact’ (2000 [1972]: 64). It was a ‘culture contact’ across time (my twenty years time-travel back to the community) and space (being away from the community for twenty years) which was shaped by experience of personal displacement. I view my own journey from the remote Siberian village which I left at the age of sixteen to attend a university in Western Europe as formative in moulding my anthropological viewpoint. It was also an intellectual journey during which I was experiencing profoundly different communities with distinct languages and cultures and observing what constitutes homogeneity (unity) and heterogeneity (differentiation and divergence) in various groups. In the process of such a journey one may lose the sense of territorialized identity but acquire analytically valuable critical distance. In this sense the return to my native community after twenty years of absence should be viewed as a return of both insider and outsider, native and non-native. In addition, those who are engaged in anthropological research among children and adolescents, regardless of whether the community is native or non-native, cannot be considered ‘native’ by virtue of belonging to a different category of population and being inherently located outside of a child’s subjectivity which constitutes what might be referred to as a ‘native’s point of view’.

Introduction

5

Furthermore, I view my own return to the community of my origin as a valuable ethnographic source for understanding children’s and adolescents’ ideas about their own future lives, since it also helps me to contextualize the ontological framework of a local category of person, specifically the Eveny concept of return. In order to embark on this issue I should like to show how my own return was understood, and later on, in my final discussion, I shall place this within a broader discussion of a local cosmology of spaces and people’s movements between them. On my way to the village of Topolinoye I stayed in the city of Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), to spend some time with my family. People from Topolinoye visited my family place in Yakutsk occasionally. Among them was a young couple with their two children, Zina and Fedor. From them I learned the latest village news: who died, who got married, who divorced, who had a new son or a daughter, who was currently in the city or in the village, who entered the university and who failed. I also learned that the roads to Topolinoye are getting worse from year to year. Very few cars travel in the direction of the village, and that is why there is always a risk of getting stuck in Khandyga, a central town of Tomponsky district. During those days in Yakutsk I met the Topolinoye school principal, who told me about their need for a person who knew how to deal with computers and teach computer literacy at school. According to her, there were no people who would agree to work in Topolinoye. When she heard that I was planning to be in Topolinoye soon, she insisted on my taking this job. After a minute of hesitation I accepted her offer, although I still doubted what I had to teach, having a limited knowledge about computing. When I first arrived in September, I was unaware of the gossip that was being spread about me. I was quite surprised when people kept asking me if everything was fine with me in the city. They were very curious as to what reasons or situation had made me travel all the way through Europe and Russia back to the village. As far as I understood from a few conversations with elderly ladies, people viewed my return to the village in a quite negative perspective. They thought that what made me return was my total failure to stay in England. First, they believed, I had been expelled from the university where I studied. Then, my husband had left me and I was divorced, so my personal life was a mess. My financial situation would not allow me to stay in England – that is why I came back to Yakutsk. But I could not even afford to stay in Yakutsk, and that is why I had to come back to the village to get employed at the school as a teacher of computer literacy. Twelve years had passed since I had left the village in 1991 and entered an undergraduate course in the Faculty of Languages and Philology at Yakutsk State University. Over this lengthy period of time village people

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would hear occasional news about me, usually from people who would stay at my family place during their trips to the city. My return after years of absence from the village scene was expected and unexpected at the same time. Perhaps people expected my return in a different way. They saw me as a very successful person who should have no necessity to be employed in the school as an ordinary teacher. In their eyes I should be able to do more than just teaching at school, and should have been employed at least at the village administration, especially after years of training outside the community, in the city and abroad. The meeting at the village house of culture klub attended by twenty people on an October evening did not help me to clarify my purpose in staying in the community. In my introduction to the audience I was as honest as possible in explaining why I was there and what I had to do during that year. After this meeting, organized by personnel of the local house of culture, I hoped that my message would be accepted and understood. However, I felt my explanation was not plausible enough for the audience since they could not see the point and their own version was still much more weighty than the truth. Finally, I gave up and decided to take their understanding as it was. These circumstances also helped me to realize that my return ruined that glorious image of myself constructed by people in the village after years of my mysterious absence from the community. My return in the capacity of a schoolteacher could be understood only as a failure and an apparently inglorious return. I pay special attention to the local concept of return in Chapter 7, where I provide a conceptual set of possible returns, which allows one to see the distinction, but also the relationships, between the frustrated return of a person from the village and the glorious return of a hero or shaman.

The Eveny and the village of Topolinoye The Eveny, or Lamut, are one of the Tungus-speaking group1 in the Russian North. Eveny economy relies mostly on the subsistence activities of reindeer herding and hunting. These economic activities, which involve close engagement with and dependence on the surrounding environment, contribute to and still play a crucial role in the Eveny worldview, cosmology, rituals and oral tradition. By virtue of their reindeer herding activity and nomadic mode of living, the Eveny expanded and occupied an enormous area of the mountain/taiga zone of north-east Asia. About half of the Eveny population is scattered around Arctic districts of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia),2 while the remaining Eveny live in western Chukotsky and Koryaksky Avtonomny Okrug, Kamchatka, and

Introduction

7

in the Magadanskaya Oblast’ and the northern part of Khabarovskiy Krai. In the pre-Soviet ethnographic literature, Tungus groups were referred to in accordance with their geographical location, i.e., either as Northern Tungus (Eveny) or Western Tungus (Evenki).3 At the end of the nineteenth century Jokhelson (1926) emphasized that most of the Eveny in the Kolyma river basin were greatly influenced by the Yukagir, and owing to the long history of intermingling and intermarriages both Eveny and Yukagir would not make a strong ethnic distinction among themselves. Another Eveny scholar and, subsequently, a political exile, Mainov (1927), distinguished two groups of Tungus: one is the Northern Tungus (the Eveny or Lamut), a group populating north-east Siberia with strong relations with the Yukagir population; the other is the Southern Tungus (the Evenki), a group which has been occupying the areas closer to Lake Baykal. Participants of the first Russian expedition under the leadership of Kopylov-Moskvitin on 28 July 1638 recorded the first contact of Eveny with Russians (Stepanov 1943). In 1639 when Russian kosaks established their fortress – Zashiversky ostrog – in the area of the Indigirka River all the indigenous population including the Eveny was coercively subjected to an obligatory fur tribute called yasak (Fisher 1943: 52). In the archives of Zashiversky ostrog there are notes made by Russian kosaks Mikhail Stadukhin and Vtor Gavrilov in 1642 about several clans of the Eveny, including the clans of Maemael, Godninkan and Paraiatkan, who would nomadize with their herds of reindeer at the mouth of the Rivers Tompo and Khandyga in the eastern part of the Verkhoyansky mountains. Much later, in 1926, the Soviets used the names of these clans to map the territories of three districts: Miamalsky, Godninkansky and Tukulan-Barainsky (Tugolukov 1997: 31). So at present, the putative descendants of these clans and other local Eveny clans occupy the territory of the former three districts and are officially referred to as Eveny of Tompo, after the River Tompo, i.e., Tomponskye Eveny. The era of socialist construction brought many changes, beginning with ‘sedentarization’ and acculturation, which went hand in hand with the whole process of modernization and technical development on the Far North. It was a seventy-year period during which the Eveny, like other indigenous peoples throughout the Russian Arctic, were educated in modern Soviet schools, treated at local hospitals by qualified doctors, and hired as hunters and reindeer herders by Soviet collective or state farms. The introduction of the boarding school or internat for indigenous children was meant to be a part of the Soviet civilizing mission. The main purpose of introducing internat into the life of the Eveny was the perceived need to educate previously nomadic children at school, and to give them an opportunity to become full members of Soviet society. The internat, or boarding school, was an educational institution to be found in

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Narrating the Future in Siberia

Figure 1: Map of Yakutia

every reindeer herders’ village, including Topolinoye. According to Pika (1999: 23), ‘modernization’ predominated from the 1930s through to the 1970s. It was linked to forced collectivization (and the suppression of armed opposition by some ethno-territorial groups and collectives of the indigenous population) in the 1930s, the co-opting of indigenous labour into state enterprises or collective farms,4 mass relocation of populations, and the broader policy of transferring nomadic populations to a settled way of life (1999: 12–13). The period between the 1970s and 1980s was marked in popular and historical discourse as the era of stagnation or zastoi. During this time, Soviet natives were characterized as being on the way ‘from successful socialism to happy communism’. As Slezkine points out, Soviet historical accounts of natives in that period were given in terms of ‘the remarkable achievements of having bypassed most of Marx’s developmental stages … In fact, these histories, usually titled From a Patriarchal Society to Socialism, became particularly popular in the late 1960s and 1970s’ (Slezkine 1994: 319). This socialist era came to an end with the beginning of ‘perestroika’ in 1986, which led to the consequent collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s the collapse of the Soviet Union brought transformations from the socialist planned economy to a market economy throughout all of Russia, including the Russian Far North. In subsequent years this rapid social change caused critical situations among indigenous communities, such as isolation, exacerbated by the dismantling of much outside infrastructural

Introduction

9

support; a drastic fall in living standards; economic and social inequality; and frustration, and as a result vastly increased consumption of alcohol and violent death rates (Pika 1993; Bogoyavlensky 1997; Vitebsky 2005: 238–41). In this work I focus entirely on the Eveny of Topolinoye, the village in the north-east of Tomponsky district. Like other native communities throughout the Russian North (Pika 1999: 12–13), this community has gone through drastic social and economic upheavals including ‘sedentarization’, settlement in a centralized community which at that time was in the village called Tompo, introduction of the collective farm ‘Pobeda’ (Victory) in the 1950s followed by its reorganization into the state farm ‘Tomponsky’ in 1974, construction of the village Topolinoye in the late 1960s, and relocation of the old village into the new one in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1976, the new village of Topolinoye was officially chosen as a state farm centre. The old village of Tompo was located on the banks of the River Tompo. The local Eveny, who had moved along the stony and wayward river for many centuries, gave the river its name. Originally it was called Tomkoruk (in translation from the Eveny: ‘thread’). Then the Soviet authorities, who were mapping the territory of the Verkhoyansky mountains, put the Eveny name of the river on a map, but in their own way, mishearing the name as Tompo. Nowadays, the abandoned site of Tompo is situated twenty-five kilometres from the new settlement. The period of the late 1980s and early 1990s, officially characterized as perestroika, brought other changes, including liquidation of the state farm Tomponsky and establishment of several reindeer herding obschinas (collectives) whose initial purpose was supposedly to allow reindeer herders to get involved in market relations on an independent basis. The village of Topolinoye, built in 1974, is a small settlement that was meant to be the centre of the former Tomponsky state farm. At present it still serves as a centre for the obshchina ‘SPK Tompo’. The structure of Topolinoye is very similar to any Soviet village, with a building for the village administration in the centre and two-storey residential houses spread around it. Having served for more than forty years as a centre, it still serves as a main spatial point to which reindeer herders move back once or twice a year to see their children and families, receive their salaries, pay their housing bills, attend official meetings with the obshchina administration and otpusk, i.e., vacation, during which it becomes a site of binge-drinking among reindeer herders. A small number of village organizations include the school, hospital, village administration, Zhilshno-Kommuna’lnoye Khoziastvo,5 (Housing Maintenance Administration), obschina (former state farm), post office, and heating and electric stations. However, with the state withdrawal of its generous subsidies in the early 1990s, the village infrastructure collapsed. It is one of those classic settlements which in Soviet time, according to

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Narrating the Future in Siberia

Slezkine, were ‘centres of productive labour, unpretentious affluence, and cultured entertainment’. For more than thirty years the village served as a showcase, an exemplar of Soviet development during which the achievements of Northern minorities were exhibited to numerous groups of tourists and foreign visitors who were always accompanied by the regional authorities and KGB agents (e.g., Beach 1986: 73–9). The false nature of such enterprise was supported by a practice which very much resembles the plot from Nikolai Gogol’s play Revizor (The Government Inspector), as a corrupt state farm administration did their best to embellish living standards before the arrival of the revizor, the Inspector-General. For example, TV sets and video recorders produced in Japan, which were extremely rare things in any Soviet family household, were taken from the huge storage depot belonging to the head of the state farm and put into the houses of villagers. The irony of the whole situation was that after the guests’ departure they were put back into storage again to wait for the next arrival of tourists. At that time Topolinoye represented a neatly built surface where there was no place for any signs of dissatisfaction or inconsistency. Everything had to symbolize a happy and cloudless existence for the former savages. The Eveny of Topolinoye were reported as being well-modernized and civilized members of Soviet society, and stable and reliable atheists.6 This village was meant to epitomize the ways local indigenous populations enjoyed the achievements of socialism. The Russian word that would signify the epitome of this ideal is pokazukha, i.e., a false display – ironically linked etymologically to pokazateli (indicators of formal production statistics). At present the community of Topolinoye village is basically composed of Eveny who are engaged in reindeer herding and hunting. A population of two hundred reindeer herders move, together with their families and brigades, around a vast territory of reindeer herding pastures. These pastures extend over large areas of boreal forest, mountains and basins of numerous rivers and lakes. Another part of the population remains stationary in the village and is represented by about three hundred natives who are occupied in various village organizations as local obshchina personnel, teachers and accountants. Sakha (Yakut), Russians and Ukrainians in Topolinoye represent less than half of the population and are occupied as village administration personnel, office and technical workers, carpenters, and staff of the local heating station and the hospital. Despite the typicality of the village and its similar history to other native communities throughout the Russian North, the case of this village appears to be special in one respect: it offers us an extra dimension which involves a tragic past associated with the GULAG and the implications of this for the present of the community. This history continues to affect the present and, as we shall see, local children’s and adolescents’ visions of their

Introduction

11

future. The place where Topolinoye is now situated used to be one of the GULAG camps. GULAG stands for the State Administration of Camps (Gosudarstvennoie Upravlenie Lagerey). It was an enormous organization within the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) that in its day conducted a political purge affecting practically every citizen in the Soviet Union. The aim to liquidate ‘enemies of the people’ led to numerous arrests and particularly heavy sentences. The NKVD would supply millions of sentenced prisoners as a free labour force for large industries and projects throughout the Soviet Union. These included huge timber and gold industries in Siberia and the building of important roads such as Kolymskaya trassa, also tragically called the Road of Bones and linked to Topolinoye, canals such as Solovetsky kanal, and railways. In the 1930s, under the Stalinist regime, the entire production of natural resources and associated industries came under the GULAG. GULAG prisoners were concentrated in labour camps where the high mortality rate was due to severe and anti-human conditions (Beck and Codin 1951; Appelbaum 2003; Gregory and Lazarev 2003). As mentioned above, from the early 1930s to the 1970s the local population used to live in the old village of Tompo, situated twenty-five kilometres from the present Topolinoye. Prison camps within three hundred kilometres of the village of Tompo were engaged in building one of the branches of the Kolymskaya trassa or Road of Bones. The construction of this road was one of the GULAG projects under Dalstroi (Far Northern Construction Trust), which was headquartered in the Russian Far Eastern city of Magadan (Gregory and Lazarev 2003). The plan to construct a very long track from Magadan via Oymiakon, Aldan and Tompo to Bolshoy Niever was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the 1940s during the Second World War and was to be used for transportation and supply of raw materials for Soviet military factories. The construction of this road was maintained by free labour of former GULAG prisoners until the late 1950s/early 1960s. There is hardly any historical published data on this particular part of the GULAG that mentions and lists all the GULAG camps located in this area. Therefore, I am reproducing some historical data which I found at the small museums of Kolymskaya Trassa situated in the towns of Khandyga and Teply Klyuch, as well as some data that I have recorded from the oral accounts of descendants of GULAG prisoners settled in Khandyga and the elder generation of the old village of Tompo and Topolinoye. According to those accounts, the administrative office of the construction project called YanStroi, which was a branch of Dalstroi, was located in Khandyga, the present centre of Tomponsky district. The population of Khandyga is still composed of various nationalities from the territories of former Soviet Union, some of whom are descendants of poselentsy, i.e., former prisoners who were sentenced for life settlement without permission to leave.

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Narrating the Future in Siberia

Labour camps were located twenty to twenty-five kilometres away from each other along the constructed road and within ten to fifteen kilometres of each other in mountain areas. Apart from the construction of the road, prisoners were involved in mining the highly toxic wolfram and uranium of the Senduchen deposit or Senduchenskoye mestorozhdenye. The names of these labour camps seem paradoxical, as those who chose them would either go totally local by giving them Eveny place names or export names from their own places of origin. For example, two camps called ‘Ol’chan-1’ and ‘Ol’chan-2’ were named after an Eveny toponym for a high pass in the mountains where these camps were located one after another. The camp ‘Malynovka’ was known for its all-female population and was named by prisoners (zeki) after a bird that inhabits central parts of Russia. The camps ‘Topolinoye-1’ and ‘Topolinoye-2’ were named by their prisoners after the poplar tree, or topol’ in Russian, as the area where they were situated was and still is full of poplars. Because of its location close to the supply road, the authorities chose the territory of the former camp ‘Topolinoye-1’ as a suitable location for a new village. The act of moving the local population from the old village of Tompo to a new one started in the 1970s and was especially hard and disturbing for the locals, as they were always aware that the place chosen by the authorities for the new village was associated with the camp where prisoners had been tortured and had died. The sense of a tragic past is still powerful and visceral; the presence of ghosts in the village buildings of the GULAG contributes to a spatial and social perception of the village as an accursed place – ningichapche tor. In Chapter 6 I shall explore how the ghosts of GULAG or arinkael contribute to particular concepts of the space of the village, and illustrate how it is reproduced in local Eveny perceptions of an accursed locality.

Previous literature on the Eveny and other indigenous communities of Siberia The first recorded information about the Eveny was found in the reports of the first explorers (kozaks) of north-east Siberia in their quest for new lands in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. From the middle of the eighteenth century the study of the peoples of this region gained a systematic character and was linked to the activities of the Russian Academy of Sciences.7 Overall, the existing literature on the Eveny can be classified according to the intentions, aims and tasks pursued by scholars while researching these people. For example, together with the aforementioned travellers, Siberian political exiles such as Khudjakov (1969), Jokhelson (1900, 1910) and Mainov (1901, 1927) were motivated to write about this culture out of curiosity and fascination. In fact, they collected valuable

Introduction

13

information on beliefs, material culture and spiritual sites of the Eveny of that time. The most prominent ethnographic works which contain studies of the Eveny or Lamut are by Waldemar Jokhelson (1910), who undertook field trips to the areas of the Indigirka and Kolyma Rivers on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History’s famous ‘Jesup North Pacific Expedition’, which was organized by Franz Boas (Freed, Freed and Williamson 1988: 97–104). Later the works of the Russian–Polish scholar Vladimir or Waldemar Bogoraz on Eveny language, folklore and material culture, especially his monograph The Lamut, present rare ethnographic information on the Eveny of the Omolon and Kolyma rivers (1910, 1926, 1931). Bogoraz was the first to record data on shamanic chanting, ritual poetry, prayers and invocations among the Eveny of Omolon River in 1895. In 1936 he published a general article on folklore in North Eurasia and North America in which he pays special attention to Eveny invocations or prayers (nirgaechaen) and suggests that nirgaechaen as a genre holds a special position in the oral tradition of the Eveny as it serves as a means for human beings to address the spirits. Special words were believed to possess magic power and serve effectively for shamanic and hunting rituals. Though in this work I touch on the issue of a genre (12), in a different light my final analysis in Chapter 7 will show why the genre of prayer is surprisingly relevant at present for understanding Eveny children’s and adolescents’ ideas about the future. During the Soviet period the nature of the studies of the Eveny and the research agenda was changed according to the ideology set by the Communist Party. From the 1920s, a team of ethnographers, sociologists and linguists, including Levin (1956, 1958), Rastsvetayev (1933), Dolgykh (1952, 1960), Tkachik (1931, 1948) and others, carried out the task of the ‘liquidation of cultural backwardness among the Eveny and involving them in the process of reforms in economic and social relations’. It was not possible to fulfil this task without studying the traditional Eveny economy, mode of living and language. Scholars were organized into teams called kultbrigady. It was the task of the scholar to help the state to convert the native peoples into Soviet citizens. Numerous expeditions organized by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR were also aimed at developing literary languages on the basis of the linguistic data collected in the field. As a result of these expeditions Eveny language dictionaries, textbooks and readers were published and distributed among schools in the districts where they lived.8 One of the most interesting ethnographic works published during the 1970s and at the beginning of the 1980s were the monographs Eveny Magadanskoi oblasti by Popova and Eveny i evenki jugo-vostochnoi Yakutii by Nikolaev. These works stand out as they are the only detailed ethno-

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Narrating the Future in Siberia

graphic accounts of the Eveny of two regions (Magadanskaya oblast and North-East and South-East Yakutia). Though done in the style of classic Soviet ethnography, with a tendency to vague generalizations and a search for archaic ‘survivals’, they include unique data on the Eveny’s traditional households, religious beliefs, funerals and wedding sites. I consider Popova’s ethnographic description of funeral rituals and the ways the death of a human being was treated among the Eveny in the preSoviet and early Soviet period, 1930s–1950s, noteworthy for this work. Though her account is presented within the Soviet paradigm in which everything was interpreted in terms of transition from ‘primitive past’ to ‘socialist present’ and afflicted by ideological censorship, her observations on the Eveny of Rassokha, specifically the social role played by a shaman9 in maintaining a safe coexistence between the spirits of the living (ibdiril) and the dead (bunil), prompted me to question and explore the issue of spirits among the Eveny in the present. I suggest that the understanding of the world of the dead among the Eveny of Topolinoye finds expression through the continuing concept of evil spirits (arinkael), which Popova mentions in her discussion of the spirit of the dead (1981: 185). This particular concept will become prominent in my discussion of children’s and adolescents’ perception of the space of the village and the tragic past associated with the former territory of the GULAG camp (Chapter 6). Practically all the existing accounts published in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia focus almost exclusively on historical data provided by Bogoraz (1900, 1910), Jokhelson (1910), Mainov (1898, 1901, 1927) and other early explorers, which then are treated as evidence of ‘survivals’ from various evolutionary stages in the peoples’ socio-political development. There is hardly any sign of the contemporary voices of the people themselves. In this regard, Vitebsky’s ethnographic accounts of spiritual life at present, as well as of social and economic changes among the Eveny, represent the first attempts to understand their social context over the last twenty years and provide readers with an insight into the lives of contemporary Eveny of Sebyan-Kuel, as he explores the long-term history of relations of Eveny reindeer herders with their reindeer, and the intricacies of their relations with the state, and with spirits of their shamanic ancestors and the landscape in the present (1991, 1992, 1995, 1997, 2002, 2005). Furthermore, a range of new anthropological literature on other Siberian indigenous groups in the English language has emerged in the postperestroika or post-Soviet period. The scope of this literature is essential for understanding the contemporary situation of the Eveny as just one example of the ‘small peoples of the North’ (Slezkine 1994: 259) who have undergone development policies imposed from above, including forced relocation, ‘sedentarization’, separation of genders and placing children in boarding schools. Publications devoted to the analysis of the post-Soviet

Introduction

15

‘transition’ and its implications for the indigenous peoples of the Russian North involve anthropological accounts of issues such as the concepts of land, resources and its use (Krupnik 1993; Krupnik and Vakhtin 1997; Fondahl 1998; Stammler 2005; Ventsel 2005), identity (Balzer 1999; Golovnev and Osherenko 1999; Anderson 2000; Habeck 2005), gender and generation (Kwon 1997; Kerttula 2000; Rethman 2001; Vitebsky and Wolfe 2001; Vitebsky 2002), postcolonialism and the Soviet State (Grant 1995; Ssorin-Chaikov 2001, 2003), residential schooling, and resistance and political movements (Bloch 2004; Liarskaya 2004; Gray 2005). Within the scope of the literature published in English I have found helpful insights in the works of Heonik Kwon (1997, 1998), who did research among the Orochon reindeer herders and hunters of Sakhalin island, and most recently Rane Willerslev (2007) on a community of Yukagir hunters in north-east Siberia in their attempts to analyse different meanings of a narrative, specifically, in their dealing with the hunters’ storytelling. Influenced and inspired by the approach established by Renato Rosaldo (1980a, 1980b, 1986), they follow the ways Rosaldo treated Ilongot hunting narratives by looking at ‘a hunting narrative as a selfcontained modular unit in which a hunting story is narrated with full knowledge of the hunt as a finite and irreversible action’ (1986: 132). Kwon views a narrative as the sequence of actions, with the movements of a hunter between his ‘going-out’ to the forest and return from the hunting trip carried out and completed in order to tell one’s own story (1997: 146–8), while Willerslev suggests that Yukagir hunters engage in storytelling and are obliged to do so in order to ‘humanize’ themselves after a hunting trip is over, i.e., to bring their human selves from the world of animal spirits back to the human social sphere of the encampment (2007: 174–5). Though Kwon and Willerslev arrive at different conclusions, they both reflect on the act of a hunter’s narration of his story as an important part in this final point of a hunter’s return to his starting place. The latter aspect should also be viewed as integral to nomadism. In relation to this, the element of an Eveny child’s return in the narrated future will also be prominent in the course of my work, though treated in a different light. The element of one’s own departure and return to the same spot at the end of a narrative will be discussed throughout this work and will serve as the crucial point for understanding the stories about their own future of those who grew up in the forest. Despite this range of publications on one group of people, the subject of childhood and adolescence among indigenous minorities in the Russian North has not been considered in detail, apart from being viewed within a broader discussion of contemporary social and economic situations in these remote areas. No researchers have attempted to explore childhood in

Narrating the Future in Siberia

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Siberia, particularly the formation of social and cultural categories among children and adolescents. Moreover, among previous studies of Siberian communities, there is no attempt to look at childhood and adolescence through utilizing narrative techniques, as I aim to do in this work. Therefore, this study attempts to fill this lacuna and bridge the gap between anthropological research on childhood and adolescence conducted worldwide and Siberian studies, so that various traditions of anthropological research may inform and be informed by each other.

Summary of the book The book is divided into seven chapters. In Chapter 1 I present my research context and introduce the reader to the children and adolescents who produced the written essays and oral narratives of their own future autobiographies. I pay special attention to the issues of gender, age and forest/village background of these children and adolescents. I introduce the genre of future autobiography and the repertoire of local speech genres that shape children’s ways of talking about the self. Special consideration is given to the discussion of the issue of narrative and of oral and written forms of children’s future autobiographies. Chapter 2 is devoted to the Eveny conceptualization of child development and, specifically, explores theoretical issues of childhood, adolescence and narrativity. I discuss childhood in the framework of Eveny personhood, which is closely intertwined with the concepts of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ body and djuluchen (in English translation, ‘travelling spirit’ or ‘forerunner which foreshadows future event’), an important component of one’s complete personhood. I shed light on the Eveny conceptualization of adolescence and show what role the component of djuluchen plays in a young Eveny’s life-trajectory. I also present a review of the studies of childhood and adolescence in the light of recent anthropological discussions as well as my own ethnographic evidence collected in the field. Chapter 3 establishes the spatial or cosmological triangle of the forest, the village and the city, and lays out the complexities of engagement between the two antagonistic spaces of the forest and the village, around which I will build my subsequent analysis. At the heart of Chapter 4 is an exploration of two types of future life stories, as narrated by a forest girl Tonya in her teens and by two village adolescents: the girl Vera and the boy Grisha. It examines these adolescents’ perceptions of the spaces of the forest and the village derived from their own knowledge and experiences of both spaces, which appear to be discrepant. Moreover, I show how my adolescent informants’ lives unfolded in the course of the following six

Introduction

17

years. This sheds light on the connection between their future autobiographies and their subsequent experience. I argue from this that the concept of the future in children’s and adolescents’ stories varies according to each narrator’s experience and perception of the spaces of the village and the forest. This analysis suggests that Tonya’s narrative reflects the dualism between a good, kind forest and a harsh, corrupt village, whereas Vera and Grisha repeat the same dualism but cannot imagine going to the forest as a purifying site, so that they have to posit the city as a (totally new kind of) place for escape. Thus, these different renditions of their selves in their narrated futures demonstrate how the social experience of these spaces feeds into different notions of personhood. It implies that each part of this total social space is associated not only with a different kind of life trajectory but also with the formation of a different kind of person. This discussion gradually leads us to our understanding of djuluchen. After this analysis of two distinct kinds of imagined life trajectory, I narrow the focus on to childhood in the forest. In Chapter 5, by analysing stories narrated and written by forest children at the age of ten and adolescents (see List of Characters), I show how the process of socialization among forest children contributes to a particular construct of time and space, which I define as a forest chronotope. I attempt to show how reindeer, a central element in this forest chronotope, serve as a developmental metaphor and a trope for the child’s expression of the self. In this sense, the way a child conceives his or her own relations with a reindeer needs to be understood within a fuller cosmological context, and, more particularly, in terms of the local construct of personhood. Here I show the phase when, in the process of socialization, a reindeer as a developmental trope appears to be a central component of a ten-year-old child’s selfhood, which then moves into a social domain of personhood when an adolescent starts practising hunting rituals of sharing nimadun and borichaen. My analysis suggests that personhood starts being formed together with the child’s involvement in reindeer herding from an early age and proceeds into the later developmental stage with an adolescent’s involvement in hunting activity. In Chapter 6 I embark on the village chronotope and analyse the accursed topography of the space of the village haunted by the unhappy ghosts of a former GULAG camp. I show how memory about the GULAG is locally constructed through the local concept of arinkael (evil spirits). And I show how children’s relationships to a place find expression through the event of seeing a ghost, which serves as a reminder of a sense of a locality and a current enactment of local memories about the GULAG. I suggest that ghosts of former GULAG prisoners appear as a special metaphor of crisis that the local population deploys in their response to the present situation of abandonment and social and economic isola-

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tion. Moreover, by looking at the accounts of three village children from broken families as a concentrated distillation of this situation of distress, I explore the social patterns that children deploy in order to construct their own narratives about the future and how they make sense of ongoing conditions of despair. Poverty, lack of cash, unpaid salaries and unemployment create a situation in which alcohol addiction becomes a form of escape for the adult, but a living hell for the child. I show that in order to narrate their lives these children have chosen to narrate their relations with idealized parents. I suggest that these children’s response to their parents’ lives serves as an imaginative device towards their own future moves for restoring their family’s wellbeing. They project a strikingly ‘mature’ sense of responsibility by taking on a parenting role as protectors of their own parents. By presenting their own response to parents’ failures, the children appear as agents and active creators of their own narrated realities. They narrate their own future autobiographies, which are part fantasy and part repetition of their parents’ lives, but do this within their own universe of morality in which they take their own parents’ life stories as a template, but reverse their parents’ alcoholism, poverty and broken families. By imagining their own happy family lives in the future, these children also express (or hypostatize) their own parents’ quest for agency, relief and reconciliation. In Chapter 7 I offer my interpretation of the children’s and adolescents’ stories about their own future lives. I suggest that in their personal, lived time the forest children are bringing their stories back in a cyclical, repetitive time. The theme of return to their own family of origin (in the case of the forest children and adolescents) as opposed to founding their own family and moving on (as in the case of village children and adolescents) has an analogy with the difference between the shapes of nomadic and historic time to which these imagined trajectories correspond. This contributes to the formation of two different local constructs of agency based on two different chronotopes. One type of agency inspires a village-reared child to move and settle in the city, while the other one directs a forest child’s future movement towards a return to the forest. I elaborate on the Eveny category of person and show that the heroic scenario, which both kinds of children are building on, gets activated at a critical moment when the community needs a heroic return and endows the young person with qualities of a potential hero in the hope that he or she will fulfil his or herself as an agent, strong enough to affect positively his or her own life and the lives of their family or community. This may be historically specific to this generation, i.e., the latent culturally available scenario of an epic hero’s return gets activated and configured in a distinct situation of crisis. Finally, I discuss that the personal agency implicit in both kinds of future transforms adolescents’ autobiographical narratives into what is ef-

Introduction

19

fectively an improvised, cosmologically sanctioned genre of prayer, and relate it to the Eveny concept of djuluchen, i.e., the partible component of human personhood, and its role in foreshadowing the fulfilment of the adolescents’ envisioned futures. Though the rest of their stories are yet to be fulfilled, the present outcomes of their lives indicate that the futures they were narrating emerged as a strikingly predictive blueprint for their possible actions in the future. I emphasize the importance of the stage of adolescence for subsequent life experience, and discuss the role of narrative in not merely anticipating but also actually forging one’s own future life experience, shaping perception of oneself and envisioning one’s own life destination.

Notes 1. Together with other Tungus groups the Evenki, Nanai (Gold), Ulchi, Orochi, Orok, Udege and Negidal, they represent the Tungus–Manchurian language group. All the aforementioned Tungus groups share similar features, including languages with the same linguistic roots, a shamanic cultural complex and traditional economies based mostly on reindeer herding and hunting. However, the Eveny stand out as the most Northerly group of Tungus origin, and have close relations with and influences from neighbouring Paleo-Asiatic groups such as the Yukagir, Chukchi and Koryak, who occupy the northern part of the area of the Kolyma river basin (Tugolukov 1997: 27). 2. According to the 1989 population census the Eveny number 17,055, including 8,688 in the following districts of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia): Eveno-Bytantaisky, Ust-Yansky, Momsky, Kobiasky, Bulunsky, Verkhoyansky, Nigne-Kolymsky, Sredne-Kolymsky, Verkhne-Kolymsky, Allaikhovsky, Oimiakonsky, Abysky and Tomponsky districts (Sokolova 1997; Alekseyev 2006). Though the Eveny population of Yakutia is considered to be trilingual (speaking Eveny, Sakha and Russian), the Eveny are distinguished by variations in their dialects and different levels of intermingling with either Sakha (Yakut) or Russians. Strong linguistic influences from Sakha may be observed among the Eveny of Momsky, Verkhoyansky, Oimiakonsky, Kobiasky and Eveno-Bytantaisky districts of Yakutia. In these districts the population of Eveny is bilingual (Eveny, Sakha) and speaks predominantly Sakha, whereas among Eveny of Abysky, Niznne-Kolimsky, Verhne-Kolymsky, Bulunsky, Ust-Yansky and Tomponsky districts (as in this thesis) the Russian language is preferred as a lingua franca. The Eveny preference for the Russian language over Sakha among the latter groups of Eveny might be explained by their isolation from predominantly Sakha-speaking groups which occupy territories closer to central districts of Yakutia and, more importantly, their close proximity to the Russian-speaking population of new settlers involved in large Soviet construction projects such as YanStroi, YanLag, Magadanskaya Trassa (Kolyma Road), and the location of the GULAG prison camps which stretched along the territory of these districts. 3. Shirokogoroff 1999 [1935]; Dolgykh 1960; Gurvich 1966; Sokolova 1997. 4. The collective farm used to be an agricultural unit of economic organization in the rural part of the Soviet Union. The process of co-opting indigenous labour into this type of state enterprise went hand in hand with mass relocation of populations, as well as the broader policy of transferring nomadic populations to a settled way of life. From the early 1960s onwards almost all collective farms in the North were changed to state farms (Vitebsky 2005: 410–11).

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5. Housing Maintenance Administration (ZhKKh or ZhEK) is an administrative unit responsible for general housing maintenance including electricity and water. 6. The most pressing task of Soviet power was ‘to protect the helpless natives and to assist the small peoples in their difficult climb up the evolutionary ladder’. That particular time was characterized as making the huge leap ‘from successful socialism to happy communism’ (Slezkine 1994: 319). 7. Several expeditions were organized to collect historical and ethnographical data on the Eveny of Magadanskaya and Kamchatskaya oblasts in the middle of the eighteenth century. Among the participants of projects such as the Second Kamchatka expedition (Vtoraya Kamchatsakaya expeditsia) and the Kolyma expedition (Kolymskaya expeditsia) were Lindenau, Wrangel, Matuskin, Kiber and Kozmin. Between 1869 and 1870 Maidel and his assistants, Afanasiev and Neiman, researched the area of north-east Yakutia and Chukotka. 8. With the emergence of the Eveny’s own intelligentsia, people such as Lebedev (1978, 1981, 1982), Robbek (1989), Dutkin (1986, 1989, 1995), Belyanskaya (2004), Alekseyev (2006) and Alekseyeva (2003) have been engaged in reconstructing the archaic survivals from the past, through linguistic and folklore studies. Vasily Lebedev, an Eveny writer and researcher, together with his wife Zhanna Lebedeva were followers of the folkloric tradition set by Bogoras and their studies of Eveny archaic epic forms in the districts of Moma River (East Yakutia), and Arka (Khabarovsky krai) remain the most systematic study of Eveny epic forms made in the tradition of Soviet folklore studies. The most vivid ethnographic accounts on Eveny material and spiritual culture including human–animal relations, wedding and initiation rituals, hunters and reindeer herders’ poetry and songs may be found in artistic novels, short stories and poems written in the Eveny language by Eveny writers such as Tarabukin (1959), Lamutsky (1964, 1970), Keimetinov-Bargachan (1982, 1985, 1992, 2006) and Cherkanov (1988). Two of the recent accounts on the ethnic history of the Eveny of West Verkhoyanie belong to Alekseyeva (2003) and Alekseyev (2006). Though both works have been presented according to the canons of Soviet etnologya or ethnology, they reproduce distinctive ethnographic data on spiritual, material and oral traditions of the Eveny of Sebyan and are accompanied by accurate and detailed references to Eveny terminology. 9. During the late 1930s the process of collectivization in the aboriginal areas of Siberia went hand in hand with the repression of native leaders and shamans. At that time the majority of shamans were repressed and by the 1970s they were practically extinguished. The introduction of atheism was aimed at ensuring the smooth transition of the northern natives to Communism (Slezkine 1994: 157–8). The most pressing task of Soviet power was ‘to protect the helpless natives and keep their body and soul together, i.e., to assist the small peoples in their difficult climb up the evolutionary ladder’.

Chapter 1

Future Autobiographies and Their Spaces

Research in the field: introducing case studies Before I embark on the discussion of Eveny children’s and adolescents’ ideas about their own future I would like to distinguish children who grew up in the forest from those who grew up in the village. This local dichotomy or divide between forest and village childhoods is to a great extent a legacy of Soviet organization of space and labour relations (Slezkine 1994; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003; Vitebsky 2005) which the local population, and specifically families of reindeer herders and their children, still have to deal with on a regular basis. Due to such spatial organization I shall build my analysis around Eveny children’s and adolescents’ lives in two separate localities or two interacting but distinct ethnographic settings, namely forest and village. Village children stay most of the time within the space of the village without the need to move, and most of them never visit a reindeer camp or travel anywhere within the local landscape. By contrast, those children who have their parents, families and relatives in the forest move between forest and village at least twice a year. The children from reindeer herding families who start life in the forest remain there until they go to school at the age of seven, when they move to the village to start schooling. In the village they may stay at their relatives’ place or at their parents’ village flats while being cared for by their grandparents or aunts and uncles. So both village and forest children start attending school from the age of seven and continue studying at school until the age of sixteen or seventeen. During each term’s break, which happens three times a year, forest children strive to go back to their parents in the forest. Summer break is the longest, and for forest children it starts in mid-April when parents arrive to collect their children and transport them back to the forest by the time the rivers start melting in May. Before the economic collapse in the mid1990s children used to be transported from reindeer herding camps to the

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village and back by helicopter. Nowadays such means of transportation as a helicopter has become a luxury, and children are usually transported by reindeer or sometimes by vezdekhod, an off-road truck. Given the distinction between the ways forest children and village children experience these two spaces, their future life stories reflect how they plan to move into the future. Since all children whom I interviewed build their future life stories on settling in one of three places, i.e., forest (living in nomadic reindeer herding camps), village or city, in this work I deal with three kinds of space which seem to determine young Eveny’s life-trajectories and their life-destinations. According to my observation of young adults from the community and interviews with them, these settings are associated with different patterns of fulfilment and frustration. The city of Yakutsk, which is 1,300 kilometres away, features mainly as a fantasy, since most Eveny lack the necessary networks, finances and protection to survive there. The forest is the zone of traditional habitation and is still the area of productive work. In between lies the village which was established in Soviet times, and in recent decades its schooling has rendered most young people unfit for life in the forest, lacking the skills to work with reindeer. They end up lumpenized, and bottled up in the village. Each village is hundreds of miles from the next and, since the disappearance of aviation during the 1990s, separated by impassable forest. I focused my research on the distinction between the village and the forest, and started by wondering to what extent children’s socialization differs in each of these settings, and what influence this might have on their later life-trajectories. To test the presumption of ‘no future’, I asked questions such as: How do local children see the future, for themselves, their friends and community? How might they write or talk about the future? What generates their anticipations? What do the present young generation of Eveny consider important and what are their preoccupations? How do they understand their parents’ lives, and how do they relate this to their own lives? As key elements of context, I have focused on isolation, exacerbated since the dismantling of much outside infrastructural support; the countervailing raising of expectations through television and videos, made available only recently; and vastly increased consumption of alcohol, which somehow reaches the village far more easily than food or medical care (Rethman 2001; Vitebsky 2005: 238–41). During fieldwork, I spent time with both forest and village children and adolescents and their families at various settings and occasions, including interacting with them in and out of their homes. A close relationship with certain households (related to my own earlier family connections) gave me access to family histories, accounts of individuals’ lives and further networks of contacts. Drawing on the stories told by local kids, I was learning

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how they experience this social world and how it is reflected in their ideas about the future. I followed ethnographic case-studies of local school children; conducted in-depth interviews with them; lived in a nomadic camp in the forest with my main informants and their parents and observed them while in the village. By doing so I explored how Eveny children and adolescents are involved in a learning process and what meanings are being produced in the spaces of the forest and the village. In order to generate a level of basic data and to explore the nature of forest and village childhood as preparation, real and imagined, for adulthood, I asked children and adolescents to write essays and also recorded their oral narratives. In this regard my approach to young Eveny narratives is close to the life-history method used by Kristen Cheney in her work among children in Uganda (2007). Cheney asked Ugandan girls and boys to write their own life-journals which then served as a starting point for her analysis of how children make sense of their own experiences of war and violence. She has followed the life-history of each child and made an excellent attempt to unfold the subjectivity of the child in times of relentless violence and radical uncertainty, paying attention to what resources Ugandan children creatively use while negotiating their own identities, in the face of disparate notions of childhood which are often incongruous with their own experiences, imposed on them and exerted by national, global and NGO agencies (2007: 157–64). Like Cheney, I asked Eveny girls and boys to write their own stories, but instead of life-journals I asked them to put down their own ‘future autobiographies’. After I got acquainted with all the written essays, I took a further step in my study and looked at the ways children and adolescents orally narrate stories about their own future lives. By asking them to write and speak about their future lives I attempted to observe how they construct their narratives, and what themes are revealed in the local senses of time, person, gender and space. I held a series of interviews with four adolescents on the matter of their lives in the present and the future. Their life stories will serve as key ethnographic case-studies on which I shall explore in my subsequent chapters. The content of the most written stories about the future or essays helped me to discern and elucidate a set of issues and questions, which guided me through the research process and shaped my perception of the collected ethnographic data. The availability of oral and written narratives allowed me to dwell more closely on young narrators’ expressions and more thoroughly on a set of meanings contained in each version of their stories. The course of our interaction and my observations of them in the village, the school, their parents’ reindeer herding camps and their village homes will gradually unpack the connections which are made in their stories and identify genres and frameworks within which they are told and written.

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My take on ‘future autobiography’ stems from the suggestion made by Julie Cruikshank (1990, 2000), that ‘autobiography is a culturally specific narrative genre rather than a universal form for explaining experience’ (1990: 2–3), and looked at the ways children construct both written and oral narratives. This process was very revealing and raised further issues of format and of explicit or implicit content (to say nothing of the fact that no one has ever asked these children and adolescents what they think or feel in this way), so that I was able to develop an actual discussion of the future. Where writing is a school format, in which one might expect that the children tend to write what they think is expected of them, later conversations and oral explorations of family stories generated a wideranging and very different body of data. My having been a schoolteacher gave me a chance to get acquainted with children of different ages and observe them both in and outside of the school. In order to elicit the messages of each story and estimate how social and individual aspects of a narrator’s life are reflected in it, I tried to involve as much additional material as possible in order to grasp the context and discourses that shape their ideas and the ways they narrate their stories. Children would tell stories when we would sit together on a bench next to the house of culture, while having tea at their relatives’ places where we would unexpectedly meet or at their parents’ temporary camps situated in the forest, a few miles away from the village. Some of the stories were recorded and transcribed verbatim when I had a recorder with me. Some of them I wrote relying on my memory straight after I would get back from unexpected and interesting conversations. To a certain extent my perception of the community is part and parcel of the process which would have been impossible if I had not shared my life experience with them in the 1980s and early 1990s. The fact that I was a native who grew up and spent my childhood in Topolinoye allowed me to capture the life-course of elder generations. I knew the children’s parents and grandparents, their perceptions of the recent changes, and ideas about the past and the present. My own memories and experience of this social world in the past and in the present shaped the nature of my observations and helped me in my attempts to understand the children and their ideas that I discuss here. I grew up in the Soviet era, i.e., 1970s–1980s, a time when the distance between forest and village was not that huge because of the availability of helicopters and the village was receiving regular subsistence supplies organized by the Soviet administration. If now it is the ghosts of GULAG prisoners in the abandoned village buildings, in the 1970s–1980s there were still a few living survivors of the GULAG. Though memories of the GULAG were deliberately repressed and ignored in the Soviet period, I still remember how adults would secretly share their scary stories about

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the time when the road was being constructed, and how the whole area around the village was crowded with military convoys and GULAG prisoners. I discuss this aspect of the community’s past in Chapter 6. My fieldwork in 2003–2004 also revealed that as a result of thirteen years of my absence from the social landscape, my relationship with Topolinoye people has changed dramatically. I had to explore, relearn and refresh what I thought I already knew. In order to update my acquaintance with the world I had left more than a decade earlier I looked at how children attend the school in the village, how parents bring up the children, how children learn in a classroom and a reindeer herding camp, how they assist their parents in a reindeer herding camp and spend time with friends in the village. While participating in their lives and the lives of their parents, I was interested in how children are similar to their parents and different at the same time. I made an attempt to observe how both generations speak, discuss and narrate their experiences, what is avoided and veiled in their narratives, what cosmologies, ideologies, practices and discourses shape their conceptions and representations.

Contact for case studies and sampling As mentioned in the Introduction, I gained access to local children and adolescents owing to my employment at school as a teacher of computer literacy. My research at school involved everyday observations and informal communication with local children, adolescents and their families. I asked in total fifty-seven local children and adolescents to write essays and then asked ten of them to speak about their own future lives. In 2004 these fiftyseven constituted more than a quarter of the overall number of the local school-aged children, which for the 2003–2004 year school came to a total of 186. I asked twenty-eight adolescents (aged fourteen to seventeen) to write essays. Of the twenty-eight adolescents, fourteen grew up in the forest and fourteen in the village. Later, I selected four youths in their late adolescence for in-depth interviewing, out of whom one boy and one girl were of forest background and the other two were village-based girl and boy. To present readers with basic data on all the stories, I would like to arrange the children’s and adolescents’ essays according to the themes, which I understand as the most prominent scenarios of their envisioned futures (these are not exclusive but show overlaps). All adolescents wish to help their families and parents in the future, though I need to emphasize that some adolescents tend to see themselves as successful professionals who will send aid back home or move their parents to their new homes, and will help their younger siblings to settle in the city; whereas others view their future help as actually coming back

Plans to get higher education

13

10

10

12

Departure after graduation from school

14

14

15

Age/ background (number of interviewees)

9–12-year-old village children (14)

Village adolescents (14)

9–12-year-old forest children (15)

Forest 14 adolescents (14)

12

12

13

10

Happy marriage in the future

8

7

14

10

14 Ten are planning to return and five did not mention return in the stories.

4

Three are planning to return but the rest did not mention return in their stories.

Plans to return Future to the community parenthood

Table 1: Most prominent themes of forest and village children’s and adolescents’ stories

14

15

14

14

Helping parents and families in the future

3

4

14

Seven expressed their wish to settle in the city, the rest did not mention it.

Future settling in the city

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in person and looking after their family reindeer herd in the forest. The expressed necessity to help is closely intertwined with my informants’ aspiration to move. All authors of the essays view moving out of the village and going to the city for educational purposes as their first step into the future, i.e., all see themselves as entering educational courses in the city after graduation from school. Apart from educational aspirations, the authors of the essays viewed their movement as necessary for creating successful marriages. It seems young Eveny’s motivation to marry outside reflects a persistent practice of kin-making among local Eveny who view this exogamous pattern as the most desirable strategy of forming their own families. Local children and adolescents are members of the extended network of kin relations within the local community, and in their futures they envisage themselves helping their families and relatives. My informants are members of the big local families who maintained their relations in and outside of the community through bringing their marriage partners from outside into the community or from moving out, settling both matrilocally and patrilocally. Moreover, the themes of their own future return to the community have been featured in both forest and village narratives; however, there is a distinction between the destinations of their return. Some young narrators prefer to return to their family camp in the forest in order to help their parents and relatives in the hard job of maintaining the reindeer herd. For example, ten-year-old forest girl Sonia wrote in her brief essay: In the future I want to help my mum and my grandma in stado [reindeer herding camp]. When I grow up I shall stay with my grandparents and help them to look after our reindeer.

Here, the reindeer, as I emphasized above, is featured as a central social element without which most forest children and adolescents cannot imagine their own future lives. Some of them view their return to the village in the capacity of a saviour who will bring about positive changes to the lives of village residents. They even list the sort of transformations the village requires and what actions they will take in order to change the hard life in the village for the better. This is how twelve-year-old forest girl Ira views her return in the written version of her future autobiography: In the future I want to become a doctor and come back to the village. I really want our village to get better and have new houses around. I wish our herd have more reindeer and our herd always to grow in numbers. It will be good if there are no bears and wolves around.

What I have also found peculiar is that the theme of not returning but settling in a new space of the city or unknown distant town has featured

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mostly among village-reared adolescents. They expressed their desire to move away and never come back in the future in an explicit and determined way (see Chapter 4). The themes of having a happy marriage, family and children have also been spelled out by most of the children and adolescents, regardless of origin, age or gender. What I have found striking is that the theme of happy family life and happy marriage is emphasized and appears particularly prominent in the stories of children who have witnessed parents’ divorce, collapse of a formerly happy household and parents’ development of alcohol addiction. I explore this in detail in Chapter 6. This background information is important for understanding each informant’s aspirations, motifs and longings.

Gender and kinship As I have mentioned above, both forest and village boys and girls emphasize the importance of getting happily married and having their own families in the future. When I asked the children how they see their future partners most of them responded that they would like to marry somewhere outside of the community, in the city or abroad. For example, fifteen-year-old village boy Ivan wrote about his future life and his future marriage as follows: In the future I shall live in Moscow and Yakutsk. I shall buy several cars, invest money into a profitable enterprise. In the city I’ll meet my wife and have two sons and a daughter. I’ll stay in Yakutsk and sometimes fly to different countries. I’ll also fly in my own aircraft to Topolinoye and help people who live in the village. I’ll build beautiful houses, bring equipment to a local hospital, school and state farm. I’ll bring new computers, printers, copying machines and a new bus.

There is more than one reason for youths moving out of the community, which I shall explore in the detailed case-studies of forest and village adolescents. However, taking Ivan’s vision of the future as well as the majority of the youth involved in this study I still consider local children’s and adolescents’ aspirations to move as a socially sanctioned strategy of finding a marriage partner outside of the community, i.e., they have to move out and travel in order to create their own families. I need to point out that the local Eveny kinship system can be characterized as bilateral exogamy. Though it is often formed on the principles of consanguinity in which membership happens through descent from both males and females, it does not exclude affinity, i.e., kin may be recruited on other basis than ‘blood’, e.g., co-residence, co-migration, commensality or co-production.

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Quite often, preference of marrying out remains persistent, therefore, the process of kin-making is directed outwards and works towards creation of social relations which are meant to be maintained by movement and reciprocity, i.e., regular visits of nomadic camps and households or such means of exchange as parcels, food and gifts. Here, social bond and affinity are construed within a regime of accommodation and ‘voluntary mutuality’ between dependence and autonomy, otherness and non-otherness (cf. Morrow 1996: 405–23; Briggs 1998: 135; Kerttula 2000: 49–57; Cruikshank 2005: 165–70). There is no strict rule in which a husband should take his wife to join his parents’ camp so it may also be a bride who can bring her groom to her parents and family in the forest. The same principle is extended to residence in the village: a groom may bring his bride to his parents’ house and vice versa. That is to say, within an extended kin network, nuclear families are formed on the principle of exogamy, and motivation to marry partners outside the kin network, therefore, remains vital in the choice of a partner. In one of my conversations with a local sixteen-year-old boy, who comes from one of the largest clans in the community, I asked whether he would create his future family by marrying a local girl. His answer went as follows: No, of course not. There is no one for me to marry as all local girls are my relatives. I’d rather move somewhere else and find my future wife there.

Hence, the pattern of exogamy remains pertinent for the younger generation of local Eveny and the plan to find a marriage partner outside of the kinship network also lies at the heart of the social necessity to move. Linguistically, the Eveny verb gulekhendei, which in literal translation means ‘to move with reindeer herd’, succinctly conveys the semantic and ontological connection between ‘movement’ and ‘marriage’, as another figurative meaning of the verb is ‘to move into a marriage’ or ‘to get married’. In this sense, outward movement should be perceived both as an extension of the nomadic movement of a reindeer herding unit and as an essential activity aimed at reproduction and kin-making. In the recent past, availability of air transport would allow regular communication between villages, so young women and men could find their partners in distant communities. In their account of the separation of genders among the reindeer herding community of Sebyan, Vitebsky and Wolfe observed that in the post-Soviet period in the 1990s ‘the withdrawal of air links between villages (flights go now only to the city) has ended a pattern of intermarriage between a chain of villages over hundreds of miles. The intermarriage had met the shortage of potential partners within the village who were not too closely related’ (2001: 92).

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The situation when the forest turned into predominantly male space1 and the village became largely occupied by women has been a part of the social landscape of this community as well. While in the field, I have also observed that the deficit of potential partners has recently motivated single young reindeer herders to restore old tracks and paths in the mountains which in the distant past used to connect the Eveny communities of Tompo and Sebyan, 320 kilometres apart. So at present, reindeer have became the main means of transport, and young herders now travel with their reindeer caravans from Sebyan to Topolinoye and vice versa in search of their future partners. In the period between 2002 and 2004 there were already been successful cases of inter-village marriages. One young reindeer herder from Sebyan married a local girl and was employed in one of the reindeer herding brigades of Topolinoye. Two girls from Topolinoye got married to their partners from Sebyan and at the moment stay with their new families in one of the Sebyan reindeer herding brigades. My reading of forest children’s stories and observation of them in the setting of the reindeer herding camp in the forest suggest that the girls’ and boys’ active participation in reindeer herding and hunting does not allow the gender-based division of labour to arise until girls reach puberty. They then completely withdraw from active participation in these activities when they get married and give birth to their first children. This is the time when their activity gets more confined to domestic space. Quite often, young girls ride their reindeer and go hunting together with senior male members of their families on equal terms with boys. Young boys’ and girls’ participation in hunting activity is viewed as important. They bring luck to an adult hunter, as it is a child’s ‘open’ body which transforms the act of killing an animal into the act of sacrifice on behalf of the animal (Willerslev and Ulturgasheva 2012). Here, the gender of a child does not matter as it is a child’s ‘open body’ that is of paramount importance (see Chapters 3 and 4). In the course of childhood, girls and boys learn the same hunting and herding skills and the issues of gender and division between female and male domains remain blurred until late adolescence. Sometimes young, unmarried women keep herding their reindeer and still actively participate in hunting together with their male family members. While boys’ activities of hunting and herding remain the same and move from adolescence into maturity, girls enter a different sphere of gender relations as they reach maturity and start learning new skills such as sewing, processing reindeer skin and producing fur clothes. This change involves not only their moving to the more restrictive domain around hearth, small children and tent but also unlearning what they have gained in their youth. Some women especially gifted in reindeer herding and known for their detailed knowledge of herding skills continue advising their husbands on effective management of their reindeer herd. Some

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reindeer herders told me that women have a special eye for tiny details, which enables them to figure out promptly how many reindeer are lost and which ones are missing. That is why these women’s knowledgeability is taken into account and valued. In other words, though the move from youth to womanhood marked the arrival of children makes women spend most of their time within the domestic space, nevertheless their knowledge of a family herd may still remain valuable in looking after reindeer. In the context of forest childhood, the process of growing up, especially in the case of girls, implies a complex process of gender identity formation, adjusting to different spaces and domains as well as moving and shifting between them, learning new skills and unlearning previous ones. The ethnographic account of a forest girl, Tonya, in Chapter 4 will illuminate the complexities of this process. The nature of gender relations takes on a different tone with our move to the discussion of the space of the village, especially in relation to the village girls’ marriage prospects. The issues related to the kontora (village administration) politics, with female workers occupying positions in it and the unattractiveness of the forest life for young women of the village, will be reflected in an ethnographic account of a village adolescent girl, Vera, in Chapter 5. Some of the issues which Vera’s account will raise, will resonate with the discussion of the gendered division of space introduced in the Soviet period and the separation of genders that have been considered in detail in the accounts of such scholars as Balzer (1999), Anderson (2000), Vitebsky and Wolfe (2001) and Ssorin-Chaikov (2003). My observation of boys in the field suggests that their acquisition of the construct of masculinity goes together with the formation of their social skills and is shaped by social practices in which they are involved from an early age. The account of Kirill in Chapter 5 will illustrate how boys’ participation in herding and hunting from childhood and their performance of sharing practices in late adolescence contribute to the formation of a particular construct of agency which will have implications for the forest boys’ and girls’ ideas about their own future. We will return to the aforementioned issues in detail from Chapter 4 onwards.

Age cohorts In the field, the occupation of schoolteacher gave me a chance to get acquainted with and observe children of different age groups. The availability of the written essays from various age groups allowed me to get an initial picture of specificity of each age group. In this section I shall present only some snippets from the collected written essays in order to introduce readers to those observable tendencies which make up overall

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picture. First, among the children aged nine to twelve, essays were quite straightforward in revealing the children’s background. For example, by writing about reindeer and their lives in a reindeer herding camp, their forest background could be revealed and I would not need any additional data to figure it out. The same might be observed among village children from these age groups as they mostly reflect their lives in the village. For example, eleven-year-old forest girl Oktia wrote: I want to have a beautiful house in the future and I want to have a handsome and smart husband. I want us to have more reindeer. I also want our reindeer herders to get smarter [intelligent]. I shall work in our stado [reindeer herding camp] and I’ll have lots of kaetekov [reindeer calves].

Oktia comes from a reindeer herding family and spent all her childhood in the forest. Her forest background is easily identifiable as she relates her future to reindeer and her family herd. The village background of a ten-year-old boy Petya is also expressed clearly. Petya comes from a singleparent family and has spent most of his life in the village. This is how he wrote his essay: In the future I shall be a surgeon. I want to treat people and help them so that they won’t grow old. I’ll help my mum so that she can never grow old and will never die. I don’t want her to fall ill and I don’t want her to go to her work. Then, we’ll all leave for a city where I want to live in a big beautiful house. I shall buy a car, a shop and I also want to have a big bania [sauna] and tepliza [greenhouse].

The marked difference between forest and village children disappears as they move into their adolescence. Forest children (nine to twelve years old) still write detailed descriptions of reindeer they want to have, using words and expressions known only in the forest. But adolescents, even if they grew up in the forest, no longer write that they would love to have such and such reindeer; their narratives seem to be assimilated to those of villagers. I shall explore this in detail in Chapters 5 and 6. Age also played a significant role in the ways the authors spoke particularly about education. In this regard I have found adolescents most eloquent in emphasizing that the chances of getting a job in the future are higher if a person is educated. While younger children vaguely mentioned the word ‘education’ in their essays, adolescents quite often wrote about why they will need education in the future. In one of the essays a fifteenyear-old village boy, Kostya, wrote an explanation of why he wants to be an educated person. He put it as follows: In the future I would like to get education and work as a teacher of history at school. I need education because I don’t want to ask my parents for money after I graduate from school and when I get education I may have a good job. Some

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young guys start drinking and ask money from their parents because they don’t have jobs. If you are educated you can get employed anywhere.

In my subsequent conversation with Kostya I learnt that his aspiration for education and good job is related to his understanding of the situation of unemployment in the village. The number of unemployed people is high and there are very few jobs available in the village. However, there is a lack of qualified people and Kostya in his lines about education expresses his wish to be a person who will not resemble those whom he sees as unemployed and in despair. This is why he was insistent in stating that in the future he would not like to be unemployed, dependent on parents and spending most of the time consuming alcohol. In her essay fourteen-year-old forest girl Olya writes on education in a similar vein: I think those who are uneducated suffer a lot. They suffer because they are paid so little and the only job they can do is cleaning floors in big buildings. That is why when I graduate from school I need to enter the university and have a degree in law.

Olya’s parents are reindeer herders and spend most of their time in the forest while she stays in the village and attends the local school. In the course of a subsequent conversation we discussed this theme again, and she explained that she understood that uneducated people are those who do not have any professional qualifications and cannot have any other jobs apart from cleaning. This part of the population has few chances to be employed in the city but they are not fit to join reindeer herders in the forest because they lack the skills and knowledge which herders gain from childhood and after many years of practising. As a child from the forest, Olya is aware of the kind of job reindeer herders do and how they are paid, and is sympathetic to her parents. During our conversation she also stated that the reason why reindeer herders do not receive high salaries is related not to their lack of professional skills but to the corrupt attitudes in the administration of a former state farm. Moreover, children’s future autobiographies, written between the ages of nine and twelve, represented probably less-coherent and less-extended forms of expression than the accounts of the future produced by adolescents aged between sixteen and seventeen. Particularly, sixteen- and seventeen-year-old adolescents wrote their stories involving more detail and narrated about what they intended to do in the near future following a linear sequence. In that sense, children were more inclined to narrate without much concern over the sequence of events, bringing all elements into their story without clear linearity.

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In the course of my fieldwork I came to the realization that adolescents wrote the same kind of stories with a similar plot, but during our conversations it would be revealed that each child and adolescent has her or his own individualized motives for the story she or he has written. In other words, they narrated their stories in a particular sequence and within a particular genre, but they would also bring their own motives and connections for telling such a story. The ethnographic richness of adolescents’ oral accounts was constituted in the details which revealed the issue most pertinent for them, i.e., social life in the local community, specifically youth’s leisure time, relations between reindeer herders and the administration, the state of the village’s infrastructure, their relationship with parents, alcohol consumption, schooling and schoolteachers, unemployment among young people, people’s conflicts, relations between relatives and factions existing in the community. In this regard the adolescents’ visions of their own future lives seem to have already been formed and their narratives and essays will represent fusion of social and individual as well as dialogical tension between internal and external (Bakhtin 1981; Bruner 2002).

Oral and written As I have stated above, having written essays in the first instance gave me a chance to pick up the most illustrative and interesting cases, which assisted me in the further development of a fuller picture. My reading of the written essays and consequent listening to children’s and adolescents’ oral narratives has suggested that though the mode of oral and written production and performance differs, the actual message of both oral and written versions remained much the same, as did the ontological framework of both versions. In other words, the scenarios of children’s future autobiographies with basic compositional elements have corresponded in oral and written forms. Though writing is often viewed as an artificial, decontextualized and more logically advanced method of production of the text, as opposed to real speech and thought which ‘always exists essentially in a context of give-and-take between real persons’ (Ong 1982: 79), I find it hard to distinguish between the two when it comes to the level of conceptual organization of the text. Walter Ong’s theory about intrinsic relationship between writing and logic according to which ‘writing is a technology that restructures thought’ (1986: 23) was challenged by John Halverson in his proposition that writing ‘has no intrinsic significance in the communication of ideas or the development of logical thought processes’ (1992: 314). The latter view corresponds to my perception of this ethnographic data. Despite clear difference of style and presentation, there is no differ-

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ence in the overall message between written and oral communications. In this respect I also agree with Ruth Finnegan, who convincingly argued that written and oral literature cannot be easily distinguished by ‘either narrative, composition, style, social context, or function’ (1977: 272). She rightly suggests that what distinguishes the oral form from the written is the difference in distinct modes of communication, i.e., oral face-toface communication versus the written form that primarily involves the private acts of writing and reading. Similarly to Finnegan’s proposition, my material will illustrate that the oral and written versions turned out to be two different channels for communicating the same message. So the oral versus written distinction will be relevant for our consideration as the distinction between two patterns of communicative exchange, i.e., face-to-face conversation and the story produced in some contrived and decontextualized writing format. Since both patterns have the same conceptual organization and notably the same compositional formula, I shall view the written and oral versions of adolescents’ and children’s future lives, whether the brief and zoomed version (a written essay) or the more elaborate and detailed narrative (an oral story), as two different forms of use of the text and thus as two equally valuable types of evidence. In her insightful account of storytelling and narrativity among American junior high school adolescents from mixed black, white and Puerto Rican neighbourhoods on America’s east coast, Amy Shuman suggests that the narrative is not only ‘one way of categorising experience’ but also the means by which the experience is being ‘replayed, duplicated and recapitulated’ (1986: 20). Her account of adolescents’ fight-stories has illustrated how the space of the narrated events represents a negotiable reality upon which adolescents try to impose their own sense of order and causality in a quest for story-telling rights and ownership. According to Shuman, it is the situatedness, i.e., dynamic factuality that involves constant realignments and narrative reconfigurations, that is of paramount importance for unpacking the relationship between the incidents interpreted by the adolescents in their stories and the event, i.e., what actually happened (1986: 20–21). The issue of the relationship between the story and the event strongly emphasized by Amy Shuman will also be central for this work, as well as the notion of situatedness for uncovering the relationship between lived and ongoing experiences and temporal and spatial proximity between the events described in the stories of young Eveny narrators. However, unlike Shuman’s emphasis on American adolescents’ practices of entitlement and ownership of the narrative, this work’s focus on the experience of adolescence will shed light on the issues of a rather different nature. The issues of factuality (what has really happened) and causal sequence of the narrative (interpretation of the events) highlighted in Shu-

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man’s account will take a different twist, as an adolescent narrative will be considered in terms of an opposite or reversed order. If in Shuman’s work it is the event that takes place in the first instance, and only later that the narrative (the oral or written account of what has happened) is produced, in the case of young Eveny the sequence goes the other way around, as the narrative (future autobiography) is told first, and only afterwards do the events unfold. Therefore, the analytical framework will shift from a focus on the interpretational or representational nature of the narrative to its constitutive and mediating force. I shall come back to this point shortly. With regards to the composition of the written and oral stories, I observed that, particularly, adolescents often structured their own written stories according to the following common sequence (cf. Propp 1968): the protagonist departs, stays in the city to gain education, wealth and experience, and finds a marriage partner; after being absent for some time the protagonist returns to bring wellbeing to the family and to change the life of the community for the better. One could say that this sequence of events helps them to compose their own story. They follow the same compositional formula and use elements from that formula as pegs for unfolding their future autobiography. In this sense, the events in their oral narratives are presented in a similar progression as in the written versions. This may also be explained by the age group of the narrators who, by their adolescence, have mastered this type of narrative composition which constitutes their sense of causality, storyability and thus genre. To illustrate this briefly, I look at the story written by Volodia, a fifteenyear-old forest boy, which reflects the typical structure of the forest adolescents’ written versions and resonates with other future life-stories told and written by those who grew up in a forest reindeer herding camp: When I graduate from school I shall leave for a city and take a course and become a helicopter pilot. I’ll meet a girl there and we’ll have two children. We’ll get a good flat there and a car. Together with my wife and children I will come back and organize my own reindeer herding obschina here so that I can help my parents, relatives and close friends with whom I grew up.

The events in the story are unfolded between the points of departure and return. The beginning of the story is quite common to adolescents’ stories; their future life starts from school graduation and departure for the city. The feature that I find quite common among adolescents who wrote the stories is the tendency to present himself or herself as a proper, good and worthy person. The scenario of Volodia’s oral version of his future autobiography did not differ very much from this; he followed a similar plot and reproduced the elements which I listed above, namely: departure, getting education, marrying in the city, returning to the native community and helping his family, parents and friends by organizing an obschina.

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Most of the forest adolescents stated in their stories that they would like to return in the future and charged their own return with the task to change the life of people for the better. Often they list the reasons why they would like to return. In this list I have observed the following reasons: to heal reindeer and organize proper veterinary service for animals; to help reindeer herders by protecting their rights in the capacity of a lawyer in a local obschina; to organize new institutions such as obschina in order to support their family reindeer herd; to be a reindeer herder for a family herd of reindeer; to work as a helicopter pilot in order to transport reindeer herding families and their children from the village to the forest. Bringing help and rescue to the family and the native community alongside their personal return serves as a culmination for both written essays and oral narratives produced by the adolescents. Another type of future autobiographies which I found to be prominent was based on the scenario of leaving the village after graduation and settling in the city or outside of the village and the native community. The following story authored by a seventeen-year-old girl who grew up in the village may exemplify this type of scenario: Aida: In the future I would like to be a make-up artist. That is why I shall leave for a city to get a degree, then I’ll start earning money and after I have enough money I’ll open a beauty salon. I shall open my own beauty salon in the city. I shall buy a car and after that I shall bring all my family to Moscow. My younger sister Valia will work in my beauty salon. If she needs to enter a university and take a course in biology I shall pay for her course. By this time my brother Vitalik will serve in the air force. Then I shall build a house for my father and mother in the city. They will stay in a separate house and they will do everything they want. In my beauty salon I shall have manicure salon, massage, plastic surgery and skin rejuvenation. I shall help women to keep their beauty. My salon will be for influential people, and TV stars will attend it. In terms of my family life I shall have one child without a husband. My child will get a degree and will be a manager of my firm. I shall produce my own line of make-up and clothes.

As we may observe here, in contrast to Volodia’s story, Aida does not see herself in the future returning to the village; instead, she settles in the city and moves all her family there. Her motive for settling in the city has also been pronounced in her oral version. I should point out that during our conversations she expressed sincere determination to move out of the village and never return in the future. Apart from viewing the element of return to the community (as in Volodia’s case) and the theme of moving away from the village and settling in the city (as in Aida’s story) as two possible life-trajectories and invariants of a specific genre of the story about absence and heroic return, we shall see that they are invocations of a particular local situation and expressions of social scenarios embedded in a local category of person (see Chapter 7).

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Moreover, I have to point out that in written versions the relationship between text and context is complex and requires contextual clues for its interpretation. Therefore, subsequent face-to-face discussions of a narrator’s future have always provided, borrowing from Shuman, ‘a shift from mediacy to immediacy’ (1986: 60), i.e., a shift from the context of the distanced written future to the context of current everyday life. The oral version of the narrative has unfolded the relationships between the anticipated future and the narrator’s life in the present in a more elaborate and detailed way than the written form. Hence, the analysis of oral narratives will be faced less with the basic structural component and will allow a more discursive exploration of a narrator’s intentions, motives, wishes and anticipations. While listening to oral narratives, one has to follow the natural flow of the authors’ speech and avoid enforcing the progression of a narrative by sticking to the subjects and themes upon which a narrating child or adolescent is elaborating.

Narrative and ‘future autobiography’ Most of the significant anthropological works on narrative have emphasized that the ways of expressing and narrating the self are culturally constructed, and thus an individual’s narrative should be understood as a form that interweaves and creates both personal and cultural meanings (Vansina, 1965; Rosaldo 1980a, 1980b, 1986; Abu-Lughod 1986; Crapanzano 1977, 1980; Cruikshank 1990, 2000; Shieffelin 1990, 2002; Finnegan 1992; Tonkin 1992 and many others). The stories individuals tell of themselves are seen as being influenced by the broader cultural conventions of context, style and genre of expression, and by other stories in circulation. My ethnography will also show how young narrators selectively draw from their own cultural lexicon stored in social memory and mediated through local speech genres. I treat ‘speech genre’ as one of the expressions of on-going social experience of the narrator in the present and as social product of particular temporal and economic conditions (see Bakhtin 1990; Wollheim 1984; White 1987; Bruner 1990; Kerby 1991). In this regard, genres and their use constitute a local society’s contribution to understanding actions and events and its ways of organizing, presenting and remembering information shared by its members. I understand each account of the future imagined and narrated by children and adolescents as the product of both existing discourses and personal meanings. In other words, whereas existing discourses and their basic units – genres – provided them with means of expression and served as expressive forms, children and adolescents endowed the contents of

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their stories with the distinct sense of the self (Bruner 2002: 63–87). Local children and adolescents perceive, anticipate, tell their stories and write their essays about their own future lives in terms of available expressive forms, and that, they personalize these forms within the context of their own lives in the present. In the field I have figured out that each social space with certain pockets of local population has specific genres of narration which have been shaped in response to a particular social and historical situation. The genres performed within the space of the village are specifically related to kontora (village administration) politics and are significant because they continue to reproduce social ranking within the local community and to a great extent are rooted in the Soviet legacy (Slezkine 1994; Humphrey 1998; Anderson 2000; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003; Vitebsky 2005). For example, the production reports on figures of loss and gain from the project of socialist construction in underdeveloped areas of the former Soviet Union have served as a rhetorical tool for generations of kontora officers and have also become a part of the village type of the narrative (see Vera’s account in Chapter 4). In their written versions of future lives, children and adolescents often borrowed themes from TV soap operas and the stories of TV show characters in order to narrate their own future autobiographies. When I was reading the essays I would often recognize certain episodes from ongoing TV dramas and realize that those TV episodes availed my young informants with new patterns of tellability and allowed them to interpret their own experiences and social life in the community in a particular way (cf. Shuman 1986: 54–76). That is to say, the narrators drew creatively from the variety of available resources, and TV soap operas and adverts provided them with one among many ways of narrating their own lives in the present and the future. I specifically view the stories about certain localities and places in local landscape as a particular fusion of narrative, space and memory which stresses the continuity of past memories into the present. The stories travel from one space to another and thus interchangeably shape the patterns of narrating one’s experience. They are inculcated into the topography of social memory and serve as a culturally defined means for conceptualizing one’s experience (Gordillo 2004: 20–26; Bloch 2005: 87–101; Green 2005: 19–29). Outside the space of the village, stories about the surrounding landscape, certain geographical locations, rivers and high mountain passes are rendered within the particular framework of engagement of a human being with these localities and their spiritual entities. And there are instructional stories about dangerous places that should be avoided, otherwise they would bring misfortune or bad luck: for example, shamans’ graves, old camps which contain traces of previous humans, random graves

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in the forest and places where the unfortunate or tragic death of a person took place are associated with the evil spirits called arinkael (see Chapter 6). Since autobiography is arguably one of the genres that most involves the presentation or construction of the self (Goffman 1969; Hankiss 1981; Linde 1993), there is a long-standing tradition in Western scholarship to treat autobiographical writing as subjective, and thus distorting some underlying, more fundamental reality. That is to say, life-stories or life-narratives are viewed not as experiences and events but as accounts and representations of experiences and events (Gullestad 1996b: 12). In this regard, autobiography is identified as a product of part history and part creative imagination of its author. In this work I use the term ‘autobiography’ in a loose and descriptive sense since the fact that Eveny children and adolescents wrote and narrated their future autobiographies has not necessarily denoted the same type of practice and has not served the same end as in the act of literary autobiographical writing, i.e., textual representation of the self. The readers will see that ‘future autobiographies’ of young Eveny alluded to a rather complex phenomenon which goes beyond the well-established distinction between the event and its representation as well as ‘fundamental contradiction between truth and authenticity, on the one hand, and literary constructedness, on the other’ (Gullestad 1996b: 24). In this work the connection between the future autobiography and the lived life-trajectory will provide the readers with a new dimension on the narrative involving not only genres but also actual lives lived as predicted in a future autobiography. In this sense the future autobiographies orally narrated and written by the Eveny youth (specifically, my key informants whose detailed cases I shall present later) will allude to much beyond the issue of genre and will draw our attention to the relationship between narrative and event in which the direction of influence is reversed, i.e., events are constituted out of narratives rather than vice versa (cf. Young 1987: 197). This will become particularly evident in the light of my recent revisiting in summer 2010 when my former interviewees have already fulfilled the first stages of their future autobiographies, i.e., their narrated futures have recently turned into the recent past. This development will raise a question on the relationship between prediction (future autobiography) and fulfilment (life in the present) which I shall explore throughout subsequent discussion, particularly in Chapters 4 and 5 and in more detail in Chapter 7. In the context of the Eveny lives, which includes harsh environmental conditions of the Siberian North, there is always a possibility that everything which is consciously conceived and accurately calculated may go wrong. Even the most experienced hunters and reindeer herders constantly stay alert and attuned to sudden weather alterations, unexpected river floods, abrupt change in animal behaviour and unanticipated attacks of predators because there is always a possibility for sudden misfortune

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and failure of plans. One local hunter eloquently put it in the following way: ‘the less you speak to people about your forthcoming hunt, the better chance it will be lucky. By speaking too much, one risks to jinx his hunt.’ Therefore, such concern over verbalization of one’s plans and conscious carefulness with spoken words suggests that my request for the young Eveny narration about their own future lives was quite a risky endeavour which would have undermined or even jinxed their futures. In regards to the latter I have to note that apart from my key adolescent informants, whose detailed case-studies I shall present in Chapters 4 and 5, there was a case when what had been written in the essay went wrong and what had been dreamed about the future was not fulfilled. In her essay a sixteen-year-old village girl wrote about her plans to leave the village for the city after school graduation in order to get education in a medical college and come back to the community in the capacity of a medical doctor. That year she wrote this essay the girl graduated from school and indeed left the village for the city but on the way to the city she got stuck in a town of Khandyga for some unfortunate reasons and was not able to leave this town for the city due to lack of travel expenses. After a few months of her absence from the village her relatives heard that she was involved in some crime and ended up serving time in a prison. Since then, no one has heard from her, and she has not returned to the community. When I heard what had happened to the girl when I revisited the community six years later, I was struck by her cousin’s interpretation of what happened to her. He explained to me that by not reaching the city, i.e., the destination of her dreams about the future, she had most likely lost her djuluchen since she was unable to reach the destination she was so eager to reach. Unfortunately, I did not have a chance to conduct indepth exploration of her case at the time when she was still a schoolgirl in her adolescence. Therefore, unavailability of a detailed interview with her does not allow me to elaborate thoroughly on her case. However, her cousin’s interpretation had brought up a very important connection for understanding of the cases of my key informants as it offered specific Eveny perception of the connection between prediction and fulfilment. It emerged that what my adolescent informants had told me (specifically, the first phases of their autobiographies) and what has been fulfilled was an outcome of particular conceptualization of human destiny and personhood associated with the concept of djuluchen. It was the unpredictability of the adolescents’ prediction that puzzled me as a researcher after I learnt about the foreshadowing nature of their narratives. This development has also thrown a different light on my main case-studies. Instead of emphasizing young Eveny narrators as disempowered subjects lost in uncertainty about the future, the actual aspect of prediction in their narratives cast them as active creators of their future lives

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(at least at the current stage of their young adulthood) and also shed new light on the role of the narrative in a young person’s life. Readers will see that the Eveny adolescents’ autobiographies go beyond perception of the narrative as a representational and secondary structure of meaning which distorts some primary reality and comprises what Roland Barthes calls ‘a plane of discourse’ (1984 [1977]: 20). An adolescent’s future autobiography will reverse the usual historical link between event and narrative or ‘signifier and signified’ (ibid: 27) and will emerge as an implicating and event-shaping force necessitated by specific cultural perception of human personhood. In this regard I suggest viewing young Eveny’s future autobiographies not as a mere product of either their random fantasies or accurate and realistic calculations but as products of an ontologically constitutive category of person, specifically its element of djuluchen, i.e., a foreshadowing force which is discharged from the moment of its narration towards the moment of its actualization in the future. The framework of djuluchen will allow us to observe how narrative gives shape to subsequent lived events and transforms the act of narrating the future into a phenomenon of certain social and cosmological status. In the course of the following chapters I shall make an attempt to explain what the concept of djuluchen entails by involving detailed ethnographic case-studies.

Notes 1. A part of Soviet development policy was to turn reindeer herding into an industry or ‘a system of meat production based on economic rationality’ (Vitebsky and Wolfe 2001: 83). According to this development plan women were removed to the villages as they were ‘not directly involved in reindeer herding’ and new village-based occupations were introduced to them. The herding had to be done by men who have stayed in the forest as it was transformed into regulated employment. All of this reinforced a growing contrast of gender and had implications for gender relations with a dominating number of men in the forest and a large part of the female population in the village.

Chapter 2

Eveny Childhood and Adolescence

Djuluchen: the composition of child and adolescent personhood In this work I intend to reflect on the process of growing up among Eveny children and adolescents and show that their formative experiences are individually variable and yet are determined by certain social and environmental factors. The latter involve a particular set of aspects which revolve around such social domains as children’s and adolescents’ family histories, their relations to and perceptions of parents, growing up in a reindeer herding camp or growing up in the village, moving around the landscape with reindeer or remaining stationary in the village, going hunting for food or getting food products from the village shop. These aspects of children’s lives are important to consider ethnographically as they help to explore and reveal how young Eveny construe their own formative experiences and what vocabulary they choose in order to articulate their own perceptions of themselves as future agents and social actors. Hence, my inquiry into the ways Eveny children and adolescents produce their oral and written future autobiographies is also an attempt to uncover the conceptual means and devices which they deploy in order to make sense of the social world to which they belong. Among local Eveny early childhood is associated with precariousness, as the young child (khulingu) is viewed as fragile and volatile, and thus unable to resist attacks by malevolent spirits. Because of this, the human personhood of newborn children is understood as moulded by social relations with various other-than-living agents of both the human and the non-human world. This particular stage in the human life-cycle is perceived as the most precarious and is expressed in the concept of an ‘open body’ – angati aertang (see also Vitebsky 2005: 111–12 for the Eveny of Sebyan; Willerslev 2007: 163 for the Yukagir). The ‘open body’ is thus the essentially frail body of a newly born child, which requires such

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means of protection as the guardian reindeer, and a proper name. Owing to its precarious ‘openness’, the ‘child’ soul is viewed by the non-human spirits as an animal prey to be killed and consumed and by the spirits of the deceased ancestors as an absent kin who needs to be brought back to the land of the dead. In particular, danger comes from the ancestral spirit whose name has been given to the child. The ancestral namesake of the child strives to get hold of the child’s ‘open body’ and continues to do so until the body ‘closes’, i.e., when it separates from the deceased ancestor. At this stage the child is more its deceased namesake than its own individual being. The child’s state of having an ‘open body’ is dangerous as it has not yet reached the firmness and stability of a ‘closed body’ – dakhupti artaeng. Having a ‘closed body’ is crucial as it serves as a protective shield against dangerous contact with the spirit world. The closing ensures that the spirits cannot enter the person’s body. The ‘closing’ or sealing of the child’s body is not achieved immediately and is done in the course of one’s lifetime with the help of protective means, most notably one’s individual name and the help of a guardian reindeer. Nowadays, when a child is born in a reindeer herder’s family, a reindeer is appointed to be the guardian of the child’s soul, which serves to stand in for its human ‘double’ in case of attacks from evil spirits as well as being custodian of the child’s wellbeing. This particular feature of human–reindeer relations has also been emphasized in ethnographies of the Eveny of Sebyan by Vitebsky (2005). He observes that the kujjai holds the special position of guardian reindeer and remains to guard its owner until its death. When the kujjai dies, a new reindeer is appointed so this position is never empty. The concept of a guardian reindeer is also prominent among the Eveny of Topolinoye, who refer to this particular reindeer as khaevek. The latter is viewed as a non-human component of a child’s human personhood, an aspect which I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Willerslev and Ulturgasheva 2012). My discussion on how a reindeer can move together with its human counterpart from one stage of the human life-cycle to another will be developed thoroughly in Chapter 5. Apart from the agency of a reindeer to guard its owners and protect them from misfortunes, reindeer also continue to be social and economic capital for contemporary Eveny. Therefore in the course of this work we shall see how local children and adolescents narrate their own relations to a reindeer and how this shapes their views about their own lives in the future. The stage of late adolescence (about fifteen to sixteen years) signifies that a young person’s body is ‘closed’, i.e., has acquired the safety of a ‘closed body’ and now can be securely involved in productive and reproductive activities. According to Jarvis (1999: 116–38), who wrote mainly on child development in the Euro-American sphere, early adolescence starts in association with the bodily changes of puberty, which roughly

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take place between eleven and fourteen years. However, among Eveny there is not a rigid distinction between childhood and early adolescence, since such chronological distinctions do not matter as much as actual attainment of subsistence skills and a young person’s acquisition of safety of her or his ‘closed body’, i.e., the process may also last longer and even progress into adulthood. For the sake of clarity, I shall very untidily assign Eveny adolescence to the age range between fourteen and seventeen, as fourteen is locally understood as the beginning of puberty and seventeen is a time when a child is no longer viewed as ‘under age’. Also, the period between sixteen and seventeen falls into the final year at school and represents the beginning of young adulthood. Moreover, among Eveny, human developmental stages are often put in parallel to the development of a reindeer calf. The child’s age is not counted literally but is defined using the same terminology applied to the developmental stages of the reindeer (see Chapter 5). As we shall see in the course of my discussion, children’s and adolescents’ ideas of themselves in the present and the future are embedded in their everyday practices, and specifically in those social roles that they play as important actors and agents in the present. Hence, the issue of Eveny children’s and adolescents’ personhood will be featured as a central theme and will be explored throughout all ethnographic case studies. Special emphasis on the importance of social interaction and participation has been propagated by Lev Vygotsky, who viewed the development of a child’s internal speech as an outcome of a child’s internalization of external knowledge acquired in the process of communication between the child and the people in her environment (1978: 89). Vygotsky paid particular attention to social interactions, which promote child development, and distinguished imagination and play as the main aids to a child’s advancement into the zone of proximal development, i.e., the zone between the actual developmental level of a child and the level of his or her potential development (1978: 86). He attributes significance to play which allows the child to realize his or her ‘wishes by letting the basic categories of reality pass through his experience’ (1978: 100). According to Vygotsky, in a child’s play there is no distinction between internal and external action; rather such internal processes as imagination, interpretation and will are externalized by outer action carried out by a child in play. As regards this, I consider Vygotsky’s views on the child’s affective attitude to play relevant for Eveny practices of child socialization in the forest during which a child is being prompted or even pushed into the zone of proximal development through his or her active involvement in such critical subsistence activities as hunting and reindeer herding (see Chapter 5). In addition, Vygotsky’s theory of child’s play and the power of child’s imagination in dealing with situations of ongoing suffering will be prominent

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in the case-studies of the children from ‘unhappy’ single-parent families in which children’s parents are divorced and undergo situations of personal crisis. I shall give detailed consideration to the ways a child construes his or her relationship to parents who while suffering from alcohol dependence leave a child in a state of neglect and despair (see Chapter 6). As I have stated in Chapter 1, my discussion of young Eveny experiences of their present and their visions of the future will not be complete without considering the local concept of person and its implications for the Eveny concepts of destiny and destination intrinsic to nomadic ontology. In this respect I see the Eveny concept djuluchen or ‘forerunner’ as essential for understanding this ethnographic material. According to local Eveny, djuluchen is an inherent component of Eveny personhood which in literal translation reads as a ‘shadow that falls or runs ahead of a person’. Djuluchen is a reindeer herding or nomadic concept which signifies the partible or separable component of human personhood (some locals refer to it as ‘one’s travelling spirit’) which departs ahead of its owner and arrives at the destination prior to the owner’s actual appearance. Djuluchen stays on hold until the owner’s arrival and the owner catches up with the djuluchen part of his/her personhood later, upon actual arrival. ‘Catching up with his/her djuluchen’ is understood as an act of the owner’s reassembling with the partible, i.e., djuluchen. By and large, it is an outcome of one’s distant envisioning of destination with focus on movement towards the place. The distant vision of the destination already forms a relationship between a person contemplating movement towards the place and the actual place, i.e. a point of his or her arrival. So djuluchen points at the capacity of a person to form this relationship not only when he or she reaches the destination but even when he or she starts planning to go there. In other words, one’s intention is projected ahead of one’s action, and can be picked up by the target of this intention. Hence, the moment of a person’s planning, narrating or reflecting on forthcoming events not only should be viewed as some act of mere contemplation on some future possibilities but also may be understood as an ‘actualization-in-progress’. That is to say, my young Eveny informants’ intense contemplation on the future triggered their djuluchen progression into their forthcoming spatial destinations. I shall have a closer look into the Eveny notion of djuluchen and its role for adolescence below, and its implications for each case study in Chapters 4 and 7.

Childhood and narrative The process by which children become effectively functioning members of a particular society has been the subject of a substantial corpus of anthropo-

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logical and psychological literature (Vygotsky 1960; Middleton 1970; Winnicott 1969; Briggs 1979, 1998; Rabain 1979; Jahoda and Lewis 1987; Shieffelin 1990; Yates 1990; Toren 1998; James and James 2001; Poole 2002 and many others). However, it was social and cultural anthropologists who emphasized the importance of cultural variability of childhoods and challenged the concept of a universal child persisting in childhood studies within other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, law and public health. The 1930s pioneering works of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict in North American anthropology followed by Raymond Firth and Audrey Richards in British anthropology have led to the premise that children are influenced as much by culture as by their biology (Montgomery 2009: 22– 38). Since then, the anthropology of childhood has been engaged in the question of how people become who they are and in so doing constitute the social relations of which they appear to be the product. Under this research agenda, it has been recognized that ‘childhood’ cannot be regarded as an unproblematic descriptor of a natural biological phase. Rather, the idea of childhood must be seen as a particular cultural definition of the early part of the life-course, historically and politically contingent and subject to change (James and James 2001). So the heterogeneity of discourses on childhood across societies and cultures has led to a premise recently posited by Alan Prout: Childhood should be seen not only as a unitary phenomenon but a multiple set of constructions emergent from the connection and disconnection, fusion and separation of heterogeneous materials. Each particular construction, and these come in scales running from the individual child to historically constituted forms of childhood, has a non-linear history, a being in becoming that is open-ended and nonteleological. (2005: 144)

From this point of view I consider this work as an attempt to gain an insight into the experiences of Eveny childhood and adolescence in order to explore what kinds of meanings and connections the situation of social crisis and desolation in the North produces and, more importantly, what meanings children and adolescents grant this situation themselves. Many anthropological studies, while analysing learning processes, put an emphasis on cultural transmission and the sustaining of traditions. Meyer Fortes was the one who, after Malinowski (1930), most prominently stressed the necessity to observe the interaction between parents and children in the socialization process and how knowledge of specialized techniques was taught and passed on. This emphasis is particularly prominent in his work on children of Taleland. He viewed the process of informal learning among Tale children not as an isolated activity but as woven into the general texture of practical life. He criticized the notion of children’s play as imitation of adults’ activities and points out that

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play ‘is never simple and mechanical reproduction; it is always imaginative construction, based on themes of adult life and the life of older children’ (Fortes 1970: 244). Moreover, in the past few decades anthropological research on childhood has recognized the necessity to portray children as agents. Since the notion of socialization has been critiqued for viewing children through an adult lens (Hirschfield 1989; Harris 1998), children are now seen not as passive recipients of adults’ action but as active meaning-makers, knowledge-producers and agents of cultural transmission (Toren 1987, 1993; Hirschfeld 2002). For example, Christina Toren has analysed how Fijian children develop notions of social hierarchy (Toren 1999). She observes that children do not simply learn fixed concepts; their concepts differ in significant ways from those of adults, and they are actively engaged in the process of producing meanings. In her discussion she emphasizes that the child is an actor who assimilates a given society’s culture with a framework that the child has developed from within. In this respect, the child is able to bring newness and uniqueness to the given social reality. This radical move towards children’s agency was adopted in part in response to a view that has its roots in evolutionary models of children and childhood with their emphasis on becoming, maturing and reaching a particular end state (James and Prout 1997; Morrow 1995; LeVine 2007). Within this developmental paradigm, the child is measured against ‘an excessively idealized version of adult autonomy, independence, and maturity’, which in itself is inconsistent (Bluebond-Langner and Korbin 2007: 243). However, the development of an approach from within children’s peer culture also contributed to a dichotomous view of adult and child spheres (James and Prout 1997; Berentzen 1989). In my view, children’s voices and their perspectives have to stay at the centre of research, but, as Cheney rightly highlighted, ‘it is also important to explore and analyse childhood as a productive social category integral to – rather than separate from – broader social relations’ (2007: 30). Alongside an increasing view of children as having agency, I find it vital also to emphasize that among Eveny childhood (in Eveny kungarapu) and the process of the child’s growing are closely intertwined with a perception of the vulnerability of the child’s physical and spiritual body as well as the fragility of a child’s human personhood expressed in the idea of ‘open body’, as I emphasized in detail above. The child’s ‘open body’ requires protective means, nurturance and care until the body gets ‘closed’ or solidified by the age of fifteen to seventeen. In this connection, the process of growing or becoming a full person will be viewed as central for our perception of Eveny childhood and adolescence, i.e., the stages during which the child is acquiring his or her full personhood and identity in interaction

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with humans and in relation to animals, ancestral spirits and spirits of the land. I shall discuss this in detail in Chapters 3 and 4. In anthropology socialization is understood as the ways, means and processes by which one internalizes the external world (Mayer and Mayer 1970; Jahoda and Lewis 1987). As Tonkin relevantly puts it: ‘The world outside is used to build the means of understanding the same outside world, and as we grow, we continue to process and internalise the outside to think with, as well as to think about’ (1992: 105). Jean Piaget put the process of a child’s internalizing the external world in his own terminology, namely, assimilation and accommodation. If, according to Piaget, ‘assimilation involves the incorporation of new events into preexisting cognitive structures’, then accommodation implies that ‘existing structures change to accommodate to the new information’ (1977: 7–8). Though Piaget is mostly concerned with the cognitive development of children rather than with their social experiences, to a certain extent his model appears to correspond with anthropological models of socialization (Lancy 2008: 154–90). In regard to this, I understand child socialization as an interactive process ‘in and through which one learns to be an actor, to enact roles, to forge social relationships within a community, and to acquire the competence, skills, sensitivities and dispositions of a member of a particular society’ (Poole 2002: 831). While interacting with forest children I observed that the social setting of the forest, or to be more precise reindeer herders’ camp within the forest, affects the ways they shape and narrate what happened to them in the past. I view it as a significant part of forest children’s socialization. The fact that they choose to narrate their own most salient experiences in the forest says that the necessity to narrate what one has learnt and acquired in the course of herding and hunting practices is a sign of the ability to make sense of one’s own learning process and, therefore, a child and an adolescent’s reflection of what has been gained so far. So I view a child’s narrative as a distillation of that child’s experience of life in a reindeer herding camp and his or her own observations of social life in the forest. It was especially involving to listen to these stories when children were back from the forest at the beginning of a school year. Most of them had lots of stories to tell. While telling me their own stories they would get excited by the actual recollection of their experience, and they obviously enjoyed the process of narrating. Narration was not the only method to recollect their experience in the forest. It was also re-enacted. Once, I observed how children at the age of seven were playing a game in the street in which one boy took the role of a herder while two girls and another boy would perform as reindeer. The boy who was the herder would move as if he were pasturing a herd of reindeer and chasing them to koral’. The rest would take larch twigs, hold-

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ing them as reindeer antlers, and pretend that they were trying to escape. Then, suddenly, one boy disappeared and after a few moments came back with real reindeer antlers, which he had probably picked up from a nearby household. This boy holding reindeer antlers over his head performed as a wild reindeer – buyun – as opposed to a domesticated reindeer – oron. He would address the rest: ‘Hey! Look, I am a buyun’. So the boy who was a minute ago a domestic reindeer took a stick, which at that moment turned into a rifle, and after pointing it at the imagined wild reindeer pretended to make a shot accompanying it with the appropriate sounds. Having heard the shot, the boy-buyun synchronously fell down, pretending he was dead. This creative and theatrical enactment of a scene from life in the forest suddenly reproduced by children in their game made me think of the significance of what they were enacting, i.e., the practice of hunting. I viewed the enacted episode as a performance of their knowledge gained through everyday observations and active participation in adults’ hunting activities. I suppose it was a part of a hunting narrative told by an adult hunter in a reindeer herding camp, enacted by the children who were his audience at that moment and who brought this story back to the camp. That was one special sort of enacted narration performed by seven-year-old children that I had a chance to observe. In the course of my discussion, I show that forest children’s involvement in hunting plays a crucial role in the process of concept formation, and therefore has implications for forest children’s ideas of their own future (see Chapters 4 and 5). Hence I understand a child’s narration as a creative process that does not involve as much tension between the internal (the self) and the external (the person) as is often emphasized by researchers of adult narrativity (Bakhtin 1981; Linde 1993). My approach, especially to childhood, through narrative, will perhaps have more in common with that of Gilles Deleuze, who has observed that children often sustain a continuous flow of talk about whatever activity they are engaged in. Their activity, he suggests, can be seen as dynamic trajectories of practice and their talk as constructing mental maps of these trajectories. Children’s ‘auto-conversations’ provide an example of how human selves come into being through an unending process of emergence (1998: 61–2). You will see that free and unrestrained flow of narrative, in which the distinction between internal and external is not yet prominent, is going to be a feature of children and early adolescents at the age of nine to twelve. Moreover, my child informants’ way of narration is similar in nature and form to the LéviStraussian notion of bricolage, particularly ‘its highest degree of freedom in relation to any preconceived frames of reference’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966 cited in Kambouchner 2009: 34). I view the bricoleur nature of a child’s narrative as a precious source for the kaleidoscopic variety and fusion of

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connections stemming from a child’s social experience. Capturing the randomness, ambiguity and idiosyncrasy of children’s stories will also involve weaving together the patchwork of children’s individual connections, social context and family histories. I should note that I do not aim for complete analysis, since I recognize that the result of my attempt will be only partial. Moreover, I believe that any attempt to do so will always be partial, as there is no definitive whole to be constructed (Strathern 2004).

Coming of age As I have stated above, the experience of being an Eveny adolescent invites us to ethnographic consideration of the process of growing up and becoming a person in a reindeer herding community, i.e., the process, as we shall see, that involves not only acquiring concepts and meanings transmitted by adults or significant elders but also modifying them in accordance with new contexts and recently introduced social changes. A major part of my discussion is devoted to boys and girls who are undergoing the stage of adolescence which within the developmental paradigm is characterized as the phase of significant physiological and psychological transitions. This stage is often represented in adolescence studies as the time of emotional turmoil stressful for both the adolescent and the society (Hall 1904; Kehily 2007) and ‘the transitional period between the end of childhood and the attainment of adult social status’ (Whiting and Whiting 1987). Adolescence, across cultures, has been a time of physical, social and emotional growth that involves the intensification of everyday engagement within the relationships most central to producing and reproducing life and culture. Though adolescence has achieved recognition as an important stage in the human life-cycle, several cross-cultural studies have demonstrated that this transitional stage does not exist universally and it may be a feature only of complex societies which are ‘so complicated and differentiated that each individual’s social role and function takes years to define and learn’ (Friedenberg 1973: 110 cited in Montgomery 2009: 202). Morever, as it has been noted in most recent overviews of adolescence studies across cultures by Lancy (2008) and Montgomery (2009), the stage of adolescence is not recognized in all societies, and the meanings and experiences of adolescence may differ greatly across cultures. This is why this transitional stage requires contextual unpacking and not solely relying on the chronological distinction between ages based on Eurocentric understanding of child development. In this regard, among Eveny the stage of adolescence is neither rigidly marked nor entirely unmarked from childhood (kungarapu in Eveny).

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However, it is distinguished from childhood by the end of play, and by recognition of a growing person’s achievement of a productive (hunting and reindeer herding) and reproductive capacity (puberty) and, as I have pointed out above, is manifested in acquisition of the ‘closed body’, i.e., the end of the precariousness of the ‘open body’ period. Moreover, the ‘closed body’ also points to attainment of djuluchen, which acts as a partible component of the solidified personhood. There are no initiation rituals that mark the stage of adolescence as it has been observed in other cultures (Lancy 2008: 294–8), but developmentally ‘coming of age’ might be viewed as ‘coming of djuluchen’. Furthermore, one of the main features of early adolescence (around the age of fourteen) has been a riding reindeer trained independently by an adolescent boy or a girl. In the course of the discussion I shall show that adolescents who grew up in the forest view their own movement from one stage to another in terms of progress in acquiring techniques for growing up expressed through the idioms of learning and teaching, giving and sharing, moving between spaces of the forest and the village, separating and uniting with parents. From their perspective, the relationship between humans and reindeer, which starts from the child’s early relationships with guardian reindeer (khaevek), proceeds into the early adolescent’s attachment to his or her riding reindeer (uchak) and then moves into a particular relationship between the adolescent and reindeer in which reindeer possess magnetizing power that may draw him or her back with centripetal force at any time. And it is this central position of the reindeer that will be reflected in the future autobiographies of those adolescents who were socialized in the forest. In relation to its linguistic marking, the transition from boyhood to manhood and girlhood to womanhood is expressed by a pronoun ikhurin/ ikhuchae which in literal translation means ‘the one who physically grew up’ and unambiguously points to young Eveny’s transition into the reproductive age. Gender-wise, the end of girlhood and transition into young womanhood would be marked by such signs of a girl’s readiness for marriage as a first sewn bag and winter clothes made of reindeer fur and skin. Completion of boyhood is often marked by both physical growth and ability to hunt independently, which is viewed as an indication of a young person’s ‘closed body’. Moreover, among Eveny adolescence as a distinct developmental stage is characterized not only by ‘closed body’ and ‘djuluchen’ but also by physiological and psychological transitions associated with hormonal change and physical growth. One of the means by which Eveny are still socially intervening in adolescents’ successful transition into adulthood is diverting the emotional intensity of adolescents from the inter-human relations of a human encampment to human–animal relations established in the

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course of hunting. When their bodies have reached the stage of ‘closure’, adolescents become more actively involved in hunting practices and are encouraged to do so on their own. Eveny also recognize that late adolescence is closely associated with the heightened likelihood of risk-taking and they often take advantage of this risky behaviour by channelling it into productive hunting activity. So in the Eveny community adolescence, especially among boys, has been marked as the time of intensification of both human–animal relationships and male–female relationships. These typically take place later in a boy’s life at fifteen or sixteen, at a time when young men may begin more urgently to desire heterosexual partnerships. Sending boys out into the forest during this time has been aimed at redirecting their focus from exercising their libidos to establishing productive human–animal relationships. In this regard Rane Willerslev, who has done research among a neighbouring group of Upper Kolyma Yukagir, relevantly observes that Yukagir hunters view the act of hunting as a ‘love affair’ and that hunters ‘seek to induce in the animal master-spirits an illusion of a lustful play’ (2007: 48). The sexual idiom of ‘love affair’ is also at work among local Eveny as they intentionally redirect young people’s attention from the opposite sex to hunting animals and view the practice of hunting as some soothing mechanism by means of which adolescents’ emotional intensity and risk-taking associated with hormonal change are channelled into their contact with the animal spirit world. So in a reindeer herding camp the activities which involve human– animal relationships such as hunting and reindeer herding often serve to manage risky behaviour and intense emotions within the human collective by transferring their intensity to hunted animals. Then, it becomes obvious why social relations in the village take on a different mode as the relations between humans and animals are replaced mostly by interhuman relationships. Hence the only social channel for adolescents’ risky endeavours becomes involvement in interpersonal conflicts, alcohol abuse and violence, which are widespread among not only boys but also girls as they progress from adolescence into young adulthood. Over the last few decades, adolescence in the Eveny community has shifted from a marked period of rapid physical, social and psychological change occurring mostly in a context of certain ecological and economic conditions of a reindeer herding camp in the forest to a new, stationary context of the village. Similar processes have been analysed by Richard Condon (1988, 1990) who referred to the ‘rise of adolescence’ in the Arctic as a direct outcome of the imposed settlement of Canadian Inuit. He argued that the settlement of Inuit in the Canadian Arctic had disrupted traditional patterns of life-stage management and created the ‘aspirational dilemmas’ and adjustment problems faced by young people who can no

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longer look to members of the parental generation for appropriate role models (Condon 1990: 267). In Siberia, rapid and externally imposed social change was associated, first of all, with the introduction of residential schooling, which had a dramatic effect on experiences of native childhood and adolescence in the Russian North throughout the last seventy years of the twentieth century (Slezkine 1994; Rethman 2001; Anderson 2000; Vitebsky 2005: 186– 92). The experience and process of growing up have drastically changed as a result of new spatial arrangements induced by Soviet educational policies and discourses on childhood which were substantially shaped by Soviet ideology that put special emphasis on institutionalized childhood and the child as a property of the state (Ssorin-Chaikov 2003; Khlinovskaya Rockhill 2010). As a result, the intimate space of family camp in the forest where all Eveny children and adolescents grew up was replaced by a harsh and distant boarding school located in the village, which was viewed by the Soviet authorities as the only venue designed for social engineering and the making of Soviet citizens (Kharkhordin 1999). The internat or boarding school has been, and in some regions still is, a permanent element of all reindeer herder communities since the 1940s. It served as a site for stationary residence and school training for children and adolescents separated from their parents, who had to stay in the forest and look after reindeer herds that were also turned into the property of a state farm. From the early 1930s the boarding or residential schools in indigenous Siberian societies were a part of the project of acculturation whose ultimate goal was to transform people into citizens of Soviet society. Bloch writes, ‘it was thought that ultimately an educated cadre of indigenous leaders and professionals, such as doctors and teachers, would assist indigenous Siberians in moving quickly through the stages of feudalism and capitalism, directly into socialism’ (1996: 72). The long period of boarding school education has produced the situation where parents’ reliance on institutional support has become inevitable. Families of reindeer herders were obliged to hand over their children for a compulsory ten years of schooling when children reached the age of seven. Children of reindeer herders used to stay in school dormitories or boarding school away from their families, under the control of teachers and tutors from outside the community. In the village of Topolinoye, before the internat was closed in the early 1990s, children whose parents were working in the forest stayed there throughout the whole period of their schooling. During the summer, the state farm usually provided a helicopter or other transport that brought the children back to their parents in the camp for the summer vacation. In the post-perestroika period the local boarding school was closed, owing to the lack of financial support by the state which had maintained its

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existence and functioning. So, nowadays, there are a couple of generations of local Eveny who spent their childhood and adolescence in the internat and a younger generation who never stayed in a boarding school but were still separated from their parents in the forest. In her study of Siberian Evenki, Bloch argues that ‘in the context of post-Soviet society, the residential school represents both a Soviet institution which played a key role in erasing and recreating Evenki traditions, and a contemporary institution through which Evenki leaders see potential for re-imagining community and solidifying political clout’ (Bloch 2004: 147). That is to say, the boarding school serves as a common symbolic capital and as a historical site for emerging concepts of kinship and Evenki identities. In relation to this, my material shows that the boarding school has indeed been vital in providing children with their everyday needs such as food, clothes and institutional care, while in the village nowadays its absence has triggered a situation in which children sometimes stay on their own, without food or any kind of control from adults. At the same time, in the situation when economic capital for members of the reindeer herders’ family in most cases comes from the forest or the land, young Eveny draw from other social and symbolic resources which signify the sense of belonging other than the boarding school. Moreover, though this shift has had significant implications for Eveny traditional socialization practices, especially affecting the important domain of a child’s social and emotional wellbeing, human–animal relations have still retained their centrality for the Eveny concept of personhood. And, as we shall see in the course of my discussion, such ideologically important practices as sharing, seasonal movements, marriage and kinship patterns, as well as the nomadic concept of djuluchen, have remained important, though the circumstances for their implementation have changed.

Chapter 3

Forest and Village

Forest and village in local cosmologies of movement As I have noted above, the children’s stories repeatedly emphasize three social settings and three kinds of spaces around which young Eveny’s lifetrajectories and their potential life-destinations revolve: the forest (i.e., living in nomadic reindeer herding camps), the village and the city. These three spaces are also reflected in the cosmology of future life-stories narrated by children and are continually reproduced in personal accounts of all generations of local Eveny. All three spaces of forest, village and city are mapped along the lifetrajectory of a local person. In the life-story of a narrator one may identify his or her movements from one space to another. The direction in the sequence of movements within the given triangle varies. For example, the trajectory of a person’s movements narrated in the story might start in the space of the forest and its route would go via the space of the village and finally reach the city. In the case of another local person, the route might start at the village and the final destination might be the city, with the forest as an interlude in between. This pattern of movement between three spaces is also reproduced in the future autobiographies. I view the following essay written by an adolescent boy who comes from a reindeer herding family as the most eloquent illustration of such a pattern as it captures succinctly the local sense of movement: I am thirteen years old. When I finish school I shall go to the city to study, then I shall come back to the village to help my parents. After I have helped my parents I shall move back to the city. Then, I shall move to our reindeer herding camp [in the forest] and will work as a reindeer herder there. I shall work for some time there. Then, I shall leave for the village and will stay in the village, then I shall leave for the city. Then, I’ll buy a house and live with my children; I’ll teach them how to

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speak the Even language. In the future I want to change old buildings into new buildings so that the life is better here.

As the essay shows, movement and travel between three spaces has always been and will be important for all generations of local Eveny. It is evident that this adolescent boy cannot imagine himself as not moving in the future. He narrates a range of his future movements and lists them in terms of coming and going, in and out of each space, without locating clearly his future destination. He concludes his movement story with the purchase of a house where he will stay with his children and finalizes his narrative with the wish for a change, i.e., new buildings in the village. This open-ended finale does not noticeably indicate where in the future he will live and get settled; it is not clear whether it is going to be the city, the village or the forest. His sense of movement follows a cyclical trajectory without a culminating point of destination. This prominent feature deserves special attention and I shall discuss it in my final chapter. Another important element of the narrated futures, which reflects local patterns of spatial orientation, is the spaces where young narrators envision themselves living in the future. Strikingly, these visions of their future spatial destinations correspond to the space of a young narrator’s origin, i.e., the village or the forest. Those who grew up in the forest tend to finalize their journey with a return to their own family and reindeer herd in the forest. The ones who were brought up in the village would speak about founding their new families in a new space (in the city, in some sort of unknown town outside of Russia) outside the native village. Since forest and village appear as two spaces for children’s and adolescents’ possible destinations in the future, I shall reflect on them in terms of the notion of return which encapsulates not only a person’s return to the community after some time of absence but also local practices of sharing, seasonal movements of the reindeer herding unit and culturally embedded local categories of person that intertwine concepts of agency, time and space. In this chapter I would like to present the ethnography of the two significant spaces – forest and village – within the cosmological triangle established above, in order to provide the reader with local perspectives on the spaces of forest and village derived from my own observations of both spaces, and also as they are featured and reflected upon by young and older Eveny in their oral accounts. I do not take into detailed consideration the space of the city. As I have emphasized in Chapter 1, the city of Yakutsk features mainly as a fantasy. It is perceived as a place where few Eveny go and where they feel vulnerable to the violence of strangers from other ethnic groups. Young men may get attacked on the street and killed by gangs of criminals; girls staying at hostels are exposed to break-ins, robbery and rape.

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The social world of the forest In Topolinoye the forest is associated with the working and productive space of local reindeer herders, hunters and their families. The forest covers numerous reindeer pastures, territories of wild animals such as elk, snow ram, bear, lynx and wolf, and endless mountain meadows, rivers, rocks, valleys, springs between high mountain passes and a large territory of Siberian boreal forest or taiga. Officially, this large territory was allocated by the Soviet authorities to the former state farm ‘Tomponsky’ which was re-formed in the mid1990s into a new economic unit called an obschina with the name ‘SPK Tompo’. The territory of the obschina today has reindeer herders’ brigades and their herds, with grazing pastures extending in three directions from Topolinoye: Adycha (north), Barai (south) and Suntari (west). The named three areas are not only geographical areas; they are also associated with places of origin of local Eveny. Each territory, whether Barai, Adycha or Suntari, is referred to as the particular locality to which one’s idea of motherland is attached. This space, to which locals refer in the Eveny language as domngae or forest, is very much related to a local herder’s idea of what it is to be a ‘true reindeer herder’. One must possess sophisticated knowledge of reindeer and the landscape, which includes awareness of the location of pastures and hunting grounds in the particular area from which the herder comes. For example, Semien, a reindeer herder in his forties, told me that his homeland is the whole territory of Adycha, around which his family, his parents and their reindeer herds were moving when he was a child. That is to say, his idea of a native land is related to this particular area rather than to the official area of Topolinoye as a whole. In the same vein fifteenyear-old Tonya would explain to me that when ‘she thinks of motherland she thinks of Barai, its mountains and rivers’. Thus, these areas and their names participate in a local construction of personhood and serve as a means within a narrative that allows one to negotiate one’s sense of belonging through a relation to a certain area of a given landscape. As we shall see later, they also inform young and older Eveny’s experiences of the space of the village. In this section I shall give a picture of regular forest life and begin to show how forest children are socialized into its values and into a cyclical sense of time and space associated with reindeer herding movement practices (a theme which later chapters will show also influences their own personal narrative). The forest economy relies on two types of subsistence activities: reindeer herding and hunting. So each of three aforementioned territories serves as both hunting areas and pastures for grazing reindeer herds.

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Hunting continues during all seasons but becomes more frequent during the summer, when an important labour force, i.e., children, arrives giving men more time to spend on hunting. Throughout the year, hunting game such as wild reindeer, snow rams and elk serves as one of the main sources for people’s everyday meat supplies in the forest. Each brigade of reindeer herders moves around and shares one of these huge territories with three or four other brigades. Normally, each brigade has a permanent winter base – baza – within the territory to which it is attached. So throughout the year brigades of reindeer herders follow the route of seasonal pastures along which they make stopovers and set up temporary camps at places that are flat and dry near a river. They may change the location of their temporary camps from year to year but generally they are situated along the same route (see also Vitebsky 2005). A brigade may consist of two or three nuclear families, with a few bachelors and unmarried young women, though this varies from brigade to brigade. Within a camp, tents are situated at a certain distance from each other, and the entrance of each tent faces the herd, so that from a tent herders can see what is going on with reindeer, how they behave and how they are grazing. The tent consists of several parts, which are not specifically gendered. Maengal’ or chongol is on the left of the tent where the oven and all the crockery are located. This is the place where women do their cooking all day. The part on the right, called niarilngi, is the place where adults and children rest after their night or day shifts. Usually, each family has its own tent; married couples with children stay separately. Bachelors may stay in other tents but the focal place of any reindeer herder camp is a brigadier’s family tent where people have a shared meal served by women and children. Reindeer in a herd know their territory and tend to graze within that territory, coming back to the camp several times a day to lick salt. All of them are marked with an earmark, which is called ilkae’n. It is an official mark by which herders may claim ownership and affiliation of a reindeer with a certain brigade and an area. Occasionally, reindeer may escape and join the herd of another brigade. But it happens rarely, and usually they come back to the original herd. What I find remarkable is that the forest children envision themselves coming back to their family camp in the forest just like reindeer return to the herd after some time of absence (see Chapter 7). Duties in a camp are varied between men and women. Women are responsible for cooking, sewing clothes, keeping the tent in order, chopping wood and providing the camp with water. In the forest women usually take care of their younger children who have not yet reached school age, whereas their older children attend school in the village.1

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Men’s duties are to search for reindeer, hunt and look after the herd. Although it depends on the gender of a brigade’s members, there are no strict boundaries for conducting duties in a camp. Men may be involved in cooking while women keep watch over a herd when it is around a camp. Some young women may perform the job of herding, but they are no longer involved in this activity after marriage and birth of their own children. In the forest, women’s main responsibility is to provide each member of a brigade with fur clothes before winter. If a woman is married, she tends to produce the first kit for her husband, so women’s sewing skills are highly valued and viewed as one of the advantages of a male reindeer herder’s marriage (cf. Rethmann 2001: 133–54). When all the clothes are ready, some women whose health does not allow them to stay over winter in the taiga leave for the village to look after children who go to school. I pay special attention to the issue of gender in Chapters 4 and 5. Forest life revolves around the regime of seasonal migration adapted to the highly mobile mode of domestic reindeer movement. The reindeer herding unit, consisting of several families, moves together with its reindeer herd along the seasonal route of pastures, moving gradually from summer territories to autumn grazing areas, and then from winter pastures into spring mountain meadows. This continues along the same cyclical trajectory from year to year until it becomes necessary to change the route in order to sustain the growth of lichen and protect reindeer from a shortage of vegetation. At this point the unit moves to a new route and changes pastures. I suggest that this persistently dynamic mode of engagement with the landscape, which implies a high level of adaptability to movement, changes of locality and spatial and social reconfigurations with people coming and going, has profound implications for the shaping of forest children’s views of the future. The future life-story written by a thirteen-year-old Eveny boy and given above is a clear illustration of this mode of mobility. Thus, reindeer herders’ practices of movement should be seen as productive in a double sense, i.e., in terms of subsistence productivity and in relation to the socializing component of movement which contributes to the proliferation of nomadic ontology with movement as its constant. Another highly important feature of forest socialization is dealing with predatory animals. All year round, herders protect reindeer from various predators, which are constantly nearby. In camp they often become the main theme for discussion and story-telling. Listening to adult stories and observing the animals themselves, children learn the types of predators, which vary from season to season, their habits, lines of attack and perspective. In one of my conversations with a sixteen-year-old forest boy I was impressed by his detailed account of a wolf hunt. According to him, all year round, wolves tend to target reindeer calves and affect the number

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of reindeer in a herd significantly, but in order to kill a wolf one needs to know how to outwit it, as it is an extremely intelligent and cunning animal. His evocative story went as follows: Once my uncle Arkady and me went for a night shift and we noticed footprints of two wolves running around our herd. Reindeer also got anxious. My uncle decided to run after one wolf and I followed the footprints of another. Arkady got the wolf at the moment when it was playing with a reindeer calf which it had just caught. He made one shot which reached the wolf but did not kill it, and it started running away from us. We were about to catch up with it but suddenly lost sight of it. It actually hid right behind a tree. The wolf stood up on its hind legs and stretched its body along the tree while leaning against it. It was literally invisible behind the tree. Arkady shot it again and it again escaped from us. We reached a small water stream and were looking around when suddenly the wolf appeared by jumping out of water. It went under water but we were standing for too long so it went short of air. My uncle made another shot and injured its front leg but the wolf grabbed its injured leg in its jaws and kept on running. We only reached it on a mountain where we could target it properly and it was eventually shot. On the top of a mountain we found its den, and from that den we saw how that wolf was observing us every single day. It could see everything from that point, where one goes, what one is doing and in which direction our reindeer left, like in a TV show. This is how smart that wolf was!

This account of a wolf hunt reproduced by an adolescent boy is illustrative of the practices which allow one to acquire faculties and capacities essential for maintaining the safety of a reindeer herd and one’s own safety, as reindeer herders also become the object of wolves’ attacks. One of these is learning to move between one’s own perspective and the perspective of one’s prey; as we could observe from this account, both hunter and predator always stay alert and intuitively aware of each other’s intentions (see also Grasseni 2004; Willerslev 2004, 2007). Our young hunter and his uncle have quickly learnt the individual character of the wolf, which has turned out to be highly agile and also aware of its opponents’ visions and intentions, demonstrating its awareness through the mimicry of a human being’s body and even its attempt to imitate the shape of the tree by standing in line with it. In her account of Inuit child socialization Jean L. Briggs brilliantly shows how Inuit children are playfully socialized to move between points of view in order engender both social self-awareness and interest in hunting. The intention of the game launched by parents is to allow a child to see itself from the viewpoints of a child’s observers, including an anthropologist. The child learns to play with movement between points of view and this in adulthood turns into an asset for a person’s dealing with both human’s and animals’ behaviour (1998: 50–58, 107–8). The account of the Eveny boy in late adolescence shows similar techniques of socializa-

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tion. However, the main difference lies, of course, in a developmental stage of Eveny late adolescence marked by the absence of play and involvement in the actual practice through which one learns the mastery of moving between perspectives. It is the boy’s participation in a hunt that allows him to observe and learn about a predator’s capacity to read its chaser’s intentions and manoeuvre its course of actions accordingly. The most important season for all reindeer herders is spring. It is the time when children reunite with their parents, arriving in their family camp for their school break. Spring is also marked by the appearance of reindeer calves or tugaesaedek. It is the busiest period for all members of a reindeer herding unit as they have to maintain the wellbeing and safety of every cow and calf. From the area where tugaesaedek has taken place, a brigade slowly moves towards autumn pastures. This trip lasts for three months, with temporary stopovers on the route. While participating in reindeer herding and observing adults’ ways of taking care of and treating reindeer, children also learn the spiritual side of social life in the forest. They not only observe adults performing small rituals for the purpose of keeping their reindeer safe and fertile, but also conduct them themselves. I would like to emphasize that if children ask their parents or senior members of the brigade about the meaning of a certain ritual they are presented with a clear explanation and are sometimes even given a full account of what the ritual is for. I would like to recall one fieldwork episode which I observed in a reindeer herders’ camp. The children had not arrived yet, and the person who was asking the questions about the meaning and purposes of conducting a ritual was myself. Late April is the time when all camps are about to move to the area where tugaesaeaek takes place. At this time of year everyone in a camp knows each heavily pregnant reindeer cow and is concerned over these cows’ safety. One early afternoon, a middle-aged herder, Laempede, decided to lasso a reindeer which he thought was unfertile and slaughter it to supply the camp with meat for the next two weeks. With two other herders, Timka and Valerka, helping him to dismember the carcass, my job was to put the fresh meat into bags. Suddenly Laempede exclaimed: ‘I did not know it was pregnant!’ Pronouncing this with a deep sigh, he carefully took out of the carcass a small bag, which was still steaming and warm, containing the unborn calf, and with an expression of care and respect he hung it carefully on a large tree not far from where the slaughter had taken place. It turned out that the cow which had just been slaughtered had actually conceived, but the time of conception was unusually late, and hence the calf was doomed to die on the day of its birth, in freezing November weather. When I asked what he was doing, he replied as follows:

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This is headjek. We need to hang it on that prominent larch … It is for the spirit of our herd! I do it because my uncle did this every time we had a pregnant cow whose calf was expected to be born too late, let’s say, late autumn. This calf is usually destined to die because its fur doesn’t have enough time to grow and protect it from a severe winter. In general, these kinds of calves are weak and die soon. No one usually intends to slaughter a pregnant cow but if it happens by mistake or of necessity, the one who conducts the slaughter and finds that the slaughtered cow was pregnant must take the bag containing the unborn calf out of the womb and hang it on a big and prominent tree which stands out from the bushes and other trees. Then, he must put smoking grass under it. The spirit needs to be fed by this smoke.

According to Laempede, one has to take care of the headjek (the bag with the unborn reindeer calf), which must be hung on the highest point of a tall tree next to a herders’ camp pasture. The headjek is believed to be the spirit of a herd, which needs to be regularly smoked by a fire made of specific wood, lichen and grass taken from a special area. Following Laempede’s account, I view the headjek as people’s perception of tactful morality which underlies their relations not only with reindeer but with all the animal world. It is also part and parcel of their contract with Bayanay (Master of the Forest). In his discussion of Bayanay among the Eveny of Sebyan Vitebsky rightly puts it thus: ‘I came to understand Bayanay as a vast field of shared consciousness which encompassed the landscape as setting, as well as all the human and animal roles in the drama of stalking, killing, and consuming’ (2005: 268). The perception of Bayanay and knowledge of small rituals which honour and please the animals is acquired by children through this kind of explanation from adults. As one can see, if it was his child asking the same question I asked, Laempede would have explained in similar manner as he did for me. Moreover, this kind of sensitivity and attunement to the animal spirits and Bayanay will be of central importance for our understanding of the issue of addressivity in the future autobiographies of Eveny children and adolescents in our final discussion. Summer is the most productive season as children assist actively in all adults’ activities. Girls assist the women in their tent-keeping duties. This allows mature women to have more time for getting men’s winter clothes prepared by the end of autumn. Overall, children’s participation in the forest daily life is of great importance for their parents and also for other members of a brigade. Local Eveny recognition of the child’s agency has received a special expression in the belief that a child brings luck to a hunter if it is a child’s first hunting trip. This season is crucial for the formation of a ‘forest child’ as most learning activities take place during this time. Now I wish to return to my argument on the Eveny concept of ‘open body’, as my further discussion revolves around the ethnography of the first hunting trip from the point of view of a girl in her early adolescence. As I

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have shown in Chapter 2, a child participating in an adult’s hunt is understood to have an ‘open body’ as at this stage a child, regardless of gender, is favoured by Bayanay. A child’s assistance in a hunt, or more specifically his or her ‘open body’, serves as a bait for animal spirits and brings luck to an adult hunter in the form of hunted game. The most eloquent sign of Bayanay’s favouritism is expressed in big game such as wild reindeer, snow ram or elk. A child as ‘open body’ participates in hunting trips as an assistant until the stage of physical maturity, i.e., the stage of ‘closed body’ when the child grows into a mature hunter. As girls turn into young women by approximately eighteen to nineteen, they do not hunt as actively as in their youth, because, first, most of them get married and have their own children and, second, their bodies get ‘closed’. So if they stay in the forest at all they become attached mostly to the domestic space of a camp. The duty of those who have already become mature hunters is to involve younger cousins, brothers and sisters as, so to speak, ‘open bodies’. Later in the course of their lives, their own children become their ‘open bodies’ who learn hunting skills by observing their mature hunting partners in action. In order to show what this process involves I would like to present the story of a sixteen-year-old girl, Anya, who narrates her experience of the first hunt as follows: The most exciting thing for me in the forest is hunting. My father often takes me on his hunting trips. He told me that when I go with him he brings game to the camp. He thinks that I bring him luck. When I get to know about father’s hunting trip I get prepared for it. I always help cook food for our trip, pack our bags with food and other necessities. When I am leaving for a hunt I feel very happy. We usually leave in the morning and come back in the evening. One of the most memorable hunts happened to me when it was early August, the time of blueberries. I remember it because it was my first hunting trip. Before the trip my father instructed me that I should not be loud … he said: No shouting! No berries! No lagging behind or dawdling! We did not take a dog with us … he was hunting without a dog. My role was to take care of our uchak (riding reindeer) while he was hunting. The scariest thing for me was to stay alone with the reindeer and to wait for father. That time I could not get rid of the idea that a bear could be nearby … I wanted to shout loud to call for my father. But I knew that at this kind of moment I needed to control myself, keep silent and wait. Mountain or snow rams are hunted in rocks and high mountains. We usually go to the place where a river runs through the area of high rocks. This type of place with rivers means that rams might be around. We rode our uchaks to the high mountains area and reached the top of one mountain …While father was looking through the binoculars I found that there were lots of blueberries and started eating them. Then, suddenly father stopped me and said that he saw snow rams. Before this time I never saw those animals and when I

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looked through his binoculars I was amazed by their look. They were beautiful … stunning! They were standing on the opposite mountain. I asked father what they were doing there and he answered: They are grazing. I asked again: How do they graze? Does anyone herd them? (Does anyone find pastures for them?) My father said: Stop asking questions. Ask questions another time. Stay still and do not make a noise! I started looking through the binoculars and still wondered who could herd those animals who looked like our reindeer. I was looking for their herder. Father told me that the rams were busy licking salt … you know that mountains have got mineral rocks which contain salt, they are called sollonzi … so rams came over to lick salt from them … I did not know about it at that time. That is why when dad told me that they were licking salt I wondered who put salt for the rams. Who could it be? Dad did not have time to answer my questions, told me to hold our reindeer and promptly left in the direction of the opposite mountain where the rams were. He instructed me to keep silent. After a few moments I heard my father shoot his rifle. At the first minute I could not understand what was going on … my ears started hurting because of that shot … I took the binoculars and saw how rams were running fast from the mountain. And one of the rams remained immovable lying down on stones … father was already there and he was waving me with his hand so that I could come down. That moment I got trapped in ropes on our reindeer and I started crying … I was kind of shocked by everything that had happened few minutes ago. My father gave me a shout to hurry up and it took me a long time to get rid of the ropes and eventually move towards my father. Then, to reach father was hard too, because the path was full of bushes and trees. That is why it was hard to go through. I was glad that we were going to have fresh meat … We took off the skin. I was helping my dad and I asked him: Aren’t you sorry for the ram? It must be the mum of those little calves running away … Poor babies! They must be crying … We made a fire and cooked meat straight after we cut the game into pieces. Father fed the fire by putting small pieces of meat and bread into the fire. While he was feeding it he thanked the fire and spoke to it. I asked him why he was doing this. He explained: If you go hunting and your hunt was successful, the first thing you have to do is to feed the fire and thank the land for your luck … because the land feeds you and gives you hunting so that you won’t get hungry and the next time you go hunting it will bring you luck again … You see that I hunted only one ram. It’s enough for us. We have been without meat and we want to eat … and we can’t slaughter a reindeer from our herd. That is why we went out hunting. He also said that I need to feed the fire every time I arrive at a new place. After his words, I think all his actions made sense for me and I understood him. We had finished our meal. My father was looking through the binoculars again … actually he kept on looking through them all the time. Then, suddenly he said: Look!

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And I saw a herd of rams again, and one of them was the biggest and kind of outstanding. I thought it was a head of the herd … it was looking at us. When I saw it I thought that it was the calves’ father … it seemed to me it was crying. My father said after a while: Yes, we hunted these calves’ mother. You’ll bring it on your uchak. I had no choice and my father put it on the back of my reindeer. We brought it to our camp and people were happy to see that we brought meat back to camp. That day I was upset and told my elder sister, Tania, that I saw how that big ram was crying. Tania asked whether I was sure it was crying and said: I am sure you are getting it wrong … it did not cry, it was happy for you. That was my first hunt. I was twelve years old. After that father took me hunting quite often.

This firsthand account in which a forest child reports her or his own experience of accompanying her father in his hunting trip is an eloquent illustration of a child’s point of view on the occasion of the first hunt. Owing to Anya’s detailed reproduction of the event, we are able to observe the stage at which she steps into direct involvement with the animal spirits’ world through her ‘open body’, about which noticeably she is not aware yet. She is ceaselessly asking her father about the meaning of animals’ behaviour unfamiliar to her and their strange appearance. She is emotionally overwhelmed by her new experience, she continually searches for clues about what has happened to her, throughout the entire account. Anya’s personal recollections of the first hunt beautifully capture a child’s curiosity, her sense of discovery and astonishment, and also her amusement at herself when she had so many bothering questions. What I find worth noting is that although her father demands from her silence and soundless movement through the bush, at the end of the hunt he still gives her detailed explanations which make it clear why he was demanding quietness from her. Given that reticence is one of the prominent features of the Eveny (Wolfe 1997; Vitebsky and Wolfe 2001), his frequent demand that his daughter keep silent and his later explanation confirm that reticence is also learnt and acquired in the process of socialization. So reticence remains a significant component of the forest type of sensitivity, which involves cautiousness towards spelling out some unnecessary words, speech taboos and sounds which may disturb harmful spirits of the unquiet dead and thus attract their maliciousness towards a human encampment (see also Vitebsky 2005). Here it is important to understand that in the process of social engagement children are gradually socialized into less vocal and more reticent individuals in order to sustain the vital subsistence activity of hunting, which engages a person in direct contact with animal spirits that requires patience, endurance and several

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days or even weeks of silent solitude. This strategy of staying quiet but alert later develops into a non-vocal and more reticent habit of communication with emphasis on gestures, facial expressions and attitudes. Hence, all the subsistence practices in which children and adolescents are involved have potent effects as they learn viscerally and, as Briggs succinctly puts it, ‘they come to be aware of themselves as actors on the social stage, what it means to observe and be observed, act and to be acted upon’ (1998: 137, my italics). An episode where a father treats hunted game by observing small rituals is an expression of appreciation of Bayanay’s, the Master of the Forest’s, gift. It illustrates the centrality of Bayanay in the social world of the forest and the necessity for a child to understand this. As I have mentioned above, in this world hunting game is part and parcel of a person’s social contract with Bayanay (cf. Durkheim 2001 [1912]: 153–82), who either favours or punishes a hunter. That is why Anya’s father follows every step in order to please Bayanay and ensure that the next hunting trip is as successful. First, he dismembers the carcass accurately into pieces, avoiding leaving even a small scrap without purpose. The timing for this job is very important, since it is believed that the faster it is done the better the chance of avoiding any sort of misfortune inflicted by the spiritual entity of a killed animal. That is why the skill to dismember a carcass quickly is of great significance and is much valued by reindeer herders and hunters, as it shows respect for Bayanay’s gift and diminishes the chances of receiving a retaliatory attack from a killed animal. In addition, hunted game ought to be consumed by humans and distributed within the camp promptly as an expression of a real need of humans for food. Appropriately, Anya’s father gives the first portion to the fire, a focal point through which a human may communicate with the Master, as a sign of appreciation and gratitude. Anya’s story reproduces all the actions performed by her father in the correct order and with the precision of an expert. Her father’s performance of small rituals is extremely important here, as this is the way he is enforcing observance of essential rules upon his children. By doing so, he also shows Anya his own commitment to the rules of treating respectfully both the hunted animal and the spirit of the land – Bayanay – who sent him the gift. In this sense, Anya’s father shows the example of what Maurice Bloch calls ‘conscious deference’, i.e., all that is prescribed in the ritual should be followed with trust and humility (2005: 135). All of the details mentioned by Anya are observed in order to outwit an angry animal spirit by performing certain tricks necessary in these cases. The spirit of a hunted snow ram may direct his anger towards a hunter who breached the prohibition on hunting a female snow ewe with her calves. By putting the hunted game on his daughter’s riding reindeer, the father intended to put his daughter in his stead as her body is still ‘open’

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and thus cannot receive punishment from the spirit of a killed animal. This strategic replacement turns the act of killing an animal into the animal’s self-sacrifice for the sake of a child. If she is still attacked by an animal spirit Anya’s riding reindeer will serve as her substitute because it is viewed as an extension of her personhood in the animal spirits’ world (see Willerslev and Ulturgasheva for detailed discussion, 2012: 84–119). This is a very important point for my further discussion, as a reindeer seen as the extension of a child’s personhood is an element from one conceptual set of a child’s relations to a reindeer, i.e., metonymic (see Chapter 5). This trick performed by Anya’s father assumes a belief that an animal spirit does not punish or send misfortune to children whose bodies are viewed as ‘open’. According to this logic, he puts the hunted game on his daughter’s riding reindeer instead of putting it on his own uchak, because by virtue of her being a child and a novice she is not meant to receive its retaliatory attack. This particular action ensures that a child will deliver the game to the human camp without any unfortunate happenings. This story told by Anya is also an articulate expression of the mode of interaction between a parent and a child and the concept of learning through joint involvement and equal partnership in the forest. It shows what position a child holds in the social space of the forest. A parent views a child as an agent and significant actor who affects the outcome of the hunt and brings luck to a hunter. That is to say, a child brings luck to an adult or parent in the forest and therefore a child appears to be perceived as a valuable and important participant in people’s activities in the forest. This pattern of children’s socialization will also be reflected in Chapter 5 and will receive detailed consideration, particularly in relation to their future life stories. The details of reindeer herders and their families in the forest which I have presented here are important for understanding those children who grew up in the forest and their stories about their own future, particularly the stories of Tonya and Kirill (Chapters 4 and 5).

The village: social context today Now I would like to move to the space of the village and illustrate ethnographically how this is perceived by younger and older generations of local Eveny. First, I shall explore why the village is associated with an accursed locality, and then I shall discuss what implications the village has as a social setting for young Eveny’s perceptions of themselves and the future. While I was in the village I would hear various kinds of comments in which people discussed the current situation, referring to the community’s isolation from the outside world and the impoverishment of local people due to the recent overall economic collapse (Rethman 2001; Kert-

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tula 2000). I find this short excerpt from my conversation with a middleaged local lady, where she expresses her perception of what is going on in the village, to be an eloquent testimony of local sense of place: There is a feeling that we have been disdained and left on our own. Nobody cares anymore about those who are so far away … Life here is very hard and what force protects us? Our ancestors’ spirits? … No one knows. People are getting rotten in this place because this place is cursed.

Her reference to an accursed and ‘rotten’ place is not accidental as it literally stems from the legacy of the GULAG, and specifically from the fact that Topolinoye was constructed on the territory of a former concentration camp, where prisoners were incarcerated until death (see Chapter 6). The idea of ‘on being disdained and left on our own’ expressed by the middle-aged woman above is not incidental, as in my childhood most elderly people perceived the place on which the village was built as wrong, and bad for living humans’ settlement. I understand that the sense of social and economic desolation and of poverty among locals have not only drastically deteriorated – ‘rotted’ – social relations among the village population but also exacerbated the sense of curse and malevolence of the space. This now extends to all spheres of village life, including village youths who are confronted with the situation where the village offers hardly anything in terms of employment. They are unable to earn salaries, subsist and support their families. One of the unemployed village girls, Vera, described her understanding of being young in the village as follows: To be a young person in the village is hard because you want to do something to make a start, for example to get your own salary or get a job where you can feel that you are needed. That is why it is better to try the city, where there are more jobs where you don’t need to be qualified.

Vera is right in stating that there is hardly anything to do in the village and this is the main reason for youth unemployment. This is why most of my informants, who were about to graduate from school that year, expressed their wish to leave the village in search of employment in other places. Within the village, young people who are unable to leave, either for the forest to work as a reindeer herder or to the city to study or settle there, can be viewed as holding the most precarious position within the community. Quite often it is alcohol abuse and despair expressed in violence towards themselves and others that become the only outlet for frustration (Pika 1993; Bogoyavlensky 1997). These processes have been reflected in reports on the situation in the Russian North and particularly on the Eveny of Sebyan (Vitebsky 2000, 2005). Vitebsky writes, ‘indigenous minorities who live in the remot-

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est settlements of all, suffer from rural frustration without the outlet of migration. Even though their villages are the most depressed of all, their young people do not seem to have the confidence to migrate’ (Vitebsky 2000: 34); and ‘the establishment of the village (which is generally coterminous with the state) amounted to a contract in which the state offered infrastructure and management in exchange for the production of animals. Now the state is no longer able to fulfil its own part of the bargain, the indigenous people are left with little support or purpose’ (Vitebsky 2000: 35). Sharing the same destiny, the Eveny of Topolinoye have been stranded in this settlement without income, transport, electricity, decent education, or functioning social and medical care. The sense of social despair has also been expressed profoundly in the increased number of families with parents suffering from alcohol abuse and, as a consequence, larger numbers of neglected children. According to the locals, the 1990s were the hardest years for the village, since people had to cope with total absence of cash and the sudden disappearance of any kind of state support, which had been taken for granted until the mid to late 1980s. The only local shop which functioned properly in the 1980s to early 1990s was closed due to bankruptcy, so that food products or any kinds of supplies could be found only at small private shops run by local Sakha and Russians, who would make larger profits from selling alcohol. During the period of widespread alcohol abuse some children lost their parents as a result of violent death or witnessed their parents’ despair and suffering. The children, particularly the adolescents whose cases and stories I shall be considering in the following chapter, went through the stages of early childhood, childhood and early adolescence during this period.

Complexities of engagement with antagonistic spaces As we have seen, forest and village are viewed as two separate but interlocked settings that constitute one social space within which local people move back and forth, in and out. Often it is reindeer herders and their families who constitute the most mobile part of the population, so their movement between two spaces maintains the connection and engagement of the forest and the village. Apart from reindeer herders, another part of the village population that remains mobile in the course of a year is the group of administrative workers. But this is a different kind of mobility. They travel for their errands to the district centre, Khandyga, or to Yakutsk by their vans or trucks. Changes in the pool of people in the village community are also seasonal and are affected by the availability of transport and condition of the roads. During spring and autumn the roads may remain dangerous for

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several months, creating an absence of cash, a shortage of food products and a lack of fuel. Summer is marked by the absence of a certain group of the local population, when schoolchildren who still have parents in the forest join them in the middle of April and stay there until the beginning of September. When June comes, some village youth leave for the city to enter educational institutions and spend the summer trying to pass entrance exams in Yakutsk. Their parents and older siblings accompany some of them. These young people stay in the city until the beginning of August. The village at this time seems empty and quiet. In autumn children return from the forest to start their schooling and young people who failed to pass their entrance exams come back from the city. Some women who stayed in the forest during summer follow their children back, to stay with them in the village. At this time schoolteachers are coming back from vacation to start their jobs at school. Some of the contractors also return after spending summer holidays with their families far outside of the village. The social life at this time becomes more lively, with Saturday concerts organized by the staff of the local house of culture, local folk groups, evening discos and various communal meetings at the building of the village administration. Village streets are revitalized and filled with the noise of small crowds of children running and playing outside all day long. At the beginning of November the surface of rivers and passes in the mountains becomes solid enough to hold lorries with goods, and so this is the month when the supply of food and other necessities is re-established. At this time the small shops of the few local entrepreneurs can usually offer a relatively good range of products and villagers are able to pay by cash for their shopping. In November and December herders travel on reindeer sledges to the village to collect their salaries. Reindeer caravans and the sounds of jingling bells on reindeer necks are heard everywhere. December and April are the most socially active months, when the festivals of New Year and Reindeer Herders’ Day are celebrated. During these months reindeer herders arrive to present reports on reindeer herding brigades’ production. This is also the time when reindeer herders’ families re-unite and children and their parents can spend several weeks together. When their parents arrive, children often move to their parents’ temporary camps within a few miles of the village, and can spend their winter and spring school breaks with them. Forest children move between their nomadic camp in the forest and the village with their parents and reindeer caravans from an early age, but when the time comes to join village school, which happens at the age of seven, they are obliged to stay in the space of the village throughout

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a school year and can only join their parents during school breaks. This continues until the age of sixteen or seventeen, the final year at school. From my observations, I have learnt that this transition from family setting in the forest to the distant and non-welcoming village at the age of six or seven is perceived by forest children in terms of emotional hardship engendered by sudden separation from their parents and the intimate setting of the family reindeer herding camp. This hard experience of separation from their parents is shared by many generations of local Eveny and I often found that this difficult transition is emotionally charged, with constant longing for parents and a sense of loneliness in the life-stories of both children and parents. I have come across this after my conversations with 47-year-old Eveny mother Shoura, who grew up in a family of reindeer herders, and a subsequent interview with her fourteen-year-old daughter Tamara, who, like her mother, spent her preschool years in a family camp in the forest. This is how Shoura narrated her experience between the late 1960s and early 1970s: When I was a child I was always helping my grandma and all my childhood I was around reindeer. Of course, we moved a lot with our herd and lived in a tent … I had never seen anything like houses, buildings or school before … and when I was brought to the village at the age of six I was so bewildered by the huge difference … everything seemed so shockingly strange to me. I was brought straight to the boarding school. I didn’t speak Russian at all so it was extremely hard to understand what was going on around and no one would explain this to me properly. I remember I tried to explain to people what I wanted using gestures and my supervisors could not understand me as they were all either Russians or Sakha. There was one Russian tutor who had to braid my hair and she did that so painfully as she was annoyed or even disgusted. She was the one who was always giving me a hard time during those years. I was always crying and longing for my grandma and reindeer herd in the forest. It’s been such a hard time for me so I always wanted to escape, run away from there.

As we can see, this transition is dramatic for a six-year-old child, and is associated not only with painful separation from her family and reindeer herd but also with a drastic culture shock, in the sudden switch to a foreign language environment and the experience of being subject to chauvinistic contempt from boarding school teachers. The period between the 1960s and 1970s was a highpoint of the socialist construction era, when the area was crowded by short-term contractors and new settlers who also occupied positions as schoolteachers and administrative workers. Shoura, as for a whole generation of Northern minorities throughout the Russian Far North, was at that time subject to a harsh and often cruel boarding schooling within an artificially imposed settlement (Slezkine 1994; Pika 1999; Bloch 2004; Liarskaya 2004).

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Shoura’s reflections clearly illustrate the stage when a local child enters the institutional world of structural violence, marked by its brutal contrast with the world he or she had got used to in earlier childhood (Farmer 1997). The chain of oppressive institutional practices has continued for the rest of Shoura’s life, as for most of the local community. However, it is worth noting that local young men’s experience of the Russian army, which they are obliged to join like other Russian citizens at the age of eighteen, remains the most severe of all experiences in youth (Bannikov 2002). At present, boarding school no longer exists in the village, but Shoura’s shocking experience of separation from parents and the transition from the forest to the village is still shared by her daughter forty years later. Here is an excerpt from my conversation with her: O.: Do you remember that time when you had to move to the village? Tamara: Yes, it happened so fast … suddenly we were already in the village. It was so sudden I did not realize that we’d already moved to the village. It was so new to me … I was overwhelmed for the first few days. O.: How old were you? Tamara: Five years old. O.: Why was it fast? Tamara: It was different … and the change was too fast. That year mum had health problems so she had to go to Khandyga [a town five hundred kilometres away] and stay in a hospital. Dad had to stay in the forest to look after reindeer. I had to stay with my auntie in the village. I was not happy at all because I always had to go to the kindergarten. I used to run away from there. My life changed a lot and got so different that year from what I was used to in the forest. Also we were all apart. O.: What was especially hard? Tamara: I found the nurses at kindergarten were vile, they would always scream at me and they would always make me feel that what I did was wrong. They wanted me to sleep when I did not want to sleep, they wanted me to eat when I did not want to eat. That is why I wanted to escape all the time. O.: When did you start your schooling? Tamara: I got to six and I had to start schooling. It was 1 September. I had to go to school and I saw all my classmates and there were so many people watching us. The school was crowded. O.: Who helped you to get prepared for that day? Tamara: Nobody, as my parents were in the forest and I went there on my own. But my brothers were there watching me starting at school. Everyone was there with their parents and I was on my own.

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Tamara reproduces a similar dramatic sense of transition which is full of harshness and emotional suffering as in Shoura’s narrative. It seems that although new settlers and those wicked Russian teachers are gone and boarding school does not function anymore, institutional harshness towards children separated from their parents in the forest still continues and is reproduced in similar forms. A child’s constant longing for parents and desire to escape from such institutional treatment evokes a strong sense of imprisonment associated with the space of the village, which bears a direct reference to the location of the former prison, i.e., the GULAG concentration camp. This spatial perception also informs the idealized sense of the forest among forest children and adolescents and, I suggest, contributes to a particular concept of return to their family camp in the forest which is prominent in their future autobiographies. They still view the forest as a space of refuge and redemption from the harshness of the village even in their envisioned futures. Another distinction between the forest and the village made by local people of all generations is related to a sense of agency, since the two spaces are associated with different patterns of fulfilment and frustration. The ability to perform agency in the forest as a hunter and a herder is irrelevant to the space of the village. Hence in the village a reindeer herder is never a fully involved agent and actor, just like the children who have already exercised their own sense of agency while in the forest, as in the forest ethnography I presented above. My forest adolescent informants’ narratives also emphasized that transition from the forest to the village entails not only drastic separation from parents and the family reindeer herd, but also the unlearning of certain skills like personal autonomy and agency that are used while living in the forest. I shall return more thoroughly to this point in Chapters 4 and 5. The wish to be occupied as a reindeer herder in the future is very common among children who grew up in the forest and rare among the village children. Even if a village child expresses a desire to do so, in reality this alternative is not accessible for everyone. Young people do try and work for a while, but few of them manage to get thoroughly involved and enjoy this job, and so most of them drop out. There are several reasons that determine a young person’s choice of being a reindeer herder or not. First of all, in order to be a reindeer herder one needs to have herding skills, which have to be acquired and honed from childhood. Then, in most cases, a brigade of reindeer herders is formed on the basis of kin relations or consanguinity. A younger brother would prefer to join an older relative’s family, or a daughter goes to join her parents in the forest. This relationship may guarantee that elders look after younger consanguines and teach them how to manage a herd of reindeer.

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On the whole, the principle for creating relationships with members of a reindeer herding camp in the forest does not exclude connections other than kin. Friendship, or any kind of social contract which involves a sense of social bond, plays a crucial role from the very beginning of a young person’s placement in a brigade. So prior to arrival in the forest a young man or woman should have some sense of relatedness with other members of this brigade. Though again, affinity can be developed in the course of people’s everyday involvement in herding reindeer. That is why one’s contribution to the work process is central to social life in the forest and it does not have an immutable base derived from consanguinity or biological kinship (see also Bodenhorn 2000). Successful integration takes place when a person is appreciated and valued for reindeer herding skills among herders or labour in a camp among women. If social integration does not go smoothly, a person may choose to join another brigade or leave for the village. The salary of a reindeer herder as well as of a tent-keeper is very low compared to the period before the 1990s. Lack of cash and inability to pay for everyday necessities and support of children who are staying in the village or studying in the city become factors that make some people leave this job. Those who are able to find a job in the village may make this choice. But it is also difficult to find work in the village. To return to the job of a reindeer herder is also a problem. One of my friends who was employed as a reindeer herder for a long time expressed his willingness to come back to the forest. He told me: If I had my own reindeer I would come back at any time and I would never leave this job because I would work for my own sake. But now where I shall go, what brigade to join, there is nothing for me to come back to. I wish I had my own reindeer, at least one or two to start with.2

There is the seemingly trivial but actually essential issue of equipment. Not all the men capable of the job of reindeer herder can afford to have the whole kit, with all the necessary items, which must include reindeer fur and skin clothes suitable for work in a reindeer herding camp. Absence of winter clothes prevents anyone from working properly in the forest during the winter, with an average temperature of –50˚C. It is expensive for a young bachelor to get a working kit, especially when he has nobody to sew the right clothes for him before he starts working in the forest. There is no problem for a young man from a reindeer herder family because his mothers, sisters or aunts make sure he gets one, or if a herder is married then his wife guarantees availability of kit. Moreover, the amount of raw material (reindeer skins) for winter clothes has been scarce in recent years so there is hardly any extra material available for the working

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clothes for those from the village who wish to join a brigade. The local seamstress shop, which used to provide reindeer herding brigades with fur hats, boots, mittens and coats, is about to be closed down because of absence of any profit. Hence, leaving for forest is not an easy option and requires a whole set of social and economic resources in order to fit the forest mode of living. In the local social world everyone explicitly and implicitly participates in this life-long process of sorting out which space to opt for and where one is the most content and happy. Children and adolescents reflect this process as well, and reproduce available discourses on three spaces in their future autobiographies. They either long for the forest (one kind of social space) or aspire to move to the totally new and fresh space of the city (another kind of redemptive space). This issue will be given special consideration in the accounts of two girls in the following chapter. My consequent chapters will also show that in their envisioned futures children want the best of two out of these three worlds. They explicitly choose between the forest as a world of reindeer, spirits of the land and Bayanay; and the city, the modern and cultured world. Clearly they do not want to live in the village, in the middle. The village is actually the focal point in everyone’s life, which even forest children and adult herders visit frequently; yet the sense of social catastrophe, coupled with the legacy of the GULAG curse, give it a cosmologically negative value as a place without hope.

Notes 1. In 2005 there appeared an opportunity for mothers to keep their children who reached the age of seven with them in the forest by teaching children in a camp when the regional Ministry of Education launched a project called Kochevayia shkola or Nomadic School funded by UNESCO. However, in Topolinoye the project is only in its initial stages and those few mothers who agreed to take a role of kocheviye teachers have not been paid for their job, which involves not only giving basic literacy classes but also moving from camp to camp situated within a distance of at least ninety-five kilometres. A school that moves with a reindeer herders’ camp gives a good chance for mothers to allow their children at the age of six to enjoy their home environment for another few years until they reach the age of ten, when children have to join secondary school in the village. However, if volunteers are not paid for their highly demanding job, then the whole endeavour only reduces mothers’ enthusiasm and undermines the success of the project. 2. In Soviet times, most of the reindeer were state-owned, and it was not necessary to own them oneself. Though it is possible to own reindeer, very few are able to afford them, as private property and large numbers of reindeer are still owned by the former state farm.

Chapter 4

Three Future Autobiographies

In this chapter I shall look more closely at the future autobiographies of forest and village adolescents written and orally narrated by: Tonya, a forest girl; Vera, a village girl; and Grisha, a village boy. In order to complement the forest girl’s account and acquire gender balance I shall present a forest boy’s story in Chapter 5. Here I shall explore the adolescents’ experiences of growing up in the forest and the village and pay particular attention to how they narrate what they have experienced, how they draw their own past and present into their futures, and how their stories mediate and constitute their personhoods. We shall see that though adolescence is often understood as a transitive period in the human life-cycle, it should be perceived as critical in its formative or even forging potential since a young person’s experiences and perceptions at this stage appear to be important for all that follows in terms of life and destiny. The account will illustrate that the relationship between the narrator and the events reported from the point of view of the future requires thorough investigation of the social context, while not only situating the future in the past and the present of young narrators but also locating the narrated ‘future’ in the present lives which are being lived and enacted. This exercise will uncover the ontologically embedded nature of the narrative and what implications the narrated futures have had for their authors’ life-trajectories. While in the field I found the narratives of Tonya and Vera as most illustrative of various facets of social relations in the spaces of the forest and the village, and specifically the aspect of gender. In particular, we shall see how the issue of gendered organization of labour invented in the Soviet period, when the village was turned into predominantly female space and the forest became largely male environment, is reflected in the forest and village girls’ views of both spaces. We shall see that Tonya’s view involves a rather subtle understanding of the two spaces in which the forest emerges

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as her final destination in her future life-trajectory. Tonya’s account sheds light on a perspective of a local forest girl that encompasses movement between the forest and the village, and experiences the two spaces through learning in a reindeer herding camp and learning in the setting of school. Tonya’s attachment to the forest moulds her entering the stage of womanhood and becoming a marriageable woman. By contrast, in Vera’s account we shall see how this village girl deploys the village construct of gender and space in which everything related to the space of the forest is featured as backward and primitive, the city as advanced and progressive and the village as an uneasy compromise of two worlds. The case study of Grisha will illustrate the ways a fifteen-year-old boy narrates his experience of growing up in the village and uncover his point of view on the social world of the village. Following Anthony Cohen, who posits that ‘a person’s experience of his or her engagement with the social structure gives rise to a “self-conception”, a symbolization of self which runs consistently through all a person’s activities’ (1994: 29), I shall explore what social experiences in the space of the village invoke certain representations of the self and how this is orchestrated within Grisha’s narrative. We shall see that his views on education, kontora politics and school are forged by his social experiences in the space of the village, which also contribute to shaping a special pattern of spatial orientation in the imagined future among the village-reared children.

The story of Tonya, a forest girl I met Tonya when I gave my first class on computer literacy in the middle of November. That month her parents brought Tonya and her siblings back to the village from the remotest reindeer herding camp situated about two hundred kilometres away from the village, on Lake Koldika. For two months they had been waiting for the routes, which pass through numerous rivers and lakes, to get more solidly frozen so that the journey on reindeer sledges would be safe for their children. Throughout the year the family of Polina and Vasily Gavrilievy mainly resides in the forest. The Gavrilievy have six children altogether. In 2003– 2004 Tonya was sixteen years old, Volodya was thirteen, Vera was twelve, Ira was ten, Sveta was nine and Zhenia was five. I was teaching three of them – Tonya, Volodya and Ira – at school. All of them were what I call forest children. They grew up in the forest and even though they were at school1 they usually spent their summer holidays with their parents looking after their herd of reindeer. At our first meeting in a village school classroom, Tonya seemed to be slightly shy and reserved in front of her new teacher. However, I was able

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to develop a much more informal relationship with her during that year because of my friendship with her mother, Polina. That is to say, I had a chance to perform not only as a teacher but also as her family’s friend. This kind of relationship allowed me to discuss with her various issues dealing with school, village, her parents, TV programmes, lifestyles, fashion, Tonya’s friends, etc. I had known Tonya’s mother Polina since my own childhood when she was only an adolescent staying at a local boarding school. By the time of my arrival in the village for my fieldwork, Polina was already a married woman with six children. Her husband, Vasily, had been working most of his life as a reindeer herder in the forest and Polina married him when she joined his reindeer herding brigade in 1985. That year she graduated from school and decided to seek employment in the local state farm as a tent-keeper in the forest. Since that time she has never left the forest as her base and has been following her husband in the movements between the village and the forest in their joint efforts to accommodate their own family needs. As the oldest child in the family and as the elder sister for all her younger siblings, Tonya quite often took on the role of child-minder in her family, especially while in the village when her parents had to look after their reindeer herd in the forest. Due to these circumstances I would often find her busy taking care of her younger sisters and brothers at their family place in the village, a three-room flat in a two-storey building. In the absence of their parents, Tonya and her brothers and sisters remained at their parents’ flat, and were regularly visited by her aunts and other relatives.2 According to Polina, she gave birth to Tonya in Khandyga and had to travel back with their first baby straight to the forest. At that time she told me that she and Vasily did not even have their own place to stay in the village, so when Polina arrived in the village Vasily transported both her and Tonya straight back to their forest camp on a reindeer sledge. That is why, from her babyhood, Tonya stayed with her parents in the forest. When she reached the age of seven, Tonya’s parents had to bring her to the village so that she could start schooling. My interaction with Tonya and observations of her in the village, at school during my computer literacy classes, or at her parents’ temporary camp in the forest, would help me in my attempts to understand what it is to be in the process of growing up. What does it involve to become a person in a local context? What social constraints does it imply? What are the family, school and community expectations from a young person like herself? What roles does an adolescent have to carry out while in the forest and the village? What should one do to be fully appreciated and accepted as a social actor and an agent in both settings?

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My first attempt in getting to know Tonya was her essay, which was among the pile of written future life-stories produced in Russian by other forest children and adolescents. When I was reading these children’s stories I was always struck by the similarity in the ways their stories were composed and structured. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, there was often a place for an author’s future departure and return to the native community at the end of their journeys. Tonya’s written future autobiography went as follows: I dream about finishing school with good marks and enter the institute in St Petersburg. After graduation I shall get a job in a big company. I have many younger sisters, that is why I shall be helping them. I’ll need to support them, especially financially. I would like my younger brothers and sisters to receive higher education. I see myself in the future as a serious, educated young lady with a mobile phone in my hand. Although I am going to be like this I won’t forget my community and I’ll visit my parents during holidays and breaks. I know how hard it is going to be for them when all of us grow up and leave them to get education. As for me, I would like to get higher education in order to help my parents. By this time my brothers and sisters will be already able to support themselves and won’t need my help. I know after we all graduate from school, our life will be changed. We’ll study and stay at different places. But in spite of it we will all make an effort to get together, sit at the table and tell each other their life-stories. In the future I want to come back and help my family and relatives. I want this wish to come true.

The central theme in Tonya’s story is her aspiration to help her parents and younger siblings. She views her educational achievement and professional success as a main means towards fulfilling this role. After she accomplishes her plan to achieve higher education, she plans to have her own family. Here, she foresees that in the future her parents will be unable to afford their younger children’s stay in the city or their higher education. Therefore she sees herself as the one who will take on the role of main helper. While depicting herself in the future as ‘a serious, educated young lady with a mobile phone in her hand’, Tonya writes that in spite of being so modern she won’t forget her village and will visit her parents during holidays and breaks. In this final stage of her story she draws a picture of her family get-together in which all her younger siblings come back home as self-sufficient and successful professionals to tell the stories of their own success: they will be both self-sufficient and emotionally united. Tonya’s essay represents a vivid illustration of her own understanding of the self as a social being responsible not only for her personal success but also for the wellbeing of her younger siblings and her parents. I suggest that Tonya’s own perception of herself has been shaped by her social experience as a child-minder and elder sister. It shows that she internalized her responsibility of being the main carer within the family, instilled by

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her parents and other members of her kin, and projected this role into her own future. Thus, her understanding of her own agency is articulated in terms of ability to help her younger sisters and brothers to become educated and successful professionals in the future. Tonya’s awareness of her own social position reflects a direct connection between her images of present and future selves. In her story she endows herself with a sense of agency and by doing so reveals her meaning of being and becoming an agent with a certain moral status in family and community life in the future. In her written version we do not observe the tension between her selfhood (internal) and personhood (external), which according to Cohen is an essential component in the process of an individual’s acquisition of socialness (1994: 56–7). In other words, Tonya’s narrative mediates her sense of relatedness without registering such tension and reveals one of the aspects of her socialness centred on her responsibility over younger siblings. In Chapter 1, the discussion on oral and written forms of narrative proposed that the written and oral versions of adolescents’ and children’s future lives, one of them a brief and concentrated version (a written essay), the other a more elaborate and detailed narrative (an oral story), are two modes of expressing. Now we may observe this in action. While reading Tonya’s essay I was surprised to find that in this version of her own future life she never mentioned the forest and her family herd of reindeer, to which she is quite attached. On the contrary, she wrote a story similar to adolescents who grew up in the village. Like any other local girl of about the same age, she would like to see herself as an educated and successful young woman settled in the city. However, when we put her written story aside and look at the ways Tonya expresses herself in the oral narrative, we may see that her oral version (narrated in a mixture of Eveny and Russian) presents a more extended and fuller rendition of her personhood. My awareness of her forest background inspired me to explore the ways she expresses her perceptions of the forest and the village. I also intended to see what her sense of belonging involves and how she relates herself to places and people. When I asked her where she felt most comfortable and where she felt her home was, she gave me the following answer: Home is the place where I feel comfortable because … everything around is so familiar and because I know this area so well. My native land is where my parents are. It is Lake Koldika, an area of Barai, the mountains Gaerbaech and Naelgaesae … I always think about our herd of reindeer, my favourite reindeer Niamakcha … The first time I tried to ride it, I was really scared. It had big antlers and it was not a tamed reindeer at that time. I managed not to fall off. It definitely felt that I was scared, that is why it was trying to drop me off its back. But on our way back home it started accepting me and kind of calmed down. Niamakcha was already getting used to me. I spent the whole summer riding that reindeer and now this is my favourite one.

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While she was presenting this narrative, her parents were away in the forest. We had this conversation sitting in a classroom at school, where, while sitting in an opposed kind of space, she associated the forest with the security and softness of her parental home and family. As one can see, her idea of native land is closely intertwined with her relationship with reindeer. Her parents’ forest camp and her favourite reindeer – Niamakcha – are presented as significant aspects of her social world in the forest and constituents of her forest personhood. Here is how Tonya speaks about the reindeer while reproducing the essence of this relationship: O.: What is a reindeer for you? Tonya: I grew up together with my reindeer. I saw how a female reindeer gave birth to the calf which then became my reindeer. When it is the time for tugasaechaek [calving], we carefully watch which calf is born and which female reindeer has delivered it. Each of us chooses individually one recently born calf. What I usually do is I attach a bow of a certain colour on a calf ’s neck. After a while this calf disappears from your sight since you leave for the village and only come back in a year’s time. This reindeer grows and it is difficult for you to identify which one you chose a year ago and attached a bow to. But usually it is my father who tells me which reindeer it was because he often is the one who takes that bow from the reindeer’s neck. A reindeer grows and that bow that I attached already does not fit its neck. In three years my father tells me: Look, this is your reindeer that you chose that time. So this reindeer is getting old already.

Having read and listened to numerous forest children’s accounts, I find this part of Tonya’s narrative an eloquent expression of how a forest girl views her process of growing up in relation to her personal reindeer, i.e., she makes sense of her growing process in terms of the physical growth of her own reindeer (for detailed discussion see Chapter 5). The kind of reindeer she is discussing here represents a mixture of uchak (a riding reindeer) and haevek (a guardian reindeer). Haevek is so closely identified with its owner that it is almost like an animal double. In that sense Tonya’s reindeer, Niamakcha, is more haevek than uchak because, as Vitebsky puts it elegantly, it is ‘an intensification of the special relationship between a reindeer and its rider which is based not just on the shared morphology or physicality, but also on shared mood and emotion’ (2005: 279). Tonya’s growing and maturing process goes hand in hand with the process of a calf turning into a mature reindeer. She retrospectively views her reindeer not only as serving as her animal double but also as marking her transition from one developmental stage to another. In a sense Tonya’s process of growing up is symbolically marked by the attachment and removal of the coloured bow on the reindeer’s neck. Her acquisition of a sense of the self is expressed through the developmental process of

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a reindeer, which remains a part of an eight- to ten-year-old child’s selfrepresentation, as in Tonya’s reminiscence until the stage of adolescence. The ways the position and role of a reindeer are transferred to the domain of human personhood are expressed by Tonya in the following way: O.: What qualities does one need to take care of a reindeer well? Tonya: Well, a reindeer feels his owner. If you give your reindeer to another person, the reindeer knows that it is not you and starts bucking. Usually, it does not allow another person to ride on its back. I know that I can trust my own uchak. A reindeer just feels its owner. Because from the very beginning you treat your own uchak with special care. The reindeer feels it, that is why it treats you the same way and trusts only you.

By reflecting on the reindeer’s behaviour, Tonya has articulated how she as a trainer of a reindeer has also become a part of the reindeer’s nature and character. So both Tonya and her reindeer are going through the process of acquiring a mutual reliance, even constituting each other as persons, and this affects the reindeer’s relationship with other riders and contributes to the development of Tonya’s personhood and her sense of agency. Throughout our discussion Tonya relates herself mainly to the space of the forest, her parents and the family herd. This becomes especially prominent when our discussion turns to the space of the village, particularly to Tonya’s experience at school. As I emphasized in Chapter 2, most forest children, including Tonya, experience their own movement from the forest to the village at the age of seven as quite painful because they are separated from their own families and reindeer. I had a separate interview with Tonya on the subject of life in the village where I asked her to reflect mostly on her experience there. First, Tonya reflects on her transition from the forest to village life in the following way: O.: When you come back from the forest to the village, how do you feel? Tonya: I kind of don’t feel that this is me [Bi maeni da aekhaem khar]. Though I am gradually getting used to the village, every time when I move from the forest down here I don’t feel happy. Every time when I return to the village I feel that everything here is not how I would like to be. It just feels so different from what I have at home, I mean in the forest. I always want to come back to our tent and see our herd around. Also, there, in the forest it is warmer inside the tent; here buildings are not heated and it is always cold inside your house.

Tonya eloquently expresses her transition from the camp to the village, typical of most forest children’s experiences. The village and the forest in Tonya’s words are presented as discrete domains. Her distinction between the two throws a rather different light on what Kwon (1993) was discussing while looking at the Orochon reindeer herders’ gendered spaces of the

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forest and the settlement that are conceptualized as dichotomous, i.e., the wild (forest – male) and the domestic or cultured (settlement – female). This gendered division is presented somewhat rigidly, whereas what Tonya reflects is rather more subtle. Her sense of both settings makes this gendered distinction less categorical and emphasizes the local construct of the person rather than a gendered sense of space. Rather than gender, it is more a division between kindness and harshness. Now we turn to Tonya’s perception of the space of the village and her school experience. Moving to the village involves not only separation but also the stress of the experience of schooling itself, which Tonya relates to the way she is treated by teachers: O.: How do you find your schoolteachers? Tonya: They are OK. But some of them can be really rough as they are always ready to reprimand and scream at you. O.: Who was screaming at you? Tonya: Last year Natalya Afanasievna was shouting at me. She was screaming that all children who came from the forest, Eveny children, are kind of wild and never take off their coats. But it is just so cold inside the school so you can’t stay there without your coat. And she would accuse us being wild.

The way Tonya is treated by a Russian teacher eloquently emphasizes the contrast between the learning process in the forest and in the village. Tonya is as sensitive as any other child to shouting or screaming, exactly as the reindeer are in her description of her father’s ways of teaching in Chapter 5. At the village school the ‘wildness’ of the children from the forest is as an excuse for humiliation and control by the teachers, who come from outside (Vitebsky 2005: 186–92). By viewing forest children as wild and uncultured, teachers reproduce the same discourse that Kwon describes. He puts it in the following way: According to their mothers, the Orochon boys run around the village like dikii [wild reindeer], speak like dikii, uncivilisedly, refuse to study at school, and want to go to the forest instead because ‘there, there is nobody who tells them what to do and what not to do’. (Kwon 1998: 151)

As this quotation shows, the Orochon boys’ mothers seem to adopt the teachers’ discourse in viewing their sons as uncivilized and dikii. However, what is missing in this perspective is the children’s sense of both spaces. What Tonya has expressed above makes the setting of school a political ground for two contested meanings of the village and of the forest. Here, Tonya reports both her past and her ongoing school experience while evaluating the teachers’ positions vis-à-vis her own. She expresses her an-

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tagonism and disapproval of teachers’ attitudes by using reported speech. In this regard her expression corresponds to issues addressed by Bakhtin in his examination of reported speech and authoritative discourse. According to him, reported speech provides the possibility for vocalizing multiple voices and is deployed as a means of destabilizing or undermining authority (Bakhtin 1981: 342–3). Tonya’s use of reported speech is crucial in understanding her attitude towards the teacher’s authoritative discourse on forest kids. Her message suggests that forest children’s and adolescents’ rejection of school life and development of a tendency to ‘go wild’ should be understood as a clash or tension between a forest child’s sense of the self and the village schoolteachers’ attitude towards them. Another issue Tonya brings up in the following excerpt is how similar tension between two meanings of the forest is extended into the sphere of relationships between herself and village girls: O.: What is so different here from the forest? Tonya: The first thing is that you don’t need to change place and move from one place to another, you just stay at one place or at the house here. Here, I miss reindeer a lot. I usually hear the news about my reindeer from my parents when we speak on the radio. O.: Are you happy with children in the village? Do you find them as good friends? Tonya: Some of them are OK. But some ask strange questions. For example, one girl asked me: ‘How do you stay there in the forest? If I ever went there, I wouldn’t be able to stay there for more than one day. It’s kind of wild.’ But I think it is much better there than in the village; they just don’t know what it is to stay there. In the village it is dirty and dusty everywhere, it is stuffy inside. Also, there is no electricity in the village; in the forest you don’t need the light anyway. Then, there are no stoves [the village buildings rely on central heating stations which were constructed in the Soviet period but hardly operate now] in the houses; that’s why it is colder inside. When the electricity goes down you go to the forest anyway and cook your food there. But in the tent it is more convenient since you don’t need to go every time to the forest to cook, you are already there. Then, the tent is warm and your stove works anyway without electricity.

Here and further on, Tonya elaborates on her position between two contrasted social worlds and spaces incorporating the voices of the village children. She presents her own stance by engaging dialogically with the village girls’ views on the space of the forest. As in Bakhtinian theory of the dialogic self, Tonya makes sense of her self against the village children’s unawareness and misunderstanding of what life in the forest involves. She is engaged in a dialogue with the attitudes of schoolteachers and village girls and, as Bakhtin relevantly points out, what she says ‘not only constitutes much of everyday discourse, but also carries psychological significance as people try to make sense of what people say and what

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it means for them’ (1981: 338–9). By refuting the village girl’s opinion she maintains her forest sense of self, and thus states that she is a different kind of person. Her perspective of a forest person is quite explicitly rendered in the following part of our conversation, where she reflects on her life in the village: I go to school in the village and I like to study, though life in the forest is more exciting than the boring life in the village. Here nothing really happens, especially during school breaks or holidays. The only thing you can do during summer holidays is to hang around the village and swim sometimes in the river or lake nearby. Nothing special. Whereas in the forest there are so many things to do. When you wake up you run to the river. You go to look after reindeer and there is always something interesting happening. Also you help a lot in a camp … you need to chop the wood and bring water from the river … I like to spend time with my reindeer and go hunting with my dad or help my mum. I also like nulgachaek [moving camp] because it is so much fun compared to this and it’s beautiful.

What she is saying here reflects a tension between the kind of person Tonya is in the village and who she is in the forest. In the forest she appears to be a fully involved actor with her own duties and responsibilities and a person related to a reindeer, while in the village she may perform as a schoolgirl or a child who needs to be taken care of and confined within the dwelling of a people’s settlement. In regard to Tonya’s reference to dull or boring life in the village Richard Condon, who conducted ethnographic research among the youth of the Copper Inuit of Holman community in Canada’s Northwest Territories, relevantly observes that children and adolescents associate their experience of living in a small remote settlement with boredom. As in the Eveny case, Inuit teens’ school attendance falls off significantly and very few actually complete the school programme. He relates their perception of boredom to a prolonged state of idleness among the settlement’s youth and writes that: Little parental pressure is placed upon these young people ‘to get a job’ or ‘settle down’ as is often the case in Eurocanadian society, rather they are allowed to develop at their own pace and decide for themselves what they plan to do with their lives. Inuit teenagers and young adults are not forced to make vital decisions that may have a significant impact upon their later lives. (Condon 1981: 82)

In the case of Eveny, it is also evident that there is hardly any parental pressure and special guidance, as the forest adolescents like Tonya are separated from their parents while at school. Moreover, I perceive that forest parents tend to avoid straightforward intrusion into an adolescent’s process of taking decisions on what to do, and, especially, what to do with their future lives. In the forest one is required to work out a solution to potentially dangerous situations on one’s own. Independent and autono-

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mous decision making is important for subsistence activities and survival in a highly risky forest environment and is therefore consistently honed and encouraged in the course of childhood socialization in the forest (see also Briggs 1998: 106–7 and my discussion in Chapter 3). Therefore, adolescents and youth are often faced with the necessity to take such decisions themselves, particularly when it comes to planning future actions. Given that, I agree with Condon on the point that absence of parental pressure has its shortcomings, especially in the totally different context of settlement life where there are other kinds of options which youth prefer in order to occupy themselves. As a result, alcohol consumption is fairly high in this age category and undoubtedly is a response to the boredom of village life. Another kind of response to this situation is expressed in Tonya’s plans for the future. Her intention of getting higher education emerged as one of the means to escape from the boring life in the village by moving to the city. The subject of ‘education’ has been the significant element in the views of the future of most local adolescents. Tonya is not an exception as she expressed her belief that all choices and opportunities may be available only if a person is educated. Importance of education was highlighted by her as a means to acquire her future capacity to help her younger siblings and parents. Though it was clear that her educational aspirations are supported by her parents, I was puzzled about how she views her departure and separation from her home, and why her sense of family responsibility is translated through this duty to ‘become educated’ rather than through her responsibility for their family herd of reindeer: O.: Do your parents or any of your relatives want you to work in the forest in the future? Tonya: No, they want me to get a different occupation. My father advises me not even to try this because he says that I’ll waste my energy. He never got a chance to go further in his studies so he wants me to get this chance … Also my brother really wants to work there and be successor to our father in the future.

To a certain extent, by putting expectations on Tonya’s educational advancement, her father intends to save her from a hard life in the forest and let her vicariously fulfil his own dreams to become educated and turn into a professional. For the future needs of their herd he has his (male) younger child, Tonya’s brother Volodya. Thus, by fulfilling her parents’ expectations, Tonya is reproducing the discourse on the place of a woman and a man in the society which was introduced in Soviet times. A woman must become educated and work in the village office whereas a man should stay in the forest and look after a herd. However, we may observe a contradiction in the ways Tonya views life in the forest and life in the vil-

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lage. She sees the world of the forest as tender and the village as harsh. She understands her responsibility but also recognizes that the forest world is closer to her than any other settings such as the village or the city. The city is an unknown and unexplored realm for her dreams and wishes, whereas the village is a place for boredom and frustration. Moreover, in the range of professions local adolescents found that of lawyer most appealing; the occupations of veterinary nurse or vet doctor were also viewed as desirable. In their view, both professions represent a particular sense of agency: one is related to protection of people’s lives and rights, the other to care and veterinary treatment of reindeer and other domestic animals. Not surprisingly, Tonya expressed her wish to qualify as a lawyer in the city and related that to her wish to come back and change the situation in the village by using a lawyer’s knowledge, skills and networks. The other side of the coin is that she views her studies in the city as an opportunity to acquire social mobility by creating new bonds, e.g., marriage: O.: You will leave to study in the city but would you like to come back after you are finished? Tonya: I shall marry a man in the city and have my own family. I may stay in the city but I think I shall come back and work here. Also I want my children to be close to my parents and know how to look after the herd. O.: When you’ll qualify for your profession, where would you like to work? Tonya: I would like to work as a veterinary doctor or a lawyer in a local obschina and I want to protect reindeer herders’ rights. I also want to help my younger sisters and my younger brother to become professionals. I also want them to be respected by other people so that my parents are also respected for having this kind of children. I want them to be proud of their children. For this I want to help my sisters in the future. O.: How would you like to help them? Tonya: I can help them only if I achieve something. For this purpose I shall definitely need acquaintances, i.e., the people who may help and support my plans. On my own, I won’t be able to do anything.

So the social status and security that Tonya is describing reflect her idea of the way a proper woman should be: both happily married in the city and still closely related to her parents and the reindeer herd. In Chapter 1 I mentioned that the principle of exogamy obliges young women and men to marry partners outside of kin. Accordingly, in local families it is expected that a young adult, regardless of gender, find a partner from another area where there is hardly any possibility for a potential partner to have any ‘blood’ or consanguinal ties with his/her family, or at least to marry a person from one of the local clans with no history of these ties.

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So it comes easily in their visions of the future that most of the children, including Tonya, intend to marry someone outside the community, usually meeting a potential partner in a totally new space of the city or in some unknown town. The kind of marriage Tonya is narrating here does not prevent her from being both an urban and a forest person. So I ask her about the ways she is getting prepared for it and how she thinks happy marriage can be maintained: O.: How will you try to make your family life happy and your family solid and united in the future? What will you do as a wife and mother to keep your family? Does your mother prepare you for future family life? Tonya: I am looking at my mother now and what she does to keep us happy. She resolves all conflicts if we are fighting with each other, she is very good at it. She sews a lot. She also teaches me how to sew namdan [a girdle for a reindeer] and last time I made my own bag – avsa. I used taergaes [reindeer suede] and I used squirrel’s fur to embroider it.

I read this as Tonya’s expression of her own appreciation of her mother’s care and effort to teach her vital skills for forest life. The picture she is drawing for me here seems to reproduce what her mother Polina is doing while bringing up her daughter. This mode of upbringing with its practical aspects prepares her daughter for life in the forest, and stems naturally from Polina’s own understanding of how a daughter has to be brought up, because this is the way she herself was trained by her older family members. Polina told me how her granny had prepared her herself for marriage: Our summer school holidays we always spent in the forest. My grandparents used to teach me everything: how to take care of the tent, how to cook, how to pack bags and put them on a reindeer’s back. My grandmother once said: ‘You have to know how to pack bags properly, once you will marry a reindeer herder. Get prepared for it!’ … She wanted me to marry a reindeer herder. She said that having a husband who is a reindeer herder will make my life easier and I won’t suffer from hunger. Eventually, I married Vasily; as you see, he is a reindeer herder. My grandmother somehow knew whom I shall marry. Since I got married I have always been with my husband.

As I mentioned in Chapter 3, among women the idea of being married is intertwined with the ability of a woman to perform as a wife and a mother. To be a good wife is to possess such abilities as sewing, cooking and knowing how to look after a husband and children. So this is the concept of marriage that Polina expressed to me, and this is what she learnt and used in order to make her family life happy.

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What I consider remarkable in this case is that, in spite of her experience of staying in a boarding school, Tonya’s mother learnt and memorized those bits and pieces that made her into a woman, wife and mother at present. By being involved in the everyday productive activity of her childhood, Polina developed skills vital for a woman’s life in the forest, and moreover she fulfilled that idea of womanhood that was promoted by her grandmother by marrying a reindeer herder and staying in the forest. What one may learn from the conversation with Tonya, especially her discussion of nulgachaek, is that while in the forest and in the course of her socialization she too has acquired the skills of packing bags (khaerukael) and sewing a special woman’s bag (avsa). The acquisition of these skills is an indication of Tonya’s preparedness for her future family life in the forest. In an earlier part of this account we saw how Tonya’s forest identity is moulded through her reindeer calf. Then we have seen them growing up together as the reindeer becomes an adult and she becomes an adolescent. Now we observe how she anticipates moving into full adult life as a marriageable woman but still carrying forward forest and reindeer imagery as a foundation for the next stage of her forming personhood. Sewing skill is regarded as vital for a woman’s life in the forest. The term for the age of a girl of eighteen – khanganni ochalan (a young woman who can sew) – points to the ability of a girl to sew clothes, and therefore emphasizes her preparedness for married life. To some extent, the age of khanganni ochalan, especially possession of a bag made of reindeer skin (avsa), points to a girl’s ability to procreate, and thus serves as a symbol of womanhood and fertility. Nowadays, older Eveny women keep their avsa not only as a container for their personal belongings and necessary tools for sewing (needles, scissors and threads made of reindeer skin) but also as a symbol of their fulfilled womanhood. Hence the threads, which are meticulously sewn on the upper surface of a bag, reflect the number of children a woman has given birth to. So in order to learn how many children a woman has had, one has only to look at the number of the special threads stitched into the outer part of the avsa. Any product made of reindeer skin, such as the avsa, acts as an expression and symbolization of the fulfilled womanhood. In this sense local women deploy the social and economic significance of reindeer to charge their skins with a procreative sense of motherhood. In a similar vein, Rethmann suggests while discussing Koryak women’s practices of tanning, embroidering, and sewing that ‘turning reindeer fur and skin into the symbol of fertility women engage in reproduction of cultural symbolism, endowing clothes and animal skin with their own personhood, and thus contributing to a particular shape of the world’ (Rethmann 2001: 152). In this sense, by teaching her daughter sewing skills Polina also

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contributes to the shaping of Tonya’s future family life and involves her daughter in the reproduction of her own social world. Furthermore, in the oral version of her future life Tonya expressed her intention to return as a veterinary doctor or a lawyer in order to use her own success for the benefit of her younger siblings and parents. I would like to highlight that in the course of the following six years the element of future return to the native community, which Tonya emphasized in her future autobiography, has manifested itself as fundamental for her later lifetrajectory. In one of my brief visits to the city of Yakutsk in 2006 I met her in the hostel of the agricultural college (in Russian sel’khoz tenkhnium). I was amazed by her transformation as, just like in her written essay, she looked like a serious young lady with a mobile phone in her hand.3 After school graduation, she had indeed entered a further education course in the city. When I asked her whether she was enjoying her studies in Yakutsk and whether she was planning to come back home, she responded that she was not sure if she had made the right choice of the course and that she was severely missing her family so far away from the city. At that time she was not sure what would happen to her after the course was finished. When I revisited the community six years after Tonya narrated her future autobiography in August 2010, and four years after our meeting in Yakutsk, I found out that she had indeed returned back to her reindeer herd in the capacity of a veterinary nurse. As in her envisioned future, she actually sees all her younger sisters and brothers around the table in her family setting and is employed as a vet in the local obshina, spending most of her time close to reindeer in the forest. It shows that the future she was narrating to me six years earlier was somehow fulfilled. I leave Tonya at this point as I shall elaborate on this after I introduce two other characters, Vera and Grisha, in order to look more closely at adolescents who have lived in the village all their lives and have not had Tonya’s experience of the forest at all.

The stories of village adolescents: Vera and Grisha I turn now to the stories of two village adolescents: a seventeen-year-old girl, Vera, and a sixteen-year-old boy, Grisha. Here I explore how the social space of the village is viewed through their eyes and the ways they elaborate in their own narratives on their understandings of the social space of the village. Vera’s and Grisha’s accounts will show how village socialization contributes to the formation of a particular construct of social relations, specifically in terms of village hierarchies, leading to a concept of person that is quite distinct from what we have seen earlier in an account of a

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forest girl. This will also illustrate the pattern of village-reared children’s orientation within the cosmological triangle of forest, village and city.

Vera The first time I met Vera was in the last week of October 2003. We were travelling together in a small van, which was used to transport Topolinoye people from the central town of Khandyga back to their native village. I was in Khandyga with another local teacher to fix a few school computers. On that freezing October day our van was picking up passengers who had spent a few days there for some errands, like myself, from various places around the town. The van was nearly full, so the last passenger to be picked up was the driver’s niece. We stopped at the district hospital and at that moment I saw a young lady with a round face whose cheeks were lit up by bright rosy colour because of the cold wind. This was Vera. What I found surprising was the fact of her being alone in the town of Khandyga, renowned as a highly unsafe area, especially for a schoolgirl travelling and staying there without an adult or a parent looking after her. In the van while we were travelling I heard someone asking her why she was there at that time of a year. She replied that she was in Khandyga to check out her health. Her response was brief and, pretending that she could not hear the following question due to the noise of the engine, she went quiet for the several hours of our trip. A few days after our return I heard the reason for her trip. I was told that she had travelled to travel Khandyga to undergo an abortion. In that gossip, told by a local lady in her mid-thirties, I felt reproof at Vera’s behaviour. I have not checked whether this was true, but her relationship with a local Russian man Konstantin, who was already married to a Ukrainian woman teacher of mathematics at the local school, was stirring curiosity among locals. This unexpected introduction to her private life fired my interest in her personality. Vera grew up in the village and is from a single-mother family. She is the first child of her mother and has four younger sisters. At the time when I was interviewing her, Vera was in her final grade at school. What was remarkable about that group of adolescents was that they were often from single-parent families or families in which there was a loss of one of the parents. In most cases the family issues were alcohol addiction of the parents, violent death of one of the parents, divorced parents or problematic parents’ relationships. During the year, I observed Vera in various circumstances and had many conversations during which we discussed her relationship with relatives, life in the village and her future. First I would like to present Vera’s

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essay about her own future life, which she wrote when I asked the group of teenagers to write the stories about own future. She was the one who agreed without hesitation, and her story goes as follows: I imagine myself in the future as a highly successful and very attractive woman. I would like to gain higher education, then get a job. I dream about my own house, a husband and cosiness at my place. I shall have one child and my husband will be very lucky to have such wife as myself. When I am settled in the city, I shall try to take another course at university and shall help my family by sending them money. If I am rich I shall invest money into some business so that the amount can grow. I shall help poor people. Hopefully, I won’t grow greedy when I am rich. I want my younger sisters and brothers to grow well and get education. I hope they’ll all be good people and love people around. Then I shall help them. I shall be a lawyer and will protect people. I hope I’ll get a qualification and a job and everything will be fine.

Vera builds her narrative of the future life around education, happy marriage, profitable business and a well-paid job. These serve as the points of her anticipation for the future and pegs on which she hangs the story. Like most local girls in their teens, Vera expressed her wish to be an educated and successful woman. In her vision of the future she receives a university degree that leads her to a well-paid job which then allows her to support her family and relatives. She helps her younger sisters and brothers in their efforts to become educated and successful people. All of this is consonant with Tonya’s story in the previous section. In a sense both girls are taking on and developing their roles as eldest sisters for their younger siblings. However, whereas Tonya envisages it by returning to her family in person Vera views herself in the future remitting money back home from the city. This construct of agency to be exercised while remaining in the city appears to be distinct from the type of agency envisaged in Tonya’s story. In this written version of the story, Vera draws us into her idea of happy marriage, which emphasizes future ownership of a house, and a future husband’s appreciation of herself as his wife and the mother of their child. Her written version is also consonant with the story of another village girl, Aida from Chapter 1, in the ways both girls view themselves as happily settled in the city. In the course of her discussion, the theme of marriage will appear to be central, and she will frame it within the trope of her escape from the village. In subsequent conversations, we see the ways she narrates the story of her future life and how her oral narrative unfolds her experience of growing up in the village: O.: Vera, please tell me what you would like to do in the future.

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Vera: The first thing I shall do in the immediate future as soon as I graduate from school is to enter the higher education institution. I shall study to become a lawyer. When I finish at an institute or university I shall work somewhere else but not here. I shall come back but I shall not work here. Maybe I’ll just make short visits. O.: Why do you want to work somewhere else but not here? Why not? Vera: Here people are evil and wicked. Also here is nothing special to be occupied with. Actually, it is just not interesting for a young person to stay here. As far as I see, young people who come back are usually unemployed and do nothing. I would like to live in the city, for example in Moscow. I think it is easier to follow this way than to work here from the beginning of your working career and fight with everyone here so that you can be consumed by all these conflicts.

While speaking about her plans after university, particularly in relation to the place where she would prefer to stay and work, Vera reveals her sense of the place where she stays now, i.e., the village. She refers to locals as ‘evil and wicked people’ and by doing this she exposes the conflicted situation in which she is involved at the moment, which makes up one of the central themes of her account – that of escape. I mentioned the gossip about Vera’s affair with a Russian married man and that her reference to locals as evil and wicked was most likely her response to this sort of social disapproval of her relationship with this man. When Vera was speaking to me, she was going through a hard time because of antagonism from Konstantin’s wife, who demanded that Vera leave her husband alone; the confrontation ended up with a fight in one of the village’s public spaces. So there were obvious reasons for her desire to leave for another place. The theme of escape is developed along with her elaborations on life in the city: O.: How do you imagine life in the city? Vera: My relatives ask me why I am planning to go there, they don’t want me to go there. They say it is dangerous to stay there, because they watch TV … and they think there are lots of bad things about Moscow … But I just want to go there and try … I think you need to avoid these kind of people who can be harmful for you … Well, I need to rent a flat first … then, see what is available and get a job somewhere. O.: Where would you like to work? Which place will you choose? Vera: I would like to work in a company or a firm where payment is high … Then, I think I shall find a partner whom I shall eventually marry.

In the above extract she reflects on the city as a place of her endeavor and fulfillment. Through the dialogue with her relatives she puts the city in opposition to the present world of the village, which she understands as vile and cruel. The city emerges as a site of her liberation, which gives

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her a chance to perform as she wants to, and where she will find a proper relationship with eventual marriage. Her present relationship with Konstantin does not promise marriage because of his marital status, and the repercussions of this affair do not make her feel happy about herself in the present. This contributes to her idea of leaving for a city where everything will be the opposite of her present life in the village. This is how Vera expresses her understanding of being young and growing up in the village: Vera: I think it is much easier for middle-aged people to stay in the village. They have already settled here and have got families … they enjoy staying here because of nature, fresh air and stuff like that … But for young people there is nothing exciting about the village … there are no places for them to hang out. The local sports hall is dead cold, the local house of culture [club] is cold too and boring … Workers at the club are boring and do nothing to entertain us or organize something so that young people can get active. Apart from discos we have got nothing. There is nothing exciting about discos either.

As in Tonya’s account, village life is associated with the sense of boredom, and Vera’s reference to a lack of entertainment in the village highlights the general decline of the village infrastructure since the 1990s that now has very little to offer young people. Local institutions hardly receive any funding. Because of drastic economic decline, during the coldest months, which usually last for more than half the year, social life in the village becomes even less active because the buildings of the village sports hall and the local house of culture remain unbearably cold. One of the issues that we discussed on several occasions was related to her marriage prospects in the village: O.: Do you think there is a possibility for a young woman or a girl to get married here? Vera: Well … yes, there are boys whom any of our girls can marry … but locals – mestnyje – have got a bad habit … they drink a lot … I mean sooner or later they will become alcoholics … I am saying this because guys do nothing here and usually drink … Well, there are a few guys who think about job and home, do not drink and stay inside, but it is difficult to find something in common to talk to them, I think … I mean they are boring and usually keep silent.

In her description of local young men Vera is stressing her difference by positing that she is not interested in local young men who only tend to drink. She does not consider the possibility of marrying a local in the future, or at least it does not attract her at this moment. That is why the theme of escape from the village features consistently in her narration:

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Vera: In general people here are vile … they are too evil, I think. O.: Why? Vera: They are hard to get along with, it is hard to talk to them. There is lots of mutual misunderstanding among them, they do not try to understand you … They judge a lot and say only bad things about other people … it makes the life here hard. What is good about staying here is that there are lots of your relatives and I enjoy that, but there is nothing to do here. Sometimes I feel it is just unbearable to stay here because of everyday routine and the same picture every day.

Here Vera presents herself as confined within the locked circle of ‘vile and evil people’ and trapped within her inability to escape. The only possibility for escape that Vera creates while narrating her self is to leave for the city in the near future and attempt to settle there. Her portrayal of local people as ‘wicked and evil’, ‘gossiping and speaking about people only bad things’ also incorporates Vera’s knowledge and experience of people’s attitudes towards herself. The starting point in this search for some sense of redemption is education, and this is how Vera elaborates on it: O.: What do you think education gives to a person? Vera: I think … knowledge and money … with education you can grow to be a person [chelovek, a human] and be occupied as you like … well, something like this. At present everyone wants to get education, for example, all my classmates. O.: Do you think it was always like this? Vera: I think in the past, I mean in the recent past, young people did not strive to get education … they were not inspired by education, i.e., they did not think about making a career [podnyatsa] … Now, I am sure that all my classmates, lets say, plan to get higher education … They want to graduate well from school … For them to have education is a huge advantage, first of all, because of money. Earlier, young people thought that they did not need education … and whatever happened … if they failed to enter an institute or not, it did not matter … when they gave up studying at school they were not bothered with it, they were not worried about it … They were satisfied working somewhere in the village or staying in the forest. Now, reindeer herding is not as profitable as it used to be. It is better to get education now and be independent.

The literal translation of the term podnyatsa is to be raised or lifted but here the meaning is to acquire social and economic significance. In one of my conversations with Vera’s mother, Praskovya, she complained about contemporary youth being too ambitious: At present everyone wants to have higher education. When we were leaving school none of us even thought about going to university, and we thought that the sal-

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ary of reindeer herders was the highest of all occupations we had in the village at that time. Teachers and doctors with higher education received a lower salary than them. We were happy without higher education.

So Vera’s aspiration to have a diploma in higher education and be advanced, cultured and progressive appears to be distinctly different from the aspirations of her mother’s generation in their youth. Praskovya told me about the decision of her classmates to go for reindeer herding straight after graduation from school and indeed she worked in the forest for more than five years until she became pregnant with her first daughter, Vera, and decided to settle in the village. Praskovya’s understanding is related to changes in the perception of the job of a reindeer herder among local people since 1990s. The decline of the reindeer herding industry, with unpaid salaries and inability of the herders to pay for basic everyday needs, which happened in the 1990s, has changed the attitude of young people towards this occupation. So the occupations of teacher and doctor, which previously were not well paid, became more profitable compared to being a reindeer herder or a tent-keeper. Furthermore, Vera’s discussion on the possibilities of going into reindeer herding is framed by the opposition between the spaces of the forest and the village. She does not see herself as being married to a reindeer herder and staying in the forest. According to Vera, it is difficult for her to accommodate her sense of self in the setting of the forest. She reflects on it as follows: O.: Have you thought about going for reindeer herding? Would you like to be, for example, a tent-keeper or the wife of a reindeer herder? Vera: Now, reindeer herding is declining. Lots of reindeer are getting lost … if reindeer herders looked after reindeer properly, reindeer herding flourishes. But now it is declining. O.: Why? Vera: First, there is the constant loss of reindeer. Then, herders do not look after them properly. They do not work as hard as older herders did. O.: What is your opinion about young reindeer herders? Vera: If you look at young reindeer herders, I find them kind of backward. They lag behind everything. When they are back from the forest they don’t have anything to talk about … I mean … whatever you ask them they answer: ‘I don’t know.’ They are not talkative, and they are bad-tempered. When they get drunk they start asking if you respect them or not, sometimes they shout at you: I’ll kill you … and stuff like that … then, reindeer herders do not express themselves and they are passive, I mean they are not active, they are passive observers.

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She does not reply directly to my question of whether she would go and work in the forest, but the way she expresses the unattractiveness of reindeer herding for her is evident. Vera’s position of viewing reindeer herding as declined and backward is very much a rhetoric of kontora politics invented in the Soviet time. Her reference to young reindeer herders as unable to be productive because of their constant loss of reindeer is very much an expression of a discourse which stems from the Soviet past, and more precisely from the mode of socialist production conceptualized in terms of figures of loss and gain (Humphrey 1998; Anderson 2000: 55–73; for a critique see Vitebsky 2005: 243–54). In other words, Vera voices the whole genre of socialist production reports, which was deployed within the hierarchical premises of kontora and the space of the village (see Chapter 1). And her depiction of herders as silent and passive derives from a classic Soviet rhetoric of ‘civilization’ (Vitebsky 2005:194–5). The rhetoric of planning strategy, based on the Soviet concept of progress which operates around the discourse of ‘the small peoples who have not yet climbed up the evolutionary ladder’ (Slezkine 1994: 319), also shapes Vera’s understanding of the situation with reindeer herding. It is worth mentioning that Vera is a member of the local family of Porotayev, who enjoyed the era of pokazukha most of all. The Porotayev family was chosen by the authorities to perform as an exemplar of a civilized, educated and cultured family of reindeer herders for exhibition before foreign tourists. However, in fact at the time of Soviet pokazukha some representatives of this family could be seen as the most spoilt and corrupted by kontora politics in exchange for such social benefits as the highest salaries, the best housing in the village, paid holidays at famous Black Sea resorts, etc. As kontora’s closest ally, Vera’s aunt Evgenya Porotayeva often performed as his deputy at the regional and district levels. Thus, Vera has a strong background for reproducing this discourse and inherits her aunt’s view of herders. Vera’s picture contrasts with the idea of agency that is expressed in the story of Tonya. Her reference to young reindeer herders as passive, shorttempered, backward and reserved strikingly contrasts with the ways Tonya conceptualizes human interaction with the space of the forest. The other reason that Vera is not attracted to the idea of going into reindeer herding is that she might not see any potential in a relationship with a herder who has little to offer her in connection to her expectations for the future, i.e., cosy house, job in a company and life in the city. Instead, she would have a tent warmed by a wood-burning stove, a herd of reindeer in need of constant care and attention, harsh weather conditions, and the absence of any conveniences including TV, video or electricity. The issue that arises from this conversation with Vera is very much a part and parcel of the situation analysed in an account of the Eveny rein-

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deer herders of Sebyan (Vitebsky and Wolfe 2001). According to Vitebsky and Wolfe the separation of genders has led to the situation where the land and reindeer herding camps have become largely dominated by the male population, whereas the village has been turned into the centre of the women’s world, even if the village is not ultimately dominated or controlled by women. ‘Many women say that life in the camps is not civilized (tsivilizovannoe) or cultured (kul’turnoe). In the camps, it is impossible to wear elegant leather boots and clothes flown in from the city’ (Vitebsky and Wolfe 2001: 88–9). I understand Vera’s attitude towards reindeer herders as an implication of these particular gender relations originating in the Soviet past, and the kind of young woman she has become in the course of her village upbringing, as opposed to the case of the forest girl, Tonya. At this point the discussion turns to the actual preparation for her moving to and staying in the city: O.: Does anyone prepare you for the life in the city? Vera: my mum does not instruct me much … She gives me advice and I’ll try to remember it … But my cousin Tanya says that if I manage to study in Yakutsk I have to avoid guys from Topolinoye, because they always try to persuade you to drink. Take you out to get drunk or something like that. That is why I want to leave for a different city, not Yakutsk … I don’t think I’ve got good friends here; I’ve got friends but they are not real friends. But I have brothers and sisters and it is not interesting to hang around with them. All my cousins of my age have plans to leave for education. O.: Do you have friends among your classmates? Vera: My group is fine but I am not really close to them.

I have already discussed lack of parental pressure and instruction in the earlier section; however, Vera’s testimony also shows this particular aspect of forest pedagogy. Vera’s mother was brought up in the forest and was employed as a reindeer herder for a long time. So the upbringing that Praskovya received was in the forest type of training in which she had to discover the right ways and work out what to do on her own in order to arrive at the right knowledge. Hence it is evident that the knowledge and skills she has, as well as her parental attitude, cannot meet and does not correspond to the context and conditions of her daughter’s future life in the city. Praskovya has not experienced this life herself. Thus, Vera will be left on her own to discover what life in the city involves. Everything may work in the right way in the forest environment, but definitely not in the city where she will need all sorts of protection and instruction for her own safety. Here we may observe how independent

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forest learning clashes with official school pedagogy and does not allow a young person to adjust effectively to life in the city anymore, or prepare a young person for life in the forest. Vera’s motif of moving out of the village emerges as the most prominent future life-trajectory in her narrative which is spatially oriented towards the city. By opposing and turning herself away from the space of the village she emphasizes her anticipation of escape to a totally new space. Six years passed and I learned that Vera finished school in 2004 and left for the city the same year. She finished the course in one of the technical schools in the city and now works as a shop assistant in a town near the city. She married a man from a different Siberian region and they now have one child. She has never returned to the community since she left, and seems to be happy staying where she is now. Although she never became a detective, the kind of life she was narrating in her future autobiography has been fulfilled: she moved out of the village and now lives in a different town, she married a man from outside her native community and she indeed has one child. As it has emerged, the imagined life she was narrating when she was an adolescent girl turned into her life in the present. Moreover, it seems as if she knew what would happen to her in the next six years. As in Tonya’s case it seems as if the act of her narration set out the scenario of future events to which she was drawn like a metal attracted to a magnet with no possibility of escape. Now I would like to introduce my next character, Grisha.

Grisha Grisha is a sixteen-year-old boy and, unlike Vera, comes from a complete family. His father, Afanasy, is a local Eveny and his mother, Lutsia, is an ethnic Sakha. Grisha’s parents met when they were studying at Yakutsk Veterinary Institute in the early 1980s. After graduation from the institute Afanasy decided to come back, and he brought his young wife with him to Topolinoye. Since that time they have stayed in the village. Afanasy is employed as a driver at the local heating station and Lutsia works at the hospital. In a way, the life-trajectory of Grisha’s father has followed the pattern that we observe among the forest children when they envisage return to the native community with their own marriage partners, whom they bring from outside. However, I have not questioned Afanasy on this matter and do not know whether the agenda of his own return was similar to these children’s ideas about their own future. When I asked Grisha to write or tell me his future autobiography, he refused to write the essay, but agreed to give me an interview and speak about his future during the conversation. Therefore, Grisha’s account consists only of an oral version. What struck me in his account are his

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views on the space of the village, and specifically his detailed knowledge of interpersonal conflicts within the community and the ebb and flow of existing factions. This is how he tells me what he thinks about the village: Grisha: I think here people are fed up with each other. Every day is all the same, the same picture, the same faces. You get tired of it. People are tired of each other and they often fight with each other. In most cases men can start fighting without any reason. That is why I don’t really want to stay here after I finish school. This is a hole [‘dyra’, from Russian, as the English a ‘boring place’, usually used to define abandoned peripheries in Russia] … This village is too distant from the centre [the city of Yakutsk]. I wish there were villages not far away from our settlement. So that we could communicate with them as happens in central districts of the Republic. We have to pay a lot of money to reach other places, even Khandyga. It is hard to reach other places. In this sense it is hard to stay here. O.: But there are some good things too for you down here? Grisha: The good thing about the village is that there are many relatives here. I can go and stay with my grandmother or auntie. They are always nice to me.

His understanding of the village as a hole or dyra is consonant with the feelings of Vera, in which she emphasizes how boring life in the village is. In the same vein, Grisha considers the village as a too familiar and boring place with no prospects for his future and no chances for a vibrant and interesting life. This kind of life can be found, in his belief, in the city. Grisha eloquently emphasizes the remoteness and isolation of the village and the unavailability of transport, which, as I have established in Chapter 1, disappeared in the early 1990s. Grisha: In the future I would like to live in the city. There are more people in the city and that is why it is much more exciting to stay there. O: What would you like to do in the city? Grisha: I would like to sit in the office in a big arm-chair and I would like to be employed as a manager. I just want to live in a big and beautiful house like a villa. I want to have a car. It does not matter what city, I just need to stay in a city. My dream is to have my own family. I want to have three children and an intelligent and beautiful wife. This is what I dream about.

Grisha’s orientation towards the city is expressed eloquently here and he is explicit in defining the city as a space which promises a different social world, and especially new and stimulating social relations. To get educated and stay in the city is a common wish for most of the village adolescents. However, what it is to be educated and stay in the village nowadays is clearly reflected in Grisha’s thoughts about people’s relationships in the village.

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O.: What does it mean for you to get higher education? Grisha: I think educated people are more likely to get good and high-paid jobs. They do not do jobs which require hard physical work … they work sitting in a room. O.: What do you think about those local people who have received a diploma of higher education? Grisha: They become unapproachable, which means they lose the simplicity that they used to have, then they lose friends … They get spoilt when they get access to finances and power.

He sees the benefits of being educated in the prospect of having a better life. For Grisha, education is an asset, which like any kind of material capital may spoil its owner and make him lose good human qualities. At this point he switches to the village people at present, which leads our discussion into the tension between educated and uneducated people in the village. He discusses what happens when a local person gains higher education: Grisha: I think people here are uneasy with each other. Everyone is on his/her own. There is no solidarity among people. They are kind of reserved, tense or highly strung. They rarely greet each other … not friendly, really … They have been brought up in a strange way. O.: What qualities don’t you like in a local person? Grisha: I don’t like it when a person considers him or herself superior to anyone else. Also when a person does not respect his elders. O.: Could you please specify the meaning of superiority, i.e., whom are you referring to? Grisha: Well, in our village these are people who have not been educated for a long time and when they receive higher education they get really obnoxious about their high achievement, i.e., about getting higher education. They all tend to feel superior after that.

Grisha’s view is striking, since this situation stems from the Soviet past when the older generation of Eveny were categorized as a lawless and backward class as opposed to educated newcomers and young educated personnel who were employed at the kontora office and village administration. In a way Grisha has explicated the social paradox of Soviet educational policy. The Soviet educational system meant to erase inequality and any kinds of social stratification. Instead, it produced a situation where a diploma of higher education became a tool that allowed one to vaunt one’s own advancement over others. Grisha claims that this contributed to the creation of yet another social hierarchy. This hierarchy is built on

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the availability of a certificate of higher education that plays a crucial role in the acquisition of what is inaccessible for the uneducated, i.e., a position as an administrator or an accountant. While talking about local educated people, the discussion turned to the theme of injustice, specifically in relation to uneducated reindeer herders: O.: What do you mean by injustice? Have you heard about injustice in the village? Grisha: Yes, I did. I heard about it. Well, I heard that our reindeer herders … While they are in the forest they trust other people to collect their salary, i.e., poluchit’ dengi po doverennosti. They write and sign a letter where it is indicated that they trust their salary to be issued to a certain person. Maria was entrusted with receiving the annual salary of a woman who was working as a tent-keeper in the forest. Maria received this tent-keeper’s money but consumed it for her own needs. That tent-keeper was left without money and she cannot do anything because she always stays in the forest. I think it’s evil of Maria to do such things … I think there is lots of cheating going on in there … what they do first of all, they cheat children who herd reindeer during the summer holiday. They work as hard as any mature reindeer herder but they are paid extremely low … a tiny amount of money and they are always cheated.

Here, I find Grisha’s observations of the corruption among the administration personnel quite revealing as they unfold his understanding of kontora hierarchies and the kind of social relations this situation produces in the village. Grisha’s awareness of village politics also extends to the politics at school, i.e., relations among his classmates and school children. O.: Do you think all of your group mates are friends? Grisha: No, I don’t think so. We are not that united. Ira Budisheva spoils the picture by talking behind your back. For example, Kolya and me are friends so she has told him that I am not the right person to be friends with. She is kind of mean. That is why people are not that united because of her gossip … They are kind of jealous of each other as of all people in Topolinoye. For example, some of the children went to Vladivostok to the famous centre where children spend their holidays, it is called ‘Ocean’. When they left, Kolya said: Why was it them who got selected for this trip and vacation at one of the Pacific ocean resorts? They do not deserve it … How can they be better than myself? O: Would you be interested in going to ‘Ocean’ yourself? Grisha: Yes, I would enjoy this trip without doubt. The only thing is that … the children who have been sent there were all relatives [of the administration].

In the same way as he discussed kontora politics, Grisha is concerned about the distribution of resources: what one deserves, who is better and who is worse, why some get resources whereas others do not. His detailed descriptions echo the social world of the village where conflicts are gener-

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ated by the system of distribution of resources by kontora people who in most cases follow their own interests and ambitions. He is aware of his parents’ conflicts and their sense of injustice, so this is what makes him so involved in understanding who gets what. In the context of the village, children do not have the same kind of tropes as in the forest. The idea of trust is differently charged and generally revolves around different associations and affiliations. Grisha expresses it through his understanding of kontora politics. This is what he has learned about this social world and how he develops the constituents of his social self. In the course of my study I wondered what salient experiences a village child goes through, as opposed to what a forest child experiences in the context of the forest. What could serve as an equivalent in the context of the village for the events such as the first hunt that takes place in the forest? So in the course of our discussions we eventually reached the point at which Grisha recollected the most memorable events in his life. This is the point when our discussion turned to his ideas about faith and religion: O.: Do you believe in feeding the fire, spirits or God? Grisha: Well, yes … I started to believe in it when my father and I were coming back from spring hunt. It was a highly risky situation. I think when you are in a situation of danger you start addressing God, spirits, whatever you call it. On the way back our truck fell deep into freezing water. My father was afraid that the truck would be overwhelmed and that the engine might stop working in the middle of the river because we had not fixed and prepared the vehicle so that it was in good working condition. At that moment I started praying and asking the gods to prevent the engine from failing. I think it was a miracle that we reached the opposite bank. At that moment I felt that God or some other spirit exists, or there is a certain force which helps us … Sometimes I think about accepting or converting to a religion. For example, Christianity … I think when it is really bad … when you despair and there is no hope, faith can help.

Grisha’s account of experiencing a life-threatening situation offers another dimension in understanding his perception of two spaces. His ideas about God and faith are shaped through this experience of anxiety and danger, which happened to take place on a hunting trip where he was together with his father. If a regular forest child goes through his or her own experiencing of the power of Bayanay, which thereafter engages the child in a life-long relationship with the Master of the Forest, in the case of a village boy such as Grisha, who makes no more than a brief excursion into the forest, his understanding of the situation leads him to consider the possibility of being converted to Christianity. His ideas about a faith that helps in despair and the absence of hope appear different from what forest adolescents were telling me about their experience in the forest. In their

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stories they go through various sorts of situations which require survival skills in the forest, but neither of them put the issue of faith in the way Grisha has just done. If the forest children acquire survival skills and knowledge of how to deal with spirits and the Master of Forest, in the village a child faces the necessity of making his or her own connections out of available resources, for example the media, newspapers, books, TV shows and nationally emerging views on religion. In relation to the discussion of what person one is becoming while growing up in the village, I suggest that the space of the village, its social world, the settings of school and other village institutions, shape a certain worldview. As I have shown, Grisha and Vera deploy different tropes for expressing themselves in comparison to the forest adolescents whose accounts will be featured in Chapter 5. Injustice and mistrust have become prominent elements in the narratives of both the village adolescents and mark their distinctive perception of the space of the village. Both Vera and Grisha aspire to leave the village for the city. In their narratives the motif of return to the native community has not been articulated in the same way as in forest adolescents’ stories. Instead, what their narratives emphasized was conflicts and antagonism, distrust and cheating. Grisha’s response to the question of faith seems consonant with a typical village child longing for a new, fresh and pure experience in another space, i.e., the space of the city. When I visited the community in 2010 I inquired about what had happened to Grisha since 2004. I learned from his relatives that he left the village as soon as he finished his studies at local school and entered a university course in the city. He received a diploma in engineering and was employed in a company supplying electricity that is located in the city. He also married a girl from another district of Sakha Republic and now lives in the city. It seems that his wish to get educated, live and have his own family in the city came true. As in his discussion of the future, his envisioned movement towards the space of the city was indeed accomplished. There are several important threads that have been consistently weaving through the narratives of three characters who were expressing them in the frameworks of distinct and often divergent spatial and social experiences. Their accounts allowed us to observe the ways they narrate their own future life-stories and how three adolescents are negotiating their own social positions vis-à-vis others while dialogically communicating voices and positions from their own external social worlds (Bakhtin 1981; Shuman 1986, 2005). One of the identifiable threads is their future spatial orientation. While Tonya’s account is shaped around her longing for the space of the forest with her parents, her family reindeer herd and her sense of agency, Vera and Grisha look forward to their departure for the space of the city where

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they expect to acquire a social status and power which they see as unattainable in the village (they do not even consider the forest). Moreover, Tonya’s narrative reflects a dualism between a good, kind forest and a harsh, corrupt village; whereas Vera and Grisha repeat the same dualism but cannot imagine going to the forest as a purifying site, and so have to posit the city as a (totally new kind of) place for escape and redemption. Thus, three adolescents’ renditions of their selves in their narrated futures demonstrated how the social experiences of these spaces feed into differing notions of personhood. It implies that each part of this total social space is associated not only with a different kind of life trajectory, but also with the formation of a different kind of person. Another important point for our further discussion is the fulfilment of these future autobiographies six years later. If right after my fieldwork, in 2003–2004, I naively perceived adolescents’ future autobiographies as only products of their imaginations and individual representations of their social world, after my revisiting their case-studies I realize that at the time of their narration in front of me they were foreshadowing nearly everything that would happen to them in the next six years. That is to say, those essays and narratives were a property of some primary realm of which neither my characters nor myself were consciously aware. The six-year span between the moments of the children’s narration of the future autobiographies and their current lives shifted my understanding of this material in a profound way, as over these years the future life scenarios narrated at my request have gradually moved into the stage of fulfilment. Due to the current situation of social despair, poverty, collapse of local infrastructure and isolation as a result of dismantling the transport system, one would have thought that everything imagined and dreamed by the Eveny youth would have easily gone wrong as it happened in the last decade, particularly in the case of their parents’ generation when it was more often the case for failure than fulfilment (see Chapter 6). In this light it might be argued that the fulfilled fantasies are simply an outcome of the limited choices that narrowed the Eveny adolescents’ visions of the future and it was their very realistic assessments of possible future events which indeed proved accurate. But I would not reduce the relationship between prediction and fulfilment down to the calculative character of the adolescents’ expectations from the future which would make the causal link between the two unjustifiably linear and too straightforward. I would rather suggest that the Eveny adolescents’ visions of the future struck an extraordinary balance between agency and constraint, i.e., their wishes for the future respected constraints of the situation and yet they belonged to the realm of imagination. In other words their imagined futures were conceived and worked within the local repertoire of restraints and possibilities, but their fulfilment should not be viewed as automatic or guaranteed.

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Instead of viewing this as a calculation or mere coincidence I would rather see it as a result of these three adolescents’ forward-looking nature of narration and the act of envisioning future events, closely intertwined with the Eveny concept of djuluchen (see Chapter 2). It seems as if the act of their narration set out the scenario of future events to which they were drawn with no possibility of escape. In other words, the future autobiographies narrated six years ago had left, so to speak, an imprint on the pathway of their destinies to which they were drawn and which they had to follow. The act of speaking or orally pronouncing their anticipations from the future and, more specifically, articulating their intention to move towards their future destinations have triggered a dormant component of their personhoods, i.e., djuluchen. Paradoxically, here the narrative which is often viewed as reflexive, fixed, typified and representational in most anthropological literature turns out to be a product of ongoing and unreflective presence in the world (Goffman 1969; Gullestad 1996a; Barber 2007). The predictive and foretelling quality of the future autobiography presents us with a different side of the narrative and, figuratively speaking, unlocks and opens the door into the domain of djuluchen. Following the Durkheimian notion of ‘sacred speech’ which, according to him, is ‘another powerful way of entering into relations with persons or things’ (2001 [1912]: 226, my italics), I suggest that these three adolescents’ relations with the future destinations had already been created in the act of contemplation and oral verbalization of their plans for the future. It was their own contemplations of future lifetrajectories and the act of oral speech that exhaled breath and, so to speak, released their djuluchens that moved the narrated prediction towards its fulfilment. As I explained in Chapter 1 and shall discuss thoroughly in Chapter 7, djuluchen is a partible component of human personhood which departs at the time of a person’s planning, contemplating and envisioning her or his movement in the immediate future, and, by departing towards the point of destination, commits its owner to catch up with it on his or her arrival. This is what happened when Tonya, Vera and Grisha started contemplating and verbalizing their plans for the future. Moreover, their engagement with the future through personal narrative, which took place exactly in their late adolescence generally characterized as a stage full of eager anticipations and hopes for the future, only intensified the effect of imaginative contemplation. By asking them to narrate their own future lives, I inadvertently made them send their djuluchens into future time and space. Their djuluchens worked literally as foreshadows or forerunners advancing themselves ahead of their owners into the future destinations. In other words djuluchens stretched forward in time and space ahead of their owners, who caught up with them a few

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years later. It turned out that they have been following what was already foretold in their future autobiographies.

Notes 1. After moving to the village, forest children return to their parents’ forest camps for a school break that starts in late spring and lasts until the end of summer. 2. These days, as I showed in Chapter 2, forest children do not stay in a boarding school but reside with their village relatives or at their parents’ village flats. 3. By the year of 2006 in the city of Yakutsk, the availability of mobile phone connection became widespread and nearly everyone had Nokia or Siemens phones at hand.

1. The village of Topolinoye

2. The school building

3. The central part of the village

4. Eveny toddler/khulingu

5. Eveny reindeer herders’ spring festival

6. Eveny reindeer herders arrived for spring festival

7. Young Eveny couple

8. Abandoned village building haunted by ghosts

9. Author in the field (Olga Ulturgasheva with her child informants)

Chapter 5

Reindeer and Child in the Forest Chronotope

Reindeer as a non-human component of child personhood By analysing stories narrated and written by young Eveny of various ages, I aim to show how the process of socialization among forest children and adolescents contributes to a particular construct of time and space, which I define as the forest chronotope. I draw on Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope – ‘the intrinsic connectedness of time and space’ (1981: 84) – within a narrative to map a child’s and adolescent’s imagined movements beyond present space and time to a better future. In my previous chapters I introduced the reindeer as the vital social and economic capital and central non-human component of the Eveny category of person. Now I would like to explore its position and role within Eveny children’s and adolescents’ social world and how it is envisaged in young Eveny future autobiographies. In order to start my discussion I would like to reproduce an old Eveny legend told by a local Eveny elder, which goes as follows: Once there was a time of famine, people were starving to death. In one family everyone died apart from a few children. These orphans had no food for a long time and only once they managed to hunt one partridge. They were eating that partridge for a while. And when they started sucking its bones it started raining. It was raining heavily for a long time. When the rain stopped, a colourful rainbow appeared in the sky. On that rainbow the orphans saw a white reindeer with golden antlers. The white reindeer walked down the rainbow and started feeding the children with its milk. This is how the white reindeer saved those orphans and thereafter they became reindeer people.

This actiological myth about the origin of reindeer people carries a very important ontological point for understanding the social and cultural significance of reindeer for the Eveny and, as you shall see, their younger

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generation. The myth about orphans and the reindeer that replaced their deceased parents and played the role of a nurturer and saviour epitomizes the essence of the proximity of relations between humans and reindeer. Moreover, the reindeer not only nurtures but also makes up human personhood as orphans are viewed both as human children and as reindeer calves. This myth bears a special significance for this discussion, since it eloquently highlights the nurturing and protective agency of a reindeer. As I have shown earlier, the Eveny view of child development is expressed in the terminology they use to identify developmental stages of a child and adolescent. I also highlighted that the reindeer participates in the construction of a child’s personhood as a ‘double soul’ or guardian of the child’s safety at the time when that child’s body is ‘open’, and it serves as an animal counterpart of a child’s human personhood throughout the earlier stages of the developmental process. Now, I attempt to show how a reindeer, a central element in the forest chronotope, serves as a developmental metaphor for a child’s and adolescent’s own expression of the process of growing up in their oral narratives and written future autobiographies. Following the Lévi-Straussian distinction between the metonymic and metaphoric proximity of animals to humans (1964: 27) I suggest that it is possible to observe two types of signification of human–reindeer relations among the Eveny. One is metonymic, i.e., the ‘double soul’ of a child or a guardian reindeer (khaevek), in which the mode of identification is analogous, and the other is metaphoric, i.e., reindeer as a developmental trope, which points at homologous categorization. The white reindeer with golden antlers from the aforementioned myth can be understood as one instance of the metonymic type of relations, since human orphans turn into the calves of white reindeer and later adopt their identification with the reindeer that nurtured them. Hence, two modes are featured in the Eveny conceptualization and differentiation of human–reindeer relations, but it is the metaphoric mode of a child’s relations to a reindeer that is deployed in the terminology of the stages of child development. This implies that the conceptual shift from a metonymic signification to a metaphorical one occurs when parents equate a developmental stage of a child with one of a reindeer calf. Thus, it is the developmental mode that switches metonymic proximity to metaphoric identification between a child and a reindeer within which the reindeer is viewed as a developmental metaphor. However, this does not imply that metonymic signification is abandoned altogether. Instead, I suggest Eveny switch between two modalities according to the scale of proximity. That is to say, they deploy metonymic categorization when it comes to signifying a reindeer as a ‘double soul’ or khaevek and move back to metaphoric when they parallel the developmental process of child and reindeer calf.

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In the children’s view the metaphoric signification becomes prominent when a girl or boy in early adolescence starts experiencing the process of learning through teaching, i.e., while receiving one’s own parents’ teaching as a child, one learns through being a teacher (of reindeer) oneself. This suggests that the two sets of human–reindeer relations, metonymic and metaphoric, do not exclude each other and can switch or move between each other rather than interact from two separate planes (see Descola 2006; Willerslev and Ulturgasheva 2012). Furthermore, the meaning of a reindeer and a young narrator’s relation to it moves from the domain of a child–reindeer identification to the sphere of human social relations, as the discussion moves into the stage of adolescence and the reindeer is featured as a key element of the social scenario of sharing. We shall see how in the course of extended or repeated narration children and adolescents evolve as moral persons by presenting how they learn to take care of others and value the care of others, in addition to exercising autonomy and performing agency in the setting of the forest. I shall discuss what role local sharing practices of borichaen (reciprocal sharing) and nimadun (unconditional gift-giving) associated with the space of the forest play in shaping a conceptual element of bringing wealth back to a native community in forest adolescents’ future life-stories. Recent works by anthropologists such as Christina Toren (1999) and Jean Briggs (1998) have substantially enriched our understanding of childhood by presenting the complexity of everyday child–adult interactions in different cultural settings, e.g., Fijian and Inuit, with a multiplicity of subtle messages to which a child is exposed in the process of socialization. However, apart from linguistic work carried out by Bambi Shieffelin among Kaluli children (Shieffelin 1990), during which they were looking at the ways children learn grammatical modalities of space and time, the process of the acquisition of culturally grounded spatiotemporal categories has not yet received detailed ethnographic study. In this work I am not attempting to address this underexplored area of study because this would require a research methodology derived from experimental psychology. However, here I am attempting to show how a child’s or adolescent’s narratives reflect the emergence of a spatiotemporal layout of the child’s social world and how this is manifested in the ways that a young narrator positions his or her own self within his or her own construct of time and space. I view Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope as helpful for understanding this ethnographic material. The core element of his theory, which has allowed me to exploit the concept of chronotope, is the idea of relationality (or relativity). This makes it possible to define what it is that a child or adolescent relates to in positioning the self within his or her own construct

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of time and space. The issue of orientation within the available construct of time and space becomes accessible for detailed consideration owing to this concept of chronotope, which I am using here in order to gain an insight into the lives of the younger generation of Eveny. By looking at accounts of the future written by children and adolescents, I address each author’s self and the ways she or he makes sense of his or her own social world. Further, in an attempt to disclose constituents of a child’s or adolescent’s selfhood, I explore what kind of chronotope each adolescent or child is deploying while narrating his or her own future, and how age affects the ways in which a narrator views and expresses his or her own self in a narrative. Here, I would like to show how forest children’s and adolescents’ accounts of their future lives are reproduced in particular frames of reference that refer to their own personally salient encounters and experiences – one in which the reindeer holds a special position. I understand selfhood as an anthropological category which implies a set of human perceptions and experiences and points to an individual’s awareness of a unique identity. According to Poole (2002): The self implies an understanding of the human being as a locus of experience, encompassing the experience a being of more or less distinctive ‘someone’ beyond one’s identity as a person. It is that conceptualized self which is the referent of such notions as ‘I’ (the subject and author of experiential states and processes and, thus, of thoughts, feelings, evaluations, motivations, and behaviours) and ‘me’ (the cognized and recognized object of my own and others’ attention). (2002: 843)

In this discussion we shall see a narrative as a primary source for unpacking each narrator’s self which comes into being through the act of narrating one’s life in the present and one’s future autobiography. We shall see how the course of child and adolescent development involves the process of concept formation in which a reindeer as a developmental trope moves from selfhood into a wider social domain of adult personhood as an adolescent starts participating in social practices of sharing. Here, I follow Mauss (2002 [1990]), Fortes (1987) and Strathern (1988, 1999), who view personhood as a composite of many relations. Following these authors, I view personhood as a fully relational and mutually constitutive condition which is attained and maintained through relationships not only with human beings but with things, places, animals and the spiritual features of the cosmos. In this chapter I shall also illustrate how Kirill, a forest boy in his late adolescence, emerges as a social being through his narration of the social practices through which his personhood is realized. I suggest that these social practices endow an adolescent with those characteristics of agency which render him or her as an agent capable of shaping social relations and affecting a social situation.

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Reindeer as child: Tonya on learning and teaching One late autumn afternoon on a village street I was on my way to school when I bumped into a local Eveny lady, the wife of a reindeer herder and mother of three. We greeted each other and after an exchange of news she asked me: ‘Did you see which direction my ankaechaer [reindeer calves] ran off in?’ I told her that I had not seen her children but I guessed that they must have run off to play somewhere around the village. I knew exactly which children she was asking about, her ten-year-old and twelve-year-old sons, because I taught them at school. In asking me about her children she put herself in a metaphorical comparison of a reindeer herder searching for the young reindeer that often escape from the rest of the herd and wander around on their own. On another occasion I was present when a great-grandfather, Mikhail, paid a visit to my friend Sveta, who had given birth to her second daughter a few months earlier. He entered her house and said: ‘Gae, tik mut hongachamut ichukaeli’ [Now, it is time for you to show me our small reindeer calf – hongachan].’ While addressing Sveta he referred to the new baby using the precise term for a baby calf – hongachan. If Mikhail had meant Sveta’s elder son, now eleven years old, he would have referred to him as ankaechaen, which is the kind of young reindeer described above. I view these instances from everyday life, in which children at particular ages are seen as reindeer calves at the parallel stage of development (see my discussion of ‘double soul’ in Chapter 2), as expressions of a metaphoric type of human–reindeer relation, i.e., that human child development is put in parallel with the life-cycle of a growing reindeer, and thus exemplifies how metaphoric categorization of child development operates in everyday life. In this conceptualization of the growing process of a child and a reindeer calf, the child is viewed as a reindeer calf. Its age is not counted literally but defined using the same terminology applied to the developmental stages of the reindeer. Appearance of antlers, and later the number of branches, signifies the reindeer’s degree of maturity. Grandparents will therefore refer to their youngest grandchild, generally between one and three years old, as hongachan (Eveny for a ‘newborn reindeer calf ’), while a young adolescent aged between eleven and thirteen would be referred to as aenkaechaen (‘a reindeer calf which is able to run’), regardless of gender. A fourteen- or fifteen-year-old would be called itaechaen – a two-year-old reindeer, equivalent to a youngster in middle adolescence. Female reindeer khati corresponds to a young unmarried woman, whereas the term for a male reindeer – yavkan – is a young male adult who is ready to reproduce.

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Both terms are therefore used to signify the stage of late adolescence and young adulthood. Moreover, it is important to note that Eveny’s concept of a guardian reindeer (khaevek) encompasses and distils human recognition of a reindeer’s protective agency which informs analogous or metonymic identification of a child with reindeer. In regards to the metaphorical mode of identification between child developmental process and a reindeer’s process of growing, Ingold in his discussion of the life-cycles of animals, plants and children relevantly suggested that: Temporal interlocking of the life cycles of humans and animals reflects greater reliance of humans on animals. The lives of domestic animals tend to be somewhat shorter than those of human beings, but not so short as to be of a different order of magnitude. There is, thus, a sense in which people and their domestic animals grow older together, and in which their respective life-histories are intertwined as mutually constitutive strands of a single process. (2000: 86)

In line with this, and drawing on local concepts of child development, I suggest that viewing the child as a reindeer reflects the mutually constitutive character of the relationship between humans and animals. Both humans and reindeer are regarded as fellow participants in one life-long process of constituting human personhood in which the close relation of a child with a reindeer plays a crucial role and appears central in childhood and adolescent socialization in the forest. I argue that this particular aspect shapes the child’s and adolescent’s understanding of the self and contributes to a particular construct of time and space, i.e., the chronotope in which forest children and adolescents operate while narrating their stories about the future. To give an idea of what the learning process in the forest involves and the ways in which a child acquires skills, I would first like to present the parents of a local adolescent girl, Tonya, whose detailed account is featured in Chapter 4. Here I want to show how Tonya’s mother and father, Polina and Vasily, reflect on the way in which Tonya acquired her reindeer herding skills in the forest: Vasily: When my daughter Tonya was a small girl I took her to look after our reindeer herd. She would watch what I did and she would repeat after me. I always tried to teach her to be a good reindeer herder. And now I am sure she is able to do a really good job in a herd on her own. Polina: What she has received from her father is an excellent visual memory. Exactly like her father, she can remember each reindeer in a herd. She would recognize a reindeer from a different herd – or a wild reindeer which suddenly joined our herd – and other tiny details. For example, last year she heard that some of our mature male reindeer were getting lost near the village. At that time we were in the village and we did not know which ones were lost. She went to see the herd and identified

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each missing reindeer. What is good is that she knows each reindeer in a herd as if it were a human. She already knew their names and their habits. That was so helpful. Vasily: All my children were brought up like this. They are really good at looking after reindeer. They are all good reindeer herders. They have acquired all the skills to work well in the camp. Polina: I think Tonya received a boy’s upbringing. This kind of training is more suitable for boys than girls. Her father took her on his hunting trips and she would hunt as if she was a boy. Then, she would train reindeer to be an uchak [a riding reindeer]. She would do the night watch with the herd. Actually, it is a man’s job to stand watch at night. Girls usually do this during the day.

The parents’ appreciation of Tonya’s agency is expressed here very eloquently. It also illustrates how an adolescent is viewed as a full actor, fully involved, knowledgeable and responsible. Their daughter’s performance of agency and her awareness of what it means to be responsible for a whole herd of reindeer effectively serve as a prerequisite for moral development in this social setting. What Vasily and Polina tell me about their daughter is an illustration of how in the course of childhood girls and boys learn the same hunting and herding skills, and the issue of gender and the related issue of labour division between female and male domains remain blurred until late adolescence (see my discussion of gender in Chapter 1). This is exemplified by the manner in which Tonya reflects on her own experiences in the forest. Here is an excerpt from a conversation I had with Tonya in which I was interested in her perspective as a learner and as one who is making an effort to meet the expectations of her parents: I started being responsible for the herd of reindeer when I reached the age of twelve. My cousin Dima [a boy] and I usually herd our reindeer on our own. Most of the grown-ups trust us with the whole herd and sometimes go hunting or visit relatives in the nearest reindeer herding camp. Reindeer usually behave quite independently and you always need to make sure they move in the direction you want. That is why you need to run very fast. It is hard to search for reindeer and run after them. Sometimes I used to cry because it was hard to run after them all the time, but I had no choice and had to run after them and chase them back to the camp. Once, the river was flooded. That flooding was scary but I and my cousin Dima knew that we had to chase our reindeer back and that we needed to cross the river, otherwise the reindeer would get lost and die. And I crossed that river even though I was really scared. The water was coming up so fast and it was frightening. Dima and I decided to split up so that we could get the herd back together as it had got dispersed on the opposite bank of the river. That day we simply could not collect the whole herd and some of the reindeer were lost. I think we were really ashamed that we didn’t manage to come back with all the reindeer. I felt bad that we lost reindeer.

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The next day, the reindeer that we had lost while doing our job were found by grown-ups, but still we were ashamed that it was not us who found them eventually. Although my parents trust me they worry about me a lot. If they see that I am late or have not come back in time, they usually come and check whether everything is fine.

Tonya articulates clearly the degree of autonomy she and her cousin are granted in order to complete the job. The part of the narrative that tells us how Tonya and Dima took a great risk in bravely crossing the flooding river illustrates the mode of life in the forest where one must be ready for sudden changes in the harsh environment. The children’s ability to respond quickly to the situation and to make effective decisions is honed by long practice spent mastering their herding skills. In the forest, children learn how to get the job done by actively observing and participating in the process. While doing this, children also learn to adopt their parents’ devotion to reindeer and their knowledge of all possible paths and the location of pastures. What I find remarkable is Tonya’s appreciation of her parents’ efforts to maintain the whole herd and their care for their own children. I believe that the kind of parent–child interaction that Tonya has just presented (i.e., joint involvement in dealing with a herd of reindeer) assists in the gradual transmission of knowledge from parent to child and in a child’s own sense of responsibility to the parents which is strongly reflected in their narrative of the future. In her discussion of Hageners in Papua New Guinea, Strathern wrote: Although at birth individuals lack full awareness of their humanity, the child grows into social maturity rather than being trained into it … As its body takes in food it responds to nourishment, acquires identity, relationships with others and eventually self-awareness. Consciousness of humanity comes to the child less through acquisition of skills, or even ability to keep rules, than through appreciation of what relationships with others involve. So in their development Hagen children are not thought as recreating the original domestication of men. They are less socialized than nurtured. (1980: 197–8)

In relation to ‘domestication’ and the metaphor of ‘nurturing’, I suggest that in Tonya’s case the process of skill acquisition goes hand in hand with the process of acquiring constituents of her own selfhood. In other words, Tonya’s relationship with the reindeer and her appreciation of her parents’ knowledge nurture her moral development and the process of becoming a person. From my observations and forest children’s accounts I realized that a crucial aspect in children’s practical mastery is learning through teaching. That is to say, learning goes hand in hand with the child’s own teaching or training of a reindeer. Children’s descriptions of how a reindeer has to

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be trained in order to get it harnessed embody a central concept of Eveny pedagogy in which a child acquires knowledge and skills through actual participation in the training process, both as teacher and as learner. This is how a sixteen-year-old girl explained how she trains an uchak: I have been taught since the age of ten how to ride a reindeer and how to teach it to be obedient so that it can be ridden. In order to teach a reindeer how to be an uchak you need to start first with making it get used to the rope. The chosen reindeer has to be tied to the rope for one night before the process of its actual training can get started. You need to be patient because it takes a while for it to get used, first, to a rope, then to a saddle and only later to a rider. For the first time you need to take this reindeer everywhere with you so that it gets used to following the rope on its neck led by a person. Then, after a while you put a saddle on its back. The first time a reindeer jumps and tries to get rid of it and starts bucking. When a reindeer starts getting used to a saddle, which takes some time, you make a first attempt to sit on its back, very slowly without fast movements, so that it is not irritated by any sharp movements. You need to jump lightly on its back and when sitting you make the reindeer move with a slight pressure on both of its sides with your legs. You should not kick its sides as you do with a trained reindeer, you have to start first with a light touch, not a kick. Again, it needs some time for a reindeer to develop reaction to kicks. You must not fall off when the reindeer tries to shake you from its back. If you fall off, the reindeer will get into the habit of throwing riders from its back. Moreover, your movements have to be exact and accurate so that a reindeer has to get your messages right.

I suggest that by teaching the reindeer, an adolescent acquires an inner or intuitive sense of the reindeer – its behaviour and its moods – as a creature similar to the adolescent’s own self. Moreover, by doing this the adolescent understands the importance of the ‘right’ ways of treating reindeer. The way a person treats a reindeer during training will affect the way this reindeer will treat its teacher who will ride it afterwards. In the same vein the way a parent or an adult treats a child or adolescent now will affect not only what sort of a reindeer herder but also what sort of a person this child will be and how it will treat its teacher, i.e., parent, in the future. Here, the object of one’s teaching, which stands for oneself, is an extremely sensitive and subtle animal, which responds to love just like a child. The way a trainer treats a reindeer directly affects the kind of creature it will become, just as the way a parent or teacher treats a child affects the kind of person he or she will become. To a certain extent this understanding of a reindeer’s responsiveness to the gentleness of a teacher is very important for understanding what constitutes a metaphorical identification of children and adolescents with reindeer, especially that between a reindeer’s loyalty towards its teacher and a child’s devotion to the parents and family’s herd as exemplified in Tonya’s narrative. Reindeer herders know that if a reindeer has been

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trained by a certain person, it is difficult to give it away to someone else’s herd, as this reindeer will escape from the new herd and return to its original owner. The element of an adolescent’s return to the family camp in the forest is a prominent feature of the forest adolescents’ future autobiographies, including that of Tonya, and therefore will be the subject of my discussion in Chapter 7. In his account of the Taimyr Evenki, another Tungus people closely related to the Eveny, David Anderson describes Evenki pedagogy as being unfamiliar to him because of the absence of overt instruction, tuition or words. As he explains: an apprentice is expected to learn by close observation and through experience … The ceaseless insults that the elders heap upon the young encourage humility, a knack for understanding through empathy, and an eye for subtleties of context. In this manner, each person discovers his own method of thinking through a problem instead of mimicking a procedure by rote. (Anderson 2000: 35)

This mode of teaching shares similar elements with the ways an Eveny child and adolescent is taught, particularly in the absence of instruction, tuition and formal words. However, Anderson’s interpretation differs significantly from my understanding of how a teacher and a learner interact with each other. The first step of a child in reindeer herding practice takes place under the careful and attentive eye of an experienced elder, a father or an uncle. Perhaps, when the learner is an adolescent girl and not an adult (as in Anderson’s case), the insults are replaced by an encouraging sense of camaraderie. The joint efforts of both elder and adolescent to get the job done add a sense of partnership to the whole process of learning and therefore raise an adolescent’s self-esteem and confidence in performance. The main principle in this method is to give the learner an opportunity to discover for him or herself the right ways of doing things. Children and adolescents are not often reprimanded for doing something wrong; instead, they are given time to do the job properly. David Lancy refers to such a mode of teaching as facilitation or acquisition of skills through imitation, i.e., ‘adults expect children to observe and attempt to imitate more mature levels of task performance’ (Lancy 2008: 170). Moreover, by means of involvement and children’s participation in the highly demanding activity of reindeer herding parents push their kids into the Vygostkian zone of proximal development (1978). However, if in Vygotsky’s account it is a child’s play that is crucial for a child’s advancement in learning, here it is participation in vital subsistence activity which serves as a precondition for such advancement. The result of this type of proximal development becomes the speed of learning process, i.e., rapid acquisition of knowledge and skills as well as the sense of social responsibility and a special knack for tiny details and features of animal behaviour.

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In contrast to the style of ‘teaching as facilitation’ in the forest, formal schooling differs strongly. Because the pedagogical form exercised in the forest is inconsistent with the formal educational methods of the school, tensions can arise when the forest child is transferred to the village school. This is especially true if a teacher does not easily understand the forest children. Teenagers may manifest this kind of tension in the high dropout rate from school at the age of fourteen and fifteen (some even leave at the earlier ages of ten or thirteen). In their discussion of different educational modes, both Bodenhorn (1988a, 1988b), who studied the Inupiaq, and Sarris (1993), who studied Kashaya Pomo, emphasized the link between the school and the expectations of the world from which schooling comes. The role of schooling is considered as a factor in the clash between native understanding of the process of learning and Western or white American systems of schooling. Richard Condon has also observed similar effects of formal schooling among Inuit of the Canadian Arctic and wrote that: Even though children know all of their classmates prior to the first day of school, the school nevertheless maintains characteristics of a strange and foreign institution. The child encounters a set of rules and regulations which governs his behaviour during school time. Probably, for the first time in his life, he is expected to abide by a rigid schedule and apply himself at tasks that are often tedious and boring. (1988: 79)

As this shows, the clash between two conceptually different systems of teaching and learning is revealed by the ways children narrate their experience in the forest. The crucial difference here is the way a child acknowledges the significance of a teacher’s knowledge and skills, while the teacher shows respect for a young learner and the elder recognizes a child’s agency in the process of the activities in the forest. In the forest, sixteen- and seventeen-year-old adolescents may do the job of an adult reindeer herder and be responsible for an entire herd of reindeer. This world may be perceived as warm and friendly for forest children where they feel good, but it is one which they will have to leave. Later in this chapter I shall show how a forest boy, Kirill, expresses his return to the forest through the idiom of ‘a magnetizing reindeer’. Based on Tonya’s own reflections, I suggest that the reindeer performs an active role in the whole process of learning and shapes her perception of the self. Moreover, Tonya’s father, as another participant in the whole process, plays a crucial role in regulating, directing and adjusting the intensity and pace of child–reindeer interaction. This multilayered mode of learning and teaching suggests that the child is both acquiring skills and gaining an appreciation of what this learning involves. It explains the point I made in relation to forest children’s experience of village schooling, when this pro-

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cess of learning is no longer regulated and gently adjusted but is replaced by a harsh teacher, which makes a forest child’s experience of schooling stand out unpleasantly against the learning experience in the forest.

The forest chronotope in narrative As emerged from the chapter in which these stories are presented, the central position of reindeer in forest children’s and adolescents’ self-perception receives vivid expression in their stories about the future and is the central standpoint for their spatial orientation in that future. Moreover, the age affects the ways they reproduce their own chronotopic map in which future events and actions are envisaged. To illustrate this, I would like to introduce essays written by forest children, Vitya and Ilona (both ten years old) and a girl in her early adolescence, Kira (thirteen). All three were brought up in a reindeer herders’ camp where their families live most of the time. (As we saw in Chapter 1, forest children go to school from the age of six or seven and go back to the forest only for school holidays.) Due to unavailability of the oral narratives by Vitya, Ilona and Kira, my discussion will only involve analysis of the content of their written stories, i.e., themes, motives and spatio-temporal framework or chronotope, whereas the account of a seventeen-year-old boy, Kirill, will give a fuller picture and will show how an adolescent boy who received training and upbringing in the forest reflects on his life in the present and writes and speaks about his own future. I shall start my analysis with Vitya, who is a ten-year-old boy. According to the Eveny theory of child development he is still viewed as an ‘open body’. The discussion of djuluchen which I highlighted in previous chapters as an attribute of ‘closed body’ will be relevant only for the casestudies of boys and girls in their late adolescence. Even though I did not have a chance to ask him to present an oral version of his future life, I find his essay incredibly rich in both content and form. This is how he wrote it: I want to be a reindeer herder and want to have two snowmobiles. I want us to have more reindeer, more fish and mountain rams. I don’t want our reindeer to get lost. I want there to be more wild reindeer to hunt and more lakes with good pastures around them. I want to be a pilot and fly to our reindeer herders’ camp. I really wish summer to be longer than it is now. Now, I have got nine reindeer. Once we were surrounded by wolves and we went to check their footprints. And when we were looking for their tracks we found a reindeer which had been gnawed by wolves. They had already gnawed it. Also, in summer one of our reindeer got crushed under a huge falling rock. It happened when our reindeer were walking on high mountains.

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Vitya’s account directly reproduces life in the forest, and he relates his future life to the forest and a herd of reindeer. The search for lost reindeer, the condition of pastures, checking footprints of wolves, snowmobiles, mountain rams and flying by helicopter to a reindeer herders’ camp – these are all themes from everyday life in the forest. Vitya’s chronotope is an unbroken projection of his own present self into the future; it embraces reindeer and the space of the forest as the constituents of his selfhood. Vitya moves within his own time dimension, shifting from his view of the future back into the present as its foundation or template. When reindeer were the subject of his thoughts he also moved freely to recollections about the past, particularly his search for reindeer and his concern for the safety of reindeer endangered by wolves. Vitya’s sudden switch from the temporal framework of the future to the dimension of the past can be viewed as narratological and temporal bricolage where the selection of words, phrases and terms as well as a switch between temporal dimensions may be arbitrary and yet are derived from possibilities that are already there in the conceptual elements available for a child (Lévi-Strauss 1966; Doniger 2009). I consider that the bricoleur manner of Vitya’s narration simultaneously expresses his synchronic and diachronic connections of his social experience to the future. However, it is still possible to follow this boy’s train of thought through his movement within his own chronotope, in which his point of connection between times always appears to be a reindeer. Another forest child of the same age, Ilona, writes her future life story in a way that also emphasizes her connectedness with the forest: In the future I want to be a veterinarian in order to treat reindeer. I shall travel and visit all the reindeer herders’ camps and brigades. I want to be presented with a calf – tugut bugdichan. Also, I want to have my own negut and uchak. I shall work in the forest and I’ll have lots of kaetek [reindeer calves]. [To clarify: tugut bugdichan is a type of calf. When you are presented with this kind of calf it means that you will have good luck in building up a big herd of reindeer.]

In this story, Ilona also relates her future life to reindeer and gives a detailed description of the sort of animals she wants to have. The negut and uchak are the most highly valued reindeer in a herd. They are the most domesticated, having been trained specifically to serve the needs of humans. Negut are used to pull sledges and uchak is a reindeer that have been specially trained for riding. Both undergo long periods of training, which requires great patience and consistency from a teacher. This is why ownership of these particular reindeer is the goal of most reindeer herders after their years of effort.

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Her wish to be presented with a reindeer calf – tugut bugdichan – with magic abilities to bring luck (a detail known only by forest children) expresses eloquently the significance and centrality of reindeer in her social world. The involvement of this sort of reindeer calf in her future life represents her domain of intentions in the present and her sense of the self projected into the future. Her reindeer calf in the story is an element of future hope since it is not yet a proper reindeer but has the potential to perform as a promising and active agent for the sake of the wellbeing of the herd. If we follow the Eveny view of child development, we shall see that Ilona is narrating exactly the developmental stage she is currently passing through. That is to say, she is that reindeer calf who – in her passage to maturity – will bring luck to her family’s herd. Another important feature of her narration about the reindeer calf is that the connection, which Ilona’s tugut bugdichan brings up, is metaphoric. This suggests that although the identification of child and reindeer is inherently analogous and metonymic, it is expressed and presented as metaphoric and homologous in Ilona’s narrative. This illustrates that the inherent metonymic mode of identification finds its inverted expression in the written narrative and suggests that metonymic and metaphoric modes of identification depend on the vantage point of a young narrator and its proximity to a reindeer at the moment of narration or writing an essay. Furthermore, both Vitya and Ilona come from families of reindeer herders and have spent their early childhood in the forest. These ten-yearold forest children still view the forest as the world of their future lives and highlight the importance of their relationship with reindeer in the present and its potential in the future. By the age of thirteen, forest adolescents tend to structure their own written stories according to a further common sequence: departure of the protagonist, who must stay somewhere outside the native community in order to gain education, wealth and experience; after being absent for some time the protagonist returns to bring wellbeing to the people who stayed behind or to change the situation for the better. To illustrate this briefly, I have chosen the story written by Kira (a thirteen-year-old girl), which is typical of this type of composition and textual presentation of the self. This example incorporates some of the aforementioned themes and reflects the common structure of the written versions: First, I’ll graduate from school. I shall go to the city and try to further my studies. If I am successful in my entrance exams, I shall study to be a veterinarian. I started dreaming of being a veterinarian when I was in 4th grade. When I achieve this profession, I’ll come back to the village. I’ll build a house where I’ll treat all domestic animals, especially dogs and cats. When I was in the camp I was taught how to heal reindeer and dogs. I know how it is done. I want to build a house for animals

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because I want them to have a shelter. In the future I’ll definitely have a dog – it is going to be a St Bernard. I’ll take care of a new puppy as I took care of my old dog. In the future I’ll go to the camp and I’ll treat sick reindeer. I want this village to be changed for the better. I really want to come back and organize my own reindeer herding obschina [cooperative] here in order to help my parents, relatives and the close friends I grew up with.

The prominent compositional elements of this story are the points of Kira’s departure and return. The beginning of the story is common to the stories written by this age group and above; practically all children of this age start their own narration with school graduation and departure for the city. At this age, the forest adolescents’ ideas of the future start to resemble those of the village kids in their teens. They go to the city to get educated, but at this point their visions of the future start to diverge. The village adolescents settle in the city or leave for other places, whereas those like Kira come back to a native community. The element of return is conceptualized by Kira as a necessity in order to bring about change in the community, or perhaps even to rescue it. She views this change in terms of a new reindeer herding obschina (a recent alternative to the state farm, which represents a reindeer herding unit organized autonomously by a group of herders), which will help her family and friends. As the discussion in Chapter 1 has shown, most of the forest children who wrote their stories did so with the explicit goal of changing the community’s life for the better. They plan to heal reindeer, help reindeer herders and set up new institutions such as obschinas and a veterinary service for animals. This rescuing of the community, family or a herd in conjunction with the hero’s return serves as the culmination of both written stories as well as most oral stories produced by the forest children from this age onwards. In this respect we can look back on the stories written by the ten year olds as quite straightforward expressions of themselves, unlike the future life-story written by seventeen-year-old Kirill. This year I finish school. I see myself in the future as follows. I’ll go first to a city and stay there. I want to work as an accountant in an accounting department. I want to have a country house while staying in the city. I shall have a good family. I shall take a break some time and leave for the forest. I also want to serve in the army and serve in the special [commando] unit called spetsnaz. I want to marry a beautiful, rich woman and have three children: two boys and one girl. I want to have my old friends around and meet new friends too. I want to spend some time abroad. I shall spend several years there then come back home to Topolinoye and work as a teacher of computer literacy. I want my younger brothers to study well and after school I want them to enter Yakutsk University. After that I want them to work in the State Duma [regional parliament]. I want my sisters to study to be doctors.

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In this story it is no longer easy to identify that Kirill is a child coming from the forest since it is not as clearly indicated as in the stories of younger children considered earlier. He relates mostly to his life in the city and only sometimes to the forest (and even then, not in such intimate detail). To understand the personality behind this story I shall provide a brief account of this boy’s background. Kirill is an orphan whose parents worked in one of the local brigades of reindeer herders. His father died many years ago in a violent fight, and a few years later his mother was found frozen to death a few miles from the village during one extremely cold winter. After his parents’ death, Kirill spent most of his childhood in the forest with his uncle and aunt. When he is in the village he stays with his aunt Klavdia, who takes care of him, but during school holidays he usually leaves for the forest. After reading his essay I had several conversations with him. Although these revealed that the written account of Kirill’s future life is more distanced and far-fetched than the future which Kirill narrates in conversation, in both oral and written versions he emphasizes his willingness to come back to the native community. He speaks of (compulsory) army service, possible failure to get further into higher education, and eventual return to the village. That is to say, the trajectory of his movement in the imagined future culminates in his return to the point of his departure, i.e., his home community. In the oral version he concluded his story by stating that their herd of reindeer and the forest may pull him back. He put this most eloquently by using the Russian word magnitiat’ – to magnetize. Kirill introduced this word when we were talking about his reindeer and he told me that reindeer possess a beauty that has the capacity to magnetize him. In his vision of the future he admits that the reindeer and the forest will have the power to pull him back again and he will at some point return there. In his vision of the future reindeer serve as a magnet and thereby retain their centrality: the magnetism of the reindeer is the dynamic force which drives his eventual return. The magnetizing power of Kirill’s reindeer is a highly important point for my further discussion of djuluchen as it should be viewed as the moment of djuluchen’s activation. I suggest considering this moment not only as his response to the powerful magnetism of the reindeer but also as the opening to his future. In this sense his reindeer with magnetizing affect served as an anchoring image of his future movements and events. While discussing cinematic image, Deleuze suggests considering human perception of an image not as a unified singularity but as ‘becoming’ (1986: 20–41). Drawing from this proposition I view Kirill’s act of envisioning his own return and pronouncement of his wish as an event of ‘becoming’

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which emerged and propelled from affective interaction with his future destination associated with the reindeer. Another important aspect of the forest adolescent’s self which is associated with the future return of the self to the community is the forest practice of sharing meat. I suggest that this particular practice contributes to the sociality of the envisioned future narrated by the forest children. In his narrative about life in the forest Kirill tells me of instances when his uncle shares with other people, both in the forest and in the village, and presents his own view of how sharing must be conducted, and on what occasions: O.: When Afonya hunts a wild reindeer, does he do nimadun? [On nimaduknuet] Kirill: Last time when he hunted a wild reindeer he did not leave it in the forest. He brought the whole carcass on his reindeer back. I mean he put everything on his reindeer, two uchak and brought it on them. He walked back to the camp. What he brought he gave to another family. O.: Do you bring meat from the forest into the village? Kirill: Of course, I do. I always bring some meat from the forest for my aunt, cousins and granny. O.: When you bring it to the village, do you call it nimadun? Kirill: No, it is not nimadun. I just gave some meat to them because I had to … because I came from the forest and they came to get some meat from me. It is not big enough to call nimadun. Bi borivattaem [‘I am sharing or I am giving my part of meat to someone else’] … It is when you give some meat but not a whole reindeer carcass.

With a sense of expertise Kirill makes a clear distinction between two different types of practices and draws me into his understanding of sharing both in the forest and in the village. This differs from what one local lady in her fifties told me. She stated dismissively that no one does nimadun these days because ‘people have forgotten how to do this and they are not interested in it anymore’. According to this older, local lady, the ritual of nimadun is not observed nowadays since local Eveny are not ‘traditional’ anymore. In other words, her statement complied with a discourse on Northern indigenous minorities as peoples who are on the verge of extinction. She stated: ‘We are dying out because our culture is disappearing and our younger generation does not know how to conduct nimadun anymore.’ In a certain sense her position holds true since there is hardly any evidence of this hunting ritual being observed in the village. However, what I shall explain further will show that the actual ritual has not been completely lost, but the circumstances for performing it have changed.

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In contrast to what the woman elder told me, this teenage boy presented me with a quite explicit explanation of how one should share and on what occasion. The main difference between borichaen and nimadun is that nimadun has to be conducted by the person who hunted a wild reindeer or a snow ram. An object for sharing has to be a whole carcass of a hunted animal, whereas borichaen does not prescribe this condition. Then, only the hunter who hunted the animal can perform nimadun. When conducting borichaen, with a smaller cut of meat, it does not matter who cuts and distributes the meat of a hunted or slaughtered animal. For the purpose of borichaen, reindeer meat is cut into pieces which are distributed among one’s own social network. According to local hunters and reindeer herders, for nimadun a hunter needs to hunt a wild reindeer or an elk which is usually left in its entirety in the forest, i.e., as a carcass. When he gets back to camp he describes to people exactly where he left the carcass and then people go and collect it. The crucial point is that to perform nimadun the carcass must remain untouched or undivided and is gifted to a receiver in its original form. In the case of Kirill’s uncle, he chose not to leave the game but brought it to the camp himself on two uchaks. If a hunted wild reindeer is not intended to be used for nimadun, then the carcass needs to be cut up in the forest and put into bags – khaeruki– and brought back to the village by the hunter. Hence I define nimadun as a hunting ritual of presenting a gift, whereas borichaen is a reciprocal sharing practice in which an object of reciprocity might not necessarily be wild (hunted) game but may even be meat of a domestic reindeer. Both practices involve an element of sharing but with a different degree of intensity and social impact. That is to say, nimadun is a more dramatic expression on the part of the giver and can be defined as a gift, whereas borichaen is a distribution of reindeer meat with an expectation of reciprocity in the future; nimadun is unconditional. As far as I have observed while in the field, the social practice called nimadun can be part of the collective life for one sort of people from a certain reindeer herders’ camp but it may not automatically be the social practice of people from another camp. The practice called borichaen is more related to the village context and usually happens upon the reindeer herders’ arrival in the village. Any person arriving from the forest is expected to bring some reindeer meat and then share it with members of his kin and social network in the village. There is no necessity for conducting nimadun unless a hunter chooses to perform it for the benefit of the people whom he considers in need. For example, if in a reindeer herders’ camp there is a young family with a small child or newborn baby experiencing a shortage of meat, the man who has been lucky enough to get a wild reindeer during his hunting trip has to conduct nimadun for this young family. This is mostly done through

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a decision made by the hunter himself, that is to say, there should be opportunity for personal motivation. However, in the context of a reindeer herders’ camp, the necessity for nimadun becomes obvious. In most cases, it is conducted for the sake of a family rather than for one individual. In addition, there is an assumption that only really good, experienced and lucky hunters can perform nimadun. Furthermore, if a person performs nimadun it may ensure that the next hunting trip is going to be lucky. In a sense it is understood that it is the Master of the Forest, Bayanay, who requires the performance of nimadun, so that it is not ultimately an initiative of a hunter. So a wild reindeer carcass subject to nimadun is not destined to be consumed or owned by this hunter – it is a gift from Bayanay which should be presented to a receiver in need. Therefore, by conducting nimadun, the hunter mediates Bayanay’s will and by doing so he seeks Bayanay’s favours in the future. In one of my conversations I asked a local reindeer herder if he performs nimadun and he answered: ‘What for? There is no point in conducting it if there is no need.’ Thus, nimadun is observed in the particular circumstances I described above and may indeed not be conducted if there is no real necessity for it. Kirill’s remarks show that he clearly understands both practices, and the distinction between them. The only reason he has not performed nimadun is that he was handling only part of a reindeer carcass. Kirill told me that what matters in conducting borichaen is the part of the reindeer carcass you give to people. For example, if a person is presented with the lower part of a reindeer’s back – daram – it is an expression of real affection and respect for the receiver. In his discussion on exchange and gifts, Mauss presented an appropriate formulation: ‘if one gives things and returns them, it is because one is giving and returning “respects” – we still say “courtesies”. Yet it is also because by giving one is oneself, and if one gives oneself, it is because one “owes” oneself – one’s person and one’s goods – to others’ (2002 [1990]: 59). In relation to this, I suggest that the body of a reindeer in this respect serves as an expression of the self and personality of a giver. In other words, a giver extends his selfhood through this act of reciprocal sharing. So in this context, a part of the reindeer carcass as an object of reciprocity becomes a part of the person, as in sacrifice (Smith 1987: 204). Kirill performs as a person and a competent agent through his ability to have a social impact on his own social network and his kin. In this detailed rendition of local sharing practices, he demonstrated how, as a teenager, he could already be seen as an actor in social relationships through the connection he creates by bringing meat from the forest to the village. I interpret his return in his future life story as an amplified narration of his participation in this social universe in which reciprocal relationships with

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one’s own community make up the self and allow it to appear. In other words, when you bring reindeer meat into the village, this is a component of the way you make up your own social world. It is in accordance with this social principle that Kirill imagines returning from the city in the future and bringing his wealth and new skills back to his native community. In her discussion of key cultural symbols, Sherry Ortner suggested that a ritual scenario formulates both the ideally valued mode of social relations in the culture and the most effective way of establishing those kinds of relations (2002 [1973]: 158–9). Following her proposition, I understand oral and written versions of forest children as scenarios for fulfilment of one’s personhood derived, for example, from sharing practices of borichaen and nimadun. Ortner also considers ‘ritual scenarios as key symbols which include not only formal, usually named events, but also all those cultural sequences of action which we can observe enacted and re-enacted according to unarticulated formulae in the normal course of daily life’ (Ortner 2002 [1973]: 162). However, Ortner does not discuss and illustrate how a key symbol is being formed and receives proliferation in the course of a person’s life and what ways of expression it finds within an ontologically constitutive narrative of the self. As I have shown here, the formation of the category of a reindeer appears to be a process conditioned by the social practices in which the growing child is involved from an early age. Specifically, the process of a child’s training of a riding reindeer is the child’s expression of his or her own experiential thoughts and reflections on family members’ everyday practices in the forest. As Jean-Guy Goulet relevantly puts it: to have an experience is to also recognize that what takes place in one’s life ‘is a replaying, in some dimension, of things that happened to others’ (Abrahams 1986: 60), i.e. what can be shared of the personal is the typical. What can be grasped of the personal is filtered through cultural frames. Through these frames an experience is recognizable as an instance of ‘this’ or ‘that’. Only then can the experience become part of a narrative, to oneself and/or to others. (Goulet 1998: 257)

This chapter has shown how children’s experiences of their social worlds in the forest emerge as the most formative in the first seven years of a child’s life, i.e., the time before they start school. The accounts of Tonya, Kirill, Kira, Vitya and Ilona, who grew up in the forest, demonstrated how they conceptualize the process of training a reindeer, which goes hand in hand with their own process of growing and becoming a person. In the course of the process of becoming a person, the forest child’s concept of the self formed in relation to a reindeer moves into a later developmental stage of personhood when his body is getting ‘closed’ and an

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adolescent starts participating in social sharing practices such as borichaen. During this stage, the social self is being expressed through sharing of meat, which contributes to a mature person’s social relations. Thus, the reindeer as an important component of the forest sociality moves from selfhood into a wider domain of personhood. It emphasizes a role of reindeer as a key symbol, in Ortner’s sense, which is being constructed through formative experiences in childhood. It starts gaining its social significance and symbolic meaning from the child’s involvement in herding activities, then acquires a recurrent power, albeit in other scenarios, in the course of a person’s mature life. I would like to link the social significance of a reindeer with its meat, skin and fur, which can be shared, given, taken and gifted, to an important conceptual point that Strathern has made in her discussion of Melanesian ceremonial exchange. She writes: ‘Exchange makes objects (persons) out of people’s relations with one another such that the ability to create or enlarge certain relationships stands for the ability to activate any’ (1988: 219). In other words, it is through exchange of the pig that the Hagen people appear as persons. It represents their ability to have a social effect on or in others. This is one reason why non-human things such as the pig exchanged by Hageners can be persons: because they have effects, and because they can be seen as active in social relationships. In a way the reindeer among Eveny is as vital to social regeneration as the pig among Hageners. However, I should also point out that the concept of the reindeer as conceptualized among the Eveny seems to carry Strathern’s discussion on Melanesian personhood further. That is to say, the reindeer participates in the production of Eveny personhood not only as a mediator of social relations between debtor and creditor, as in Hageners’ case, but also as a non-human subject with its own agency. The reindeer’s agency affects a person’s destiny (the concept of a guardian reindeer khavek). In this respect a reindeer emerges as a symbolic bearer of a particular concept of agency, which, as this chapter has illustrated, has been internalized by Kirill and Tonya in the process of their socialization in the forest. Developmentally speaking, the stories of forest children at the age of ten are still marked by the absence of two compositional elements in their narratives: departure and return. These elements appear only later, in the stories of older children at the stage of adolescence. I shall show how the mode of narration and reproduction of events in the stories by ten-year-old children reflects movement of reindeer herders along their annual itinerary in which there are no punctuating points of departure and return. That is to say, at this developmental stage children’s stories are not yet finalized. They still follow a nomadic cycle, which never ends. In the imagined trajectories of their own future lives, they follow a seasonal route together with their parents

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and herds of reindeer. The concept of ‘return’ within a forest child’s future life-story evolves in a later developmental stage, i.e., adolescence, when a forest adolescent starts actively participating in the activity of hunting and sharing (Kirill’s and Tonya’s accounts). Thus, we observe development and emergence of a concept of return in an adolescent’s narrative, which has been necessitated by the hunter’s departure and return in a hunting narrative. I view the practices in which these children are engaged from early childhood in the forest as main channels for forest children’s concept formations, which are shaped and deepened as childhood moves to adulthood. They serve as mechanisms of reproduction. They are familiar lines of thought and action that are returned to as they are deeply wrought. In a sense these inculcating practices are an expression of social relations, exchanges and interchanges and are forged by the ‘dialectical interlocking of recall and social nexus’ (Tonkin 1992: 109). Thus, this chapter has shown that the symbol of a reindeer is not abstracted from social action but is ingrained in everyday practices, living language and social memory. It is a symbol, a personal reference which has been reflected in the accounts of these children and which will hold its significance in the course of their future lives. The reindeer emerges, as Asad puts it, as ‘a symbol which is not an object or event that serves to carry a meaning but a set of relationships between objects or events uniquely brought together as complexes or as concepts, having at once an intellectual, instrumental, and emotional significance’ (1993 [2002]: 27–54). Furthermore, according to the local perception, Kirill and Tonya have reached the stage of ‘closed’ body and so attained solidification of their personhoods, and thus of their djuluchens, i.e., their forerunning or travelling spirits. Thus, at the time of their narration of their future plans, their djuluchens were already at work in the same manner as in the case of village adolescents, Vera and Grisha. In Chapter 4 we have learnt from an account of Tonya’s envisioned future life and her life in the present that she returned and now works as a veterinary nurse providing treatment for reindeer among local reindeer herding brigades. In the case of Kirill, I learnt that after school graduation in 2004 he indeed went to the city to study at a technical college, but could not finish his studies as he was obliged to do military service. Having served two years in the Russian army, he came back to the native community and joined the reindeer herding brigade of his uncle. When I revisited the community in August 2010 I could not get hold of Kirill to talk to him directly as he was in a reindeer herding camp located 150 kilometres away from the village. It seems his djuluchen followed the same cosmological trajectory as he was envisioning six years earlier and the reindeer had indeed magnetized him back to the forest where he now lives and works and, most importantly, takes care of his family reindeer herd.

Chapter 6

The Village as Domain of Unhappiness: Broken Families and the Curse of the GULAG

Wandering spirits of the dead and the curse of the GULAG In this chapter I continue to explore the spatial opposition of ‘forest versus village’ in which the village serves as a hegemonic but problematic space within the cosmological triangle of city, village and forest established in Chapter 3. First, I show how a child’s relationship to a place finds expression through the event of seeing a ghost, which serves as a reminder of a sense of a locality and as a current enactment of local memories about the GULAG past. I then illustrate how a sense of place associated with a former territory of the GULAG camp, which is understood by the local population as cursed by former prisoners, permeates local perception of the present and shapes the children’s and adolescents’ stories about their own futures. I build my analysis on the local concept of arinkael, which is associated with traces left behind by the deceased and, as I argue, shaped by the nomadic practices of coming and going which lie at the basis of the local concept of ‘leaving one’s trace’. While discussing the concept of spirits among the Evenki of Katonga, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov has attributed a local concept of ‘invisible beings’ or ‘spirits of the dead’ (bukhadyl) to Soviet repressive policies, as well as to the activity of Russian ethnographers engaged in the Soviet construction of the Evenki past. According to Ssorin-Chaikov, bukhadyl are the product of a Soviet construct of culture, and therefore avoidance of them among contemporary Evenki is a result of the reifying effects of the Soviet religious policies and post-Soviet ‘invention of tradition’ (2001: 13). To a certain extent the Evenki concept of bukhadyl shares an element of malevolence with the Eveny concept of arinkael, as well as a sense of uncertainty which they cause among local population. There are various ways

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of looking at the issues related to this concept, including the approach suggested by Ssorin-Chaikov (2001). However, I would like to consider the issue of the locality, spirits and ghosts among the Eveny from a slightly different angle. I suggest viewing the space of the village and its locality within the nomadic idiom of dwelling, in which the act of going and coming is associated with ‘engagement with local spirits’ and ‘leaving one’s trace’ (in Eveny: udji edji aemaen). I deduce that it is this system of thought that moulds and organizes the experience of the space of the village itself. My material shows how the sense of curse permeates local discourse on the space of the village, and in many ways is an expression of a social modality of human engagement with a particular locality occupied by arinkael. Ethnographers such as Popova (1967, 1981) and Nikolaev (1964) have also noted that ideas about the spirits of the dead – arinkael, bunil, magdili – among the Eveny are very detailed and elaborate, as these kinds of spirits have always caused fear and distress. Arinkael were originally forest spirits, but since in local understanding they are at present in abundance in the village buildings it seems that they have also been sedentarized and concentrated in the village, just like the humans. Therefore, I suggest that this social modality emphasizes a construct of the locality of the village of Topolinoye as the domain of a cursed place of misfortune and unhappiness. Local Eveny refer to it as ningichapechae tor, in literal translation from Eveny ‘the place which was cursed’. I show how the sense of trespassing on previously occupied spaces, and the pervasive presence of ghosts of former (blonde, Russianlooking) GULAG prisoners in the village buildings, invokes a sense of curse (in Eveny ningichaen) among the local population. In his discussion of Apache senses of place, Basso (1996) suggests that places and place names may act as mnemonics for the historical actions of individuals and groups. It is a conception of land in which a story becomes anchored in a space and so affects the way in which people think of themselves. In the case of Eveny youth, the place contains a story, and the story can be unwrapped at any moment by the vision of a ghost. The story is stored in the place, as a potential which is actualized by an event. Here, meaning of the place and memory about the locality of the village has been woven into the fabric of social life and become part of the narrative of the self. When a local person reports seeing a ghost, I view this as a local mechanism of transmission of knowledge about locality, i.e., awareness about previous people inhabiting this place, and collective remembrance as a ‘form of moral practice’ (Lambek 1996). Here, the vision of a ghost subverts a sense of linear motion in time and serves as a vehicle for the transmission of knowledge about the locality and, in the case of Topolinoye, its violent past. As Lambek eloquently puts it in his discussion of Sakalava people:

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Spirits are memorable not only for what they evoke about the host’s experience but because they are themselves historical or mythical figures. If in Western discourse it makes sense to distinguish memory from history, this is less obvious in places where history is less text-mediated than voiced and embodied. When the spirits are persons from the past, once living figures who re-emerge after death, the narratives they evoke include dimensions of broad interests. (1996: 243)

However, contrary to the Sakalava sense of reverence in relation to their ancestral spirits and valorization of their glorious past, ghosts from the GULAG past invoke perceptions of wrongness and cosmological instability of the locality; they represent a specific case for the locals. It is important to remember how Topolinoye was constructed in the early 1970s and its population was drawn from a well-established old village called Tompo (see Chapter 1). This gradual population shift occurred from the early 1960s, as a result of the process of amalgamation of collective farms and units (Russian: ukrupnienie), to the beginning of the 1990s. According to the elderly people, the process of moving from an old village to a new one was made especially hard and painful for the locals because the place chosen by the authorities for the new village was the site of a GULAG camp, where Slavic, Baltic, Jewish and other prisoners had been tortured and had died. Though the ghosts of former prisoners are associated with the suffering, deaths and violence that took place in Stalinist times, they echo the suffering of the local Eveny population which is still going on in the present. So as well as being an embodiment of the past they are also engaged in the reproduction and construction of a sense of space in the present. From the Soviet perspective, the village of Topolinoye was created as part of the Soviet civilizing mission to serve as a proxy for the wider world of Russia. Here, the triangle of the forest, the village and the city reconfigures itself in a new light, creating a polar opposition between the city (in effect the whole Russian world), the forest (the archaic Eveny world with its spirits of the land, reindeer souls and its Master of the Forest (Bayanay)) and the village as an uneasy compromise between both worlds. In Topolinoye the nomadic camp (domnge) and the GULAG camp (lager’) have become conflated. Ironically, each corresponds to a particular sense of the English word ‘camp’. The village appears to be a large camp in both senses. It is a container of previous people’s personhoods and a former Soviet concentration camp for GULAG prisoners. In both senses there is an element of rupture and incongruity. The current locality of the village is conceived as a space where GULAG prisoners were tortured and killed, and as a space of previous people’s settlement which is associated with a world of the dead. This space is full of malevolent forces of the deceased which still continue to bring misfortune and unhappiness to the world of the living.

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In the Soviet sense, the village was designed as a totally rational space. It was to epitomize and embody the Soviet idea of development expressed as the ‘mastering’ (Russian: osvoienie) of the territories of the Russian Far North. Previously, the forest was full of spirits and all sorts of superstitious native ideas which had to be tamed and civilized. Now, ghosts of unburied former GULAG prisoners disturb the living population of the settlement. When the Soviet authorities decided to build a village on the former GULAG camp territory, they viewed the Eveny idea of the world of the dead and evil spirits as ‘backward, native superstition’ and alien to the Soviet idea of progress. In this sense, the spatial construct of the accursed and haunted place subverts the whole Soviet idea of progress. The Soviet conception of time implodes with the apparition of a former GULAG prisoner’s ghost, since the very phenomenon of a ghost, let alone its message, defies the Soviet temporality of progress and linear development. The space of the former GULAG camp and its essence exert a particular effect on time because although these events happened in the past they remain irredeemable today. The evidence suggests that post-Soviet experience has brought these ghosts back to life, so to speak. In other words, the ghosts stayed dormant in a local deposit of memory in the 1970s and 1980s, but were given new life in the 1990s and 2000s because of new relevance. In my own childhood I heard very few stories about ghosts. I heard nowhere near as many as I have heard while conducting my ethnographic fieldwork. This suggests that during the period of the state’s generous support of the local infrastructure (the 1970s and 1980s) this sense of malevolence was not apparent. The village economy and infrastructure were strong and there were close links with the outside world through air transport, so local people could make frequent and regular flights to the regional centre of Yakutsk or the district centre of Khandyga. Flying back and forth in this way would allow one to stay mobile and not to feel trapped within one social and geographical space (Vitebsky 2000). The collapse of this elaborate infrastructure which occurred in the 1990s generated a quite new sense of isolation from the outside world and perhaps a more intense sense of place. What makes this case special is that the appearance of ghosts in local buildings and of stories related to them only became common in the early 1990s. It was the period of economic collapse when new (post-GULAG) settlers who had arrived to live in the village in Soviet times moved back to central parts of Russia and their places of origin. By vacating houses and flats, they have left empty spaces which are being filled by the ghosts of previous generations of newcomers (GULAG prisoners) who represent the suffering on which the village was originally built.

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My interpretation is that it was then that the people’s real and close engagement with this particular space brought out its full and sinister nature – a metaphor waiting to be actualized. Memories about the tragic past came to the surface when local people realized that they were trapped there, unable to escape even for a short period of time (e.g., on a shopping trip to town). This sense of isolation and abandonment only intensified awareness of the brooding malevolence of the place. Therefore, as in any other community throughout the Russian North and other parts of Russia, they have responded by deploying their own local metaphor. For example, in his account of the Eveny of Sebyan, Vitebsky suggests that: The increase in destruction wrought by wolves had run in parallel with the collapsing economy. If previously there had been a coercive welfare state, now the late, decadent State Farm was seen as taking without giving anything in return, failing to honour its own part in any contract with the herders. Like the wolf, at least in remote Sebyan, the Farm represented pure predation. (2005: 272–3)

So if among the Eveny of Sebyan it was the wolf that provided a metaphor for other kinds of human predation, in Topolinoye at the same period it was the ghosts of the GULAG that caused a sense of social crisis and of curse among the locals. Hence, I take these ghosts (arinkael in local terminology) as an available metaphor which the local population deployed in their response to the situation of economic desolation, abandonment and the collapse of the local infrastructure. On the one hand, the village can be viewed as the symbol of Soviet state violence, being located at the centre of the GULAG system. On the other, its locality is understood through the distinctively Eveny idiom of ‘leaving a trace of oneself ’, which is manifested in the young generation’s reactions to it in the present. As Tilley suggests in a broader sense: ‘If stories are linked with regularly repeated spatial practices they become mutually supportive, and when a story becomes sedimental into the landscape, the story and the place dialectically help to construct and reproduce each other’ (1994: 33). In the material I am presenting here, the story and the place not only dialectically help to construct each other, but also are delivered in one package when a local (native) person sees a (Russian, Jewish, etc.) ghost. In that package, a story already exists, because local people (including the children) are already informed by ghost stories that have been told and discussed within the local community. So when a child sees a ghost, the story is instantly unwrapped because knowledge and insights about it have already been transmitted. In other words, tragic events from the GULAG past are captured in local discourse concerning the place, and so act as mnemonics that define a child’s mode of understanding and engagement with the locality.

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One of the most eloquent renditions of this local sense of the village comes from a conversation I had with a fifteen-year-old girl named Diana. Diana grew up in the village and comes from a single-parent family; in the forest/village dichotomy of my work, she falls into the latter set. Her mother, Irina, was married to a Russian man for a few years until he left in the mid-1990s to go back to the place of his birth. She was left alone with their two children, Diana and her younger brother Sergei. In her story about the future, Diana was emphatic that she would leave to go to the city in order to get educated, become a lawyer and protect people’s rights without returning to the village. From our several conversations she gave me a strong impression of her sincere hope for a new life in the city and her anticipation of a fresh and totally different experience of another space. Here, Diana vividly recalls her sense of the space of the village and by doing so reveals what is wrong about it and why she feels unhappy here: O.: What do you do in your free time? Diana: I like reading … or watching TV … my friends love watching soap operas but I don’t think I am as interested in them as they are … I find them all the same, they have got the same plot and … you can guess what will happen because they have got the same endings ... O.: What else do you do when you are free? Diana: My friends and I just talk to each other … We discuss various things … scary things … we tell each other stories about ghosts. We have a ghost in our house. I find it scary sometimes to stay alone in our place … My mum told me that they have a ghost in a local house of culture … she saw a small boy once … he had long arms, they were so long … they would reach the floor … She thought he did not have arms … that the boy was armless but he had long hanging sleeves which reached the floor … he was bald and had an expression on his face as if he was scared of something … That boy was scared of my mum and was kind of hiding in the corner … my friends also tell me this kind of stories … You know that the building where the gym is now used to be the site where prisoners worked? … They were building the village. Most of them would die there … Some people occasionally see a young man standing next to a radiator and warming his hands. He is dressed in a telogreyka like a GULAG prisoner … One lady who was working there as a cleaner once entered the sports hall and saw a boy who was standing at a heater. She thought that it was one of those who’d stayed after a sports session. She asked him to leave the hall since she needed to wash the floor. But he only moved from that radiator to another. She shouted at him and suddenly that boy disappeared … Sometimes I see a ghost of a woman … My window faces the gym and sometimes in the dark winter night you can see a woman standing at a window holding a light. She is always there… I told my friends about this and they came to see her … they got scared and now one of my friends doesn’t go to the gym anymore because she is scared of that woman … Once the gym fell down… I think it is because of the place … then they rebuilt the gym again. O.: Do you find it disturbing and does it scare you?

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Diana: Yes, I feel scared when I am alone. Loneliness is what I don’t like at all … last summer I stayed in the house alone because my mother and my brother left for Khandyga … I was so afraid of staying alone, I was afraid of ghosts. During the summer we did not have electricity … then, the village was half empty and I felt scared because of the empty buildings. My house was empty and I was afraid of ghosts that I would possibly see when I was alone.

In the field I have listened to these kinds of ghost stories numerous times – they quite often become the subject of conversations that involve all generations of the local population. Most stories about ghosts generally convey a negative message and it is widely agreed that the ghost of a deceased person is a sign of a cursed place. And the more often one encounters a ghost of non-local origin, e.g., a vision of a person with blue eyes and blond hair, the deeper the sense of eeriness and wrongness about this place. This is the ultimate sign of a previous person’s engagement with place and so it should be avoided due to its malevolent nature. In his account of Eveny in Sebyan, Vitebsky (2005) points to a prominent characteristic of Tungus cultures which is concerned with the traces left behind by human activity. He shows that any physical objects used by people who have since died, e.g., fence poles or the ropes used to tie their animals, are, by definition, haunted because they are the sites of the deceased person’s actions and related to their life events. In the same vein, a French anthropologist, Alexandra Lavrillier (2005), has shown that the biggest concern among the Evenki of Iengra (South Yakutia) is not to leave a ‘footprint’ after you wherever you go (Evenki: onnir). The nature of this concern points to previous events which may potentially bring misfortune to those who may be harmed by traces left behind, since these spaces have already been claimed by others. In this sense, people who are now dead leave a lot of personhood behind them, and the vulnerability of a person encountering a ghost points to the potential dangers inherent in these traces. In the forest one should know those places and avoid them. The ideas related to this are centred on arinkael (wandering spirits of the dead), expressed in reindeer herders’ stories as part of their concept of the world of the dead which is supposed to be opposite, wicked towards living humans, and unclean. That is why, in the forest, one must follow various taboos related to the areas in the landscape that contain these traces, and avoid these places by staying as far away from them as possible. If one engages with these kinds of places one risks getting involved in a relationship with the spirits of the place. They could be any spirits, not necessarily malevolent ones, but if the situation of an encounter is wrong, it is conceived as trespass. The main purpose of the other Eveny taboo or tonkaekich (udji edji aemaen), i.e., ‘don’t leave a trace or footprint after yourself ’, is to prevent humans

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from crossing the border between the two worlds: the world of the living and the world of previous humans now dead. According to my local informants, when a person dies, the soul (han’yan) leaves the body. After the han’yan has left, the dead person acquires another soul, which is located in the corpse until the tendons in the joints decompose (the seventieth day after death). After that, the soul flies to the Lower World – Buni – with the help of the shaman, who carries out a certain ritual so that the soul is escorted there. It is characteristic that, in spite of the imagined congruity of the worlds of the dead and the worlds of the living, the Eveny traditionally made a qualitative distinction between the two: they regarded the other world as ‘different’, ‘bad’, ‘unclean’, and so they also damaged the things given to the deceased because those objects too had to look ‘destroyed’. In other words, they needed to show that these things are not used by living humans. All objects in the ‘other’ world mirror their inverted image in the world of living humans. Nowadays, on graves one can still see saucepans with holes in them, porcelain teapots without spouts, cups and saucers with broken edges. Even the clothes in which the deceased are dressed have patches to make them unusable to the living, otherwise the deceased ‘will not find them’ and will wander around. In this context, any sort of trace left behind by the deceased, especially by those who died as a result of physical violence, creates anxiety and in a crowded village setting generates a sense of a space full of malevolent spirits of the dead or arinkael. Ghosts of the GULAG represent a special case. Local people can deal with the dead of local origin and prevent themselves from being disturbed by the dead by conducting small rituals, i.e., they feed the deceased by putting a shot of vodka and food on their graves. But GULAG ghosts do not respond to these rituals and, above all, they have no known names for locals to address them, and their graves cannot be located. The local Eveny’s concern about ‘engagement with local spirits’ and ‘leaving a trace of oneself ’ thus gives us an insight into their understanding of the space of the village. Given the Eveny concept of engagement with a certain locality, it is not difficult to imagine how dreadful it must have been for them to witness the Soviet authorities establishing a village on the site of a former GULAG camp, a place that bears the ultimate bad footprint of previous humans. A local person’s encounter with a ghost becomes a reminder of the tragic past associated with violent deaths in the vicinity. It serves as a vehicle for transmission of memory about this past. Seeing a ghost is disturbing and traumatic in itself, since it generates fear, distress and a deep sense of uncertainty among locals. I suggest that a ghost is not just a thing in itself, for the person who perceives it and the person who hears the story of the encounter are both affected by it. Thus, a ghost is not only a re-

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minder but also an index of a social relationship – or even of a whole web of such relationships. It is a fusion of the relationships of the local person who is narrating the event to an audience and an event that happened in that location in the past. It is also a trace of an unknown deceased person with whom both teller and listener are engaged at the moment the story is being told. When they see a ghost in the forest, people are able to avoid it by not looking at it and moving on from the event as fast as possible. The strategy is not to engage with it, even with your eyes. Reindeer herders told me if it ever happens to you in the forest, you should not look at it. Ignore it and simply move forward, or as they put it, Gadych, haerly! Move forward! Fast! Within the village, the sense of confined space inside village buildings intensifies the event of seeing a ghost and makes it more inescapable. It creates an immediate point of connection with that tragic past. Ghosts here retain specific memories, even if we are not sure what these are, and thereby symbolize uncertain social relations. Each instance of the appearance of a ghost rediscovers and extends the narrative of which it is a central character and the relationship to the tragic past of which it is the embodiment. Hence, arinkael as traces of the GULAG past are participating, to borrow from Henri Lefebvre, in the ‘process producing that space itself ’ (1974 [1991]: 129). Lefebvre rightly suggests that ‘no space vanishes without leaving traces’ (1974 [1991]: 164), implying physical and material traces. However, local testimonies extend Lefebvre’s understanding of the concept of ‘trace’, highlighting its visceral, non-tangible and yet visible dimension which has significant ramifications for younger generations’ visions of the future and ways of dealing with such a legacy (see also Gordillo 2004). This suggests that arinkael is a nomadic concept that is largely informed both by animistic ontology including nomadic practices of movement around vast territories of reindeer herding pastures and by the tragic legacy of the GULAG past invoking the sense of an accursed place. Hence, semantic expansion of the arinkael into the space of the village is not purely one-directional, i.e., from the forest into the village, but travels back and forth so the narrative discourses on the forest and the village are shaped in response to each other and are mutually constituted. According to Kangalas, an elderly informant and the son of a local shaman who died in the mid-1970s, in a local community it used to be an exclusive activity of the shaman to comfort, treat respectfully and escort the spirits of the dead into their world. The ethnographer Ulyana Popova also emphasized (1967) that the rituals performed by the shaman were of great importance among the Eveny, as they were aimed at regenerating the life-cycle in which the dead and living people had two separate worlds to inhabit.

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The GULAG prisoners were never buried properly; instead, their bodies were used as fillers in a ‘Road of Bones’ or they were thrown into a communal hole. In the memoirs of one former GULAG prisoner who miraculously survived several years in one of the YanStroi camps, he mentions that extremely low temperature and permafrost replaced the need for the crematoriums used in Nazi concentration camps, and dead bodies would be put into the foundations of the road (Fedorov 2001). One of the subjects of local ghost stories which drew my attention in the field was the ghost of a severed arm. This ghostly, dismembered arm has appeared to local children in the school building on numerous occasions and the story about it was often retold and discussed among children. When I questioned a local, elderly lady about the meaning of the appearance of this dismembered part of a human body, she recounted a story from her childhood, referring to an existing ghost of a ‘severed arm’ in the building of the village school. She explained that when she was a child there were various GULAG camps in the vicinity. When prisoners escaped, local hunters were sent to catch them under the threat of arrest and punishment if they refused. The proof that the job had been done properly was the severed arm of a GULAG prisoner with a number on it. She recalled how once in the winter she and her friends were playing on a street near some bags which had been left leaning against the wall of the school building by people dressed in military uniform. During their game one of the girls accidentally pushed a bag and a pile of frozen and bloody arms spilled out. The vision of cut-off arms was so dreadful that she nearly vomited and ran away in fear. My discovery that an image of a severed arm was not simply a children’s folk tale but a real event from the GULAG past suggests that a disembodied part of the body transmits memory about the place, and that the story got unwrapped at the moment of the children’s vision of this ghost. This encounter acted as a mnemonic peg and defined a child’s mode of understanding and engagement with the locality. Ghosts from the GULAG past shape the local experience of the present to a significant degree. That is to say, it is not just the ghosts’ past; it is also the child’s present and the community’s present. As one local lady put it, ‘we are cursed because of what happened to them’. She articulates a particular version of the past and a sense of causality, which is strongly connected to its consequences for relations in the present. In other words, local people now perceive an analogy between the previous suffering of the GULAG prisoners in the past and their own suffering in the present. By imagining their own departure from the village in their own imagined future and escaping from this place, my young informants draw on a moral idea which mediates their experience of the space of the village. Young Eveny perceive that the community is undergoing a critical situa-

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tion, so their responses to it are shaped by their personal experiences and are reflected in the ways they view their own destinations in their own future autobiographies.

Unhappy families: children’s futures and parents’ pasts As I have shown above, local perception of the space of the village is closely intertwined with the current situation of social despair and the past associated with the tragic legacy of the GULAG. Now I shall try to illustrate what it is like to inhabit a space that is conceived of as malevolent and dangerous, and what foundation this gives the local village children, especially those for whom the space is impossible to escape. Since the space of the village was regarded as being uninhabitable and wrong from the outset, I can sense this as a place of social and emotional hardship in the children’s accounts of their hopes for their own futures. In previous chapters I have shown that the local distinction between the forest and the village is manifested in the ways people, including children and adolescents, relate to and engage with two antagonistic spaces. This perception is also amplified by the perception about the ‘healing’ effect of the forest (cf. Roseman 1991). For example, while telling me her lifestory, one local village lady in her mid-thirties, Rosa, gave me an account of how the forest healed her son Sasha. In the course of the first few years after her son’s birth, Rosa had been anxious about his poor health. Both of them spent most of their time in the village. To cure Sasha’s illness, which was related to his bones, Rosa travelled to the city of Yakutsk to show her son to medical specialists in a regional medical centre. The medical treatment which was prescribed by the doctors at the centre was unaffordable for Rosa, so she took her son from the hospital and brought him back to the village. Nothing seemed to improve his health, and so Rosa decided to send her son to her sister’s family’s camp in the forest. According to Rosa, after spending three months in the forest Sasha miraculously recovered, and since then his health has improved dramatically. In our conversation, Rosa told me that forest, reindeer, mountains and pure air – chysty vozdukh – healed her son. She told me that her Sasha spent the summer playing with children, performing domestic tasks and chasing reindeer near the camp. In the short period of one summer Sasha had healed and developed physically. In a conversation with Maria, another local lady in her fifties, I learnt that Maria was suffering from severe headaches and only the forest (domngae in Eveny) could heal her. She would not explain the cause of her headaches. Maria’s brother, a local reindeer herder who suggested that she should come to his family’s camp in the forest, referred to the symptoms

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of mental illness that he believed Maria was about to develop. Both of them told me that it was forest (domngae) and reindeer that healed her and prevented her from getting mentally ill after spending most of her life in the village. Maria explained that her trouble had come from evil spirits (arinkael) of the place where the village is located. While speaking about her life in the village, she referred to the old, abandoned village of Tompo (see Chapter 1) as a much better and healthier location for human beings to settle, as it was free of curse and arinkael. According to locals, in the pre-Soviet past the old village of Tompo used to be a trading post and a meeting point for local Eveny; those who chose the locality for the village of Tompo made the right choice, as people who settled there did not have to deal with arinkael. In my observations of reindeer herders in the village and the forest, the two spaces are also conceived in relation to how the self is orchestrated socially. That is to say, if in the forest one may be a respectful reindeer herder as well as a modest and kind person, in the village that same person totally moves out of this social image and turns into a ruthless being full of aggression. To some extent, the space of the village has always been associated with availability of alcohol and reindeer herders’ binge drinking on their arrival from the forest. When in the forest, those reindeer herders with whom I discussed this issue in their camps reflected on themselves by saying that their staying in the village could ruin them and turn them into alienated and hostile beings. They need to come back to the forest to purify themselves and return to what they really are. For forest children who are obliged to stay in the village for schooling, the arrival of their parents in the village is always an exciting moment. These children long for their parents most of the time while they are in the village. When parents and children eventually reunite for a few weeks during their winter or spring breaks, some parents happily return to their parenting roles. Other parents, however, as soon as they arrive, get involved in heavy drinking. At this time, children from these families need to move from one household to another in search of a peaceful and safe place to stay. One ten-year-old boy whose parents had been binging for a few weeks during their spring stay told me that he couldn’t wait until his parents would travel back to the forest, where alcohol is not available. He added that the best time he has with his parents is usually in the forest during summer. Hence, as we can see, the village is here associated with pollution, as opposed to the purifying space of the forest. Both Rosa and Maria referred to the village as ningichapechae tor. Therefore, a person who has experienced this contrast between the two spaces construes the village in terms of pollution by arinkael/evil spirits and curse/ningichaen. As one reindeer herder put it eloquently: ‘When you are in the village, you don’t

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want it but you turn into one of those arinkael. Sometimes you feel as if you are already becoming one of them.’ Now I turn to the case studies of the village children and explore what social patterns they deploy in order to construct their own narratives about the future and what strategies they avail themselves of in order to sustain their own sense of self in ongoing conditions of despair and social distress. Here I consider the future life-stories of three village children from incomplete (i.e., single-parent) families. Local schoolteachers referred to them as children from ‘problem’ families. The striking feature of these particular children was the sad expressions in their eyes. They are the witnesses to their parents’ alcohol addiction and often to their long-term depression. Their family histories involved drunken fights or violence, which have resulted in the loss of one of the parents. Poverty, lack of cash, unpaid salaries and unemployment create a situation in which alcohol addiction becomes a form of escape for the adult, but a living hell for the child. I have to emphasize that these ethnographic accounts represent only part of the whole picture, as I am not presenting here the cases of forest children. Here I attempt to elaborate on what constitutes children’s agency and what social relations shape this sense of agency. I focus on how Eveny children relate and emotionally attend to their parents’ lives while performing the role of nurturer and protector of their parents. Moreover, the ethnographic material which I am presenting here goes some way to providing a ‘children’s perspective’ by revealing how children reflect on their parents’ life-histories in their own future life-stories. This will show that children creatively draw from the parents’ life histories and charge their stories with the content relevant and pertinent to them. By doing so they create their own variants of the plots of parents’ lives in their future autobiographies, negotiating their identities both as individuals and as social selves (Cohen 1994; Briggs 1998). One afternoon in November when I was coming back from the school where I was employed as a teacher of computer literacy I saw Dasha, a local woman, who was so drunk that she was unable to stand upright. Beside her was her son, twelve-year-old Taras, who was trying to support and guide his mother back to their flat. He was leading her home as if he were the adult responsible for her safety. In his attempts to push and support her, I saw an expression of dismay, frustration and yet care and concern for his drunken mother. This made me think how unfair it was for Taras and how irresponsible it was of Dasha to make her son suffer in this way. I caught myself wondering what his life would be like if he could choose his parents and have a happy and peaceful childhood along the lines most schoolteachers would consider ideal.

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A few weeks later I approached him at school and asked if he would mind speaking to me about himself and his own future. He agreed, but when we actually met a few days later I realized just how hard it was for him to speak about anything related to his life in the present. He nearly burst into tears when, in response to my question about the future, he started speaking about the person whom he wanted to help most of all – his mother. In order to avoid the emotional stress of talking to me, I apologetically suggested that he might prefer writing to talking, and Taras chose to write about his future. When I read his story I realized that I must have been wrong about my thoughts when I witnessed Taras struggling to take his mother home. His story about the future was very short and consisted of one line: I would like to be a driver in the future and drive a truck.

Immediately after this, however, he offered to write another essay which contained a story about his mother, which goes as follows: My mother’s name is Darya. Since early childhood she has taught me how to work and stand up for those who can’t protect themselves, i.e. the weakest. And owing to it I learnt everything. I am grateful to my mother for this and for the fact that I was born and came to life. My mother taught me to go to the forest and I got used to going to the forest. Now I go to the forest every day. She taught me how to orientate myself in the forest, also she taught me how to fish, hunt and rest there in my free time. And my mother taught me lots of other things.

Before I embark on analysing this story and its author, I would like briefly to introduce Taras’s family story, which I learnt from Darya (Dasha for short), Taras’s mother, on one occasion when we had a chance to talk, and from several conversations with other people who were closely acquainted with her. Dasha has three children, all of them boys. She is a local Eveny who grew up in the village and stayed at the local boarding school in Topolinoye while her parents worked outside the village as cattle-rearers and stayed at the site of the old village of Tompo. When she graduated from the local school Dasha went to the city of Yakutsk, where she entered a one-year course on building, painting and decorating at one of the city technical schools, completing it in the mid-1980s. After that, Dasha got married and gave birth to her first child. Her marriage to a man from another Sakha village was not successful. After a few years together in Topolinoye, her husband, who was a local militzioner/policeman, had an affair with another woman in another village and decided to move out, leaving Dasha with their two sons, Borya and Vitalik. After her divorce in the early 1990s, Dasha spent most of the time on her own trying to make ends meet and take care of her sons. In one of those hard years she gave

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birth to her third son, Taras. The father refused to accept his responsibilities so she again ended up alone, looking after her third son and his two older brothers. Throughout this time, Dasha and her sons lived permanently in the village. When I talked to her in one of my neighbours’ flats she would not tell me much about herself. However, what I learnt from her was that she suffered from her divorce so much that it had made her unhappy for the rest of her life. She was still angry at her former husband’s cheating on her, and the fact that he preferred another woman would always make her feel depressed. She would also explain his refusal to stay with her as being because he was very natsionalisticheskye (nationalistic). According to her, he would look down on her as someone of Eveny and not Sakha origin, so he felt able to neglect their sons and find a woman of the same origin in his native Sakha village. Her anger and frustration about her personal life would make her drink for weeks, months and then years. She had made one attempt to treat her alcohol dependence but after a few months she threw herself back into binge drinking for another period. Now I would like to return to the story written by Taras. His view of the future, consisting of one line, was not helpful in creating the context for my further attempts to understand him, and did not appear to be as involving as the story about his mother. I did not dare push him further in discussing his future life and decided not to interrogate him on the subject. But what struck me most was the way in which the story about his mother emerged as being more relevant than his story about the future. Moreover, it came to light as a more elaborate and vivid expression of his self and his relation to his mother. In that emotional expression of his grief over his mother’s depression I saw how this boy related to her grief and suffering and that somehow this had moulded his sense of responsibility towards her. I found that episode when Taras nearly burst into tears as totally outside my expectations because previously it had been hard for me to get him involved in any kind of discussion. He seemed to be very reserved and would run away from me when I approached him. The reason for this was probably that he felt uncomfortable about my interest in him and that he found my questions about his future strange. Even after our conversation, he would never again reveal his feelings and emotions to the extent that he did at that moment. Taras’s reluctance to talk about the future also made me realize that the discussion of the future involves not only fantasies and dreams but an actual sense of the present. For Taras the present was not separated from the future. In his narration, the future was inevitably and logically coming out of his ideas and understanding of the present in which he relates himself closely to his mother and what she is undergoing at the moment.

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Taras’s story about his mother represents a distinctly inverted image of the way Dasha is seen and represented by locals and schoolteachers, who told me various stories about her misbehaviour and neglectful attitude towards her children, whom she would leave without food or proper care for months. So in this sense, this story represents Taras’s own perspective on his mother and what she has been to him. Perhaps it is only he, the son of this mother, who can see what no one else can see in her personality. It might be also an attempt to depict an enhanced image of her. The distance between an author and the reality that Taras acquired owing to the process of writing helped him to narrate what he wanted to narrate, and to present what he found necessary and appropriate to present. So his choice of writing a story in this sense was the best way for him to reflect and create the reality in which he would like to be. Though Taras is evidently vulnerable, and powerless to help his mother to retrieve herself from the condition of alcohol addiction, his story shows how his imagination has served as one of the devices to negotiate and execute his sense of agency. At the moment when he started writing the story about his mother, he moved out of the reality at hand, looked over his own experience and elicited what he found to be most relevant for creating the story. So in a way the chance to write a story has enabled him to express his voice vis-à-vis teachers’ and neighbours’ reproachful perception of his mother as a neglectful and irresponsible parent. In the story there is a part where he refers to his mother as the one who taught him how to hunt, fish and find a way through the forest. In other children’s stories and their parents’ narratives I observed that this role is usually the responsibility of fathers. In most cases, they are the ones who train their children in all kinds of tricks and transmit the actual knowledge of how to live in the forest. In Tonya’s case, as we saw earlier, it is her father who performs the role of instructor in his daughter’s learning skills in the forest. But in Taras’s story, his mother takes on the role of teaching her son skills for survival in the forest and for protecting the weakest. I interpret this as Taras attributing a father’s role and his place within the family to his mother. The absence of a father does not prevent him from following a local pattern of gender roles within the nuclear family, on which he draws while writing his essay. In her article ‘Resistance, Refusal and Global Moralities’, Marilyn Strathern writes that the kind of knowledge that the children of neglectful parents (such as the characters Peevay and Carolyn Steedman in her analysis) possess would stand against the assumption so popular among the missionaries and social workers that ‘like reproduces like’. I don’t have to rehearse the literature on deprivation traps: poverty leads to poverty, neglect to neglect. But it is not the whole story. If neglect leads to neglect, how

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come Carolyn Steedman cares about her mother, writes so movingly about her? … How come Peevay, despite his mother’s hatred and (we might surmise) selfdisgust, puts such effort into recovering her? (2005: 185)

In her account of cases that are similar to that of Taras, she refers to relationships as one kind of resource and, particularly, the power of the relationship between mother and son: ‘for while a person’s skills might be taught by others, the relationship is learnt only through those who are party to it’ (2005: 186). Drawing from Strathern’s account, I suggest that though Taras’s mother has not been able to perform her parenting duties during her long-term depression, Taras is still attributing to her the roles and qualities that others probably do not see (and that perhaps are not there). So in Taras’s case it is not important whether he narrates the real or the imagined. What is crucial for our understanding is the actual relationship between himself and his mother and the value of this relationship. I cannot account for the day or occasion when he learnt how to stay in the forest and, indeed, it may have been his mother who taught him the skills to which he is referring. There might, perhaps, have been a time when she was able to perform as a really good parent, which would make Taras and her other sons see and feel what others would not have a chance to observe. What is significant here is that Taras’s story contains a strong moral message and understanding that one is responsible for protecting the weakest. This is precisely what his father failed to do in relation to his wife and her children who needed his protection and care. Furthermore, it emphasizes Taras’s sense of moral reasoning which connects his understanding that ‘one should be responsible for the weakest’ to his sense of connection to his mother. He considers himself as being responsible for her wellbeing and takes the role of her defender in the present. In a certain sense his story about his mother is a statement that defends and justifies her. To build on my discussion about the future I would like to turn now to another point, namely, that every local child and adolescent performs as a socially related and caring being when writing/narrating their stories. That is to say, they narrate the world they live in and respond to the events and experiences as socially aware and compassionate persons. It has also shown that Taras’s relation to his mother reflects not only his sense of a close bond and attachment despite her neglect, but also his own attempt to give a different meaning to her neglect by reversing it and elevating it to the meaning of care and love (see also Briggs 1998: 193). It seems that he is able to understand his mother in more a complex way than how schoolteachers or neighbours see her. Taras’s testimony stands not simply as a story about his mother but as an expression of his strikingly mature sense of responsibility and social awareness.

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There is another type of story, in which a child’s attachment to a parent is reflected in a different way. For example, a child writing about the future may try to reproduce the story of his or her own parent in which the parent’s ideas of wellbeing are fulfilled. In this respect I would like to look at the story written by a girl called Galya. In the future I would like to work in a kindergarten or be a teacher. I want to have my own house, a car, several cars, one daughter and many friends. In the future I shall leave for a city and stay there with mum. I shall get married to a man who does not smoke, who does not drink alcohol and who does not mess around with women. I want my daughter to know many languages and, first of all, her native language, Eveny. I shall have a happy family and my husband will be educated. I want her to study well and get only excellent marks.

Galya is a ten-year-old Eveny girl (a village child) whose parents got divorced several years ago and who, at the time of my fieldwork, was living with her mother, Svetlana. Both of her parents are local Eveny who attended the local boarding school. After finishing school they got married and stayed mostly in the village until Roman, Galya’s father, got a job as a reindeer herder and moved into the forest. At that time Svetlana chose to stay in the village, where she was employed in the local village administration as a secretary. According to Svetlana, her husband left her when he got another job at the end of the 1990s at a reindeer herding state farm located in Verkhoyansky district, more than three thousand kilometres away from Topolinoye village. There he set up a new family, and he was not seen again in Topolinoye for several years. When talking to me, Svetlana expressed how unhappy she had been in her marriage, owing to the numerous affairs her husband had had. His cheating made her suffer for years and eventually he decided to marry another woman from a different village. The story about the future that Galya wrote appears to me to have obvious connections with her mother’s life-story. Here she puts down her thoughts about future marriage and what sort of husband she would have, and especially how he has to behave. The plot of her story suggests that Galya is reproducing her mother’s life-story, in which she has what her mother wished to have in her own life. She is projecting her mother’s concern about her personal life and her mother’s understanding of what an ideal marriage should be into her future life story. In other words, her life will be like her mother’s, but instead of marrying a man who drinks, smokes and cheats she will marry a man with good qualities. If I had not listened to the life story of her mother, I would probably not have gained the same understanding of Galya’s story about the future. As we can see, what Galya produced in her story is her mother’s wish for

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her daughter’s future family life. This story is also Galya’s response to her mother’s suffering and sense of frustration caused by her relationship with a former husband. Her daughter’s future life story and its happy ending resolve the story of her unhappy mother’s marriage. Like Taras, Galya brings to the fore a moral message for her own father who failed to meet his responsibilities as father and husband. Another character that I would like to introduce into my discussion is eleven-year-old Karina, another village girl. Her family history resembles those discussed above, but the reason for her parents’ divorce was different. Karina lives with her father, who takes care of her, or sometimes with his relatives, because her mother cannot handle her parenting role owing to alcohol dependency. The mother, Larisa, arrived in Topolinoye in the late 1980s or early 1990s and was originally from a village in another part of the Sakha Republic. She got married to a local Eveny man, Volodya, and settled into the village for good. They had three children, Tolik, Karina and Sasha, but after several years of marriage their life went wrong. Their relationship reflected the life of the whole community when people were overwhelmed by a sense of collapse and abandonment. Larisa’s habit of occasional drinking eventually developed into alcohol dependence. I have to note that Larisa was not the only person in the village whose alcohol addiction began at this time. According to the locals, the 1990s were the hardest years for the village, with people having to cope with a total absence of cash and the sudden disappearance of any kind of state support which, in the 1980s, had been taken for granted. There were no shops in the village, and food products and other supplies would rarely reach Topolinoye. These were the years when people really struggled to survive, and some lost that struggle. When I looked through the archival statistics in the village administration, the period of the mid to late 1990s showed the highest rate of homicides, triggered by heavy alcohol consumption, and numerous cases of suicide committed most often by men. The statistics on suicide at the local hospital and my conversations with hospital personnel helped me to obtain data on the violent deaths for this period which show that the most vulnerable part of the local population appeared to be the unemployed, the alcohol addicted and, in most cases, divorced women and men. So the cases of divorce and separation that we have looked at here, including Karina’s story, indicate some of the reasons for the suffering, the depression and the alcohol dependence of local women and men. After several years of heavy drinking, Larisa lost her parental rights and, at the time of my arrival, was no longer responsible for the care of her children. Karina’s younger brother Sasha was taken care of by their aunt Nina, and her older brother Tolik was sent by his father’s relatives to

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study at the school for the children of Northern Minorities in the city of Nerungry in another part of Siberia. I became acquainted with Karina during my class on computer literacy. The group mostly consisted of girls, and Karina stood out owing to a certain expression of suffering on her face. She seemed to be really fragile, reserved and quite diffident in learning how to deal with a computer. After several classes, however, she was making good progress and I found her keen to learn and acquire new skills. During one of the classes I asked the whole group to write their stories about the future. Karina wrote a story that goes as follows: I shall finish school and enter the course where people are trained to be surgeons. When I finish the course I shall get employed at hospital. I shall buy a two-storeyed brick house with a big balcony in the city. I shall have a big greenhouse where I shall grow flowers and vegetables. I shall stay in this house with my mum, dad, my brothers Tolik and Sasha. I shall do all the household duties so that my mum could rest and have a good time. I shall get married and have three children: two girltwins and a boy. I want the village to be better and wish people here not to swear.

In her story there is an attempt to rewrite and remake the end of her family story. She is writing the plot of her future actions in which she organizes her parents’ reunion and brings her brothers back to their original home. In this story, along with seeing herself as a successful person, she assumes the role of the one who takes care of her mother in the future. Her view in this respect is similar to that of Taras in that she sees herself as responsible for caring for her mother, despite the fact that her mother has failed utterly to fulfil her parenting role in the present. Children’s idealization of their own parents might be interpreted by the attachment theory, which is focused on the impact of attachment, separation and loss throughout the life-cycle (Bowlby 1969, 1973, 1980; Parkes et al 1991; Holmes 1993). In other words, the ages of Taras (twelve), Karina (eleven) and Galya (ten) indicate that they have not yet reached puberty, which might serve as an explanation for their idealized view of their parents. If following the Eveny views on child development, this stage is associated with vulnerability of ‘open body’ (see Chapter 2), in mainstream theories of child development this stage is viewed in terms of a child’s attachment to mother or significant parental figure. Bowlby’s theory of attachment has an ethological base that emphasizes the evolutionary importance of the protection of the young by their parents. According to Bowlby, they are at the age at which a child is not fully separated from his/her mother. They are still emotionally bonded to their closest person. Both views on child development highlight vulnerability of a child and her dependability on parents’ protection.

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Although vulnerability of these children’s ‘open bodies’ in the Eveny sense and their sense of attachment as in Bowlby’s theory are obvious their stories highlight astonishing sense of responsibility, i.e., children take on a parenting role as protectors of their own parents. Somehow they take on to their own small shoulders the responsibility for their mothers’ failures and faults for which they are not responsible at all. So their attempts to rewrite their mothers’ lives appear to be their response. This response is not that of rejection or offence but one of compassion, support and a certain sense of justification of their failures. In her discussion of motivational force of romance and expert knowledge Dorothy Holland suggests, following Dreyfus (1984), that the emergence of a sense of responsibility and emotional involvement marks one’s advanced stage of competency and proficiency (1992: 80). As Dreyfus puts it: ‘The competent performer … after wrestling with the question of a choice and perspective or goal, feels responsible for, and thus emotionally involved in, the result of his choice’ (1984: 30). Drawing from Dreyfus and Vygotsky, Holland argues that if one starts experiencing oneself not as following rules or maxims taught by others but as working out one’s own devices, this implies one has obtained a sense of responsibility (ibid: 81). Though Holland’s discussion is mostly on acquisition of cultural models of romance, I would like to draw an analogy between her expert’s emotional involvement and obtained responsibility and these children’s response to their parents’ lives, and to view the latter as an imaginative device of their own future moves for restoring their family’s well-being. In this light, the sense of responsibility projected by the children might be read as an expression of their sense of agency. As described by Vygotsky, ‘in play the child suspends other possible interpretations of things in the environment and becomes caught up in a pretend world. The child’s desires become related to “a fictitious ‘I’”, to his role in the game and its rules’ (1978: 100). According to him, a child’s motives become defined by the motives of the game. Here, the children have got caught up in their parents’ life-story and see themselves as agents in it. ‘As with play, the overall activity is emotionally engaging’ (Holland 1992: 81). If, following Holland, the responsibility and emotional involvement come only after a certain degree of competence, then these children appear to have achieved a particular stage of social competence, and thus agency. Returning to the point made by Marilyn Strathern in her analysis of two literary accounts, i.e., the childhood reminiscence by a former neglected child, Peevay, who grew up during the revolutionary struggle for independence in Papua New Guinea, and the autobiographical account of childhood experience in a single-mother, working-class family (Steedman 1986), in which she suggests that ‘relationships flourish in different

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ways’ and the ‘parent–child relation is one kind of resource and one kind of particulars that matter’: People are nowhere ‘free’ to create relationships. This is true in a double sense: a) conceptually, relationships have a momentum and character of their own, that is, each must take the form of a ‘relation’ and thus embody a particular image of itself; b) processually, each relationship involves other parties, at a minimum in sustaining the relationship, and these are always specific people. (Strathern 2005: 190)

Despite their mothers’ neglect, both Peevay and Carolyn Steedman reconcile with their emotional hardship in childhood and come to terms with the ambiguities of motherhood through linking their childhood experiences to broader social processes such as rigid class stratification in British society and the situation of colonial and racial tension in Papua New Guinea, which, as a result, produced particular kinds of parents. In other words, it is these former neglected children’s intellectual effort that gives their childhood experiences and their relations to mothers distinct personal meaning. Given that these literary childhood reminiscences were produced in later stages of adulthood and there is a significant distinction between the literary and scholarly genres of writing and Eveny children’s written essays, I still observe a common trait in all of them, which is the emphasis on the value of the actual relationship to their mothers. Similarly to Peevay and Carolyn Steedman, the authors of the stories, Galya, Karina and Taras, present us with the ways they conceive their relations with their own parents, independent of how these relationships are looked at from others’ viewpoints. We may observe that in order to narrate their lives and their relations with their parents they have chosen to narrate their relations with idealized parents. For example, Taras has produced a story about his relations with his mother in the same genre as any child would narrate his/her relation with two parents. He has depicted his mother performing the roles of both father and mother. Karina reproduced the same genre in which her parents are portrayed living together, never being separated and happily taking care of their children. Galya views the idyllic picture of her own family fulfilling her mother’s wishes at present. Children’s imagination of future parents’ reconciliation and their reunion in these narratives works as a device for dealing with family crises in the present and as a source of genuine hope, which allows these children to make sense of their parents’ lives in this particular way. Thus, in their narrated futures children draw creatively from the themes of adult lives, and yet they do not fully accept the adults’ world because in their future lives they reverse this world rather than maintain and reproduce it. That is to say, they narrate their own future autobiographies,

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which are part fantasy and part repetition of their parents’ lives, within their own universe of morality in which they take their own parents’ life stories as a template, but reverse their parents’ alcoholism, poverty and broken families. By presenting their own response to parents’ failures, the children appear as agents and active creators of their own narrated realities. By reversing social suffering and imagining their happy family lives in the future, they also express their own parents’ quest for agency, relief and reconciliation. When I followed the lives of Karina, Galya and Taras six years later, I learnt that Karina, a seventeen-year-old adolescent, was attending her final year at school. When I saw her, I was really astonished by her transformation, as during my years of absence she had turned into an attractive adolescent girl. In our informal conversation Karina told me that she was planning to enter the law course in the city and was preoccupied with her graduation exams. As in previous years, she lived with her father and grandmother in the village, and never saw her mother, who had moved out of the village back to her native town a few years ago. At the time of my visit Galya was away from the village and, according to her aunties, was attending the school in the town of Khandyga, about four hundred kilometres from the village. Her mother Svetlana stayed in the village and continued working in the village administration while supporting her daughter’s studies in Khandyga’s school. I also learnt that Taras had dropped out of school a few years earlier. It happened the same year that his mother died, several months after she had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. After that, one of the local reindeer herders, who is distantly related to Taras, had decided to take Taras to his reindeer herding camp in the forest and had been taking care of him since then. As far as I can tell, Taras is now enjoying his life in the forest and steadily learning his reindeer herding skills under a senior reindeer herder’s supervision. Considering the local perception of the forest as healing, which I mentioned earlier, I suspect that Taras has found redemption and reconciliation in this hard, risky and yet fulfilling world close to reindeer.

Chapter 7

Cosmologies of the Future in the Shadow of Djuluchen

In my conclusion I would like to address the issues that have been raised in previous chapters and elaborate on what implications these have for understanding young Eveny’s experiences of childhood and adolescence, their future autobiographies and the category of person which underlies the senses of time, space and destiny invoked in the narratives of the children and adolescents. In Chapter 5, I established that the concept of a child in relation to a reindeer is an expression of personhood, and that forest children and adolescents draw from their relations to reindeer developmentally as they learn the sharing practices of borichaen and nimadun. In Chapter 6 I dealt with a rather different striving for agency; the accounts of children from unhappy families have shown how they narrate their own future autobiographies, which are part fantasy and part repetition of their parents’ lives. But the agency comes in the twist: they take their parents’ life-stories as a template, but reverse their parents’ alcoholism, poverty and broken families. So now I would like to consider the issues of personhood, agency, time and narrative in further detail. First, I shall show how forest children’s and adolescents’ element of return draws on the motif of a shaman or epic hero bringing resolution to a critical situation and combines this with the redemptive orientation of village children’s attempts to rewrite their parents’ lives. I shall argue that forest and village constructs of agency correspond respectively to cyclical and non-recursive journeys as well as to cyclical and historic temporalities, and shall suggest that these two spaces are associated not only with different kinds of life-trajectory but also with the formation of different kinds of person. Finally, I shall argue that both forest and village children’s and adolescents’ autobiographical narratives can be seen as effectively activators of the partible component of their personhoods, djuluchens which foreshadowed fulfilment of their envisioned futures.

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Personhood: hero and shaman As my discussion in Chapter 1 has illustrated, all forest and village children and adolescents see themselves as departing from the native community. However, their future destinations diverge in distinctive and consistent ways. While most forest children and adolescents envisage themselves returning to their family reindeer herding camps in the forest, village-reared children and adolescents hardly consider the prospect of returning to the village in their future but instead see themselves settling in the city. However, both forest and village adolescents set the departure and return in their future life-stories within a conceptual framework of what I call productive absence.1 I deploy the concept of productive absence to refer to the young Eveny’s motif of bringing rescue or salvation to their native community or family. I shall show that it is this element of return that renders the absence productive, since it is the community of a child’s origin that will benefit from the child’s enhanced powers gained while away. Both forest and village children and adolescents wish to help their families and parents in the future. However, as ethnographic cases have illustrated, village adolescents see themselves as successful professionals who will send aid back home or move their parents to their new homes, and will help their younger siblings to settle in the city; whereas forest adolescents view their future help by actually coming back in person and looking after their family reindeer herd. We shall see that if village adolescents’ view of their own futures resembles a more cosmopolitan, global pattern of immigrant labour and remittance economy, forest ones follow a scenario of departure and return which is local and culturally distinct. I shall come back to this point in my further discussion. Productive absences can take many forms, in each of which a character or protagonist embarks on a journey in order to return and bring resolution to a problematic situation. In Topolinoye one can distinguish a local repertoire of such scenarios. Within this repertoire I distinguish three scenarios of productive absence: 1) the hunting trip in which a hunter brings game back to the camp; 2) the mythic hero’s journey, which brings salvation and rescue to his native community; 3) the shaman’s cosmological flight into the realm of spirits, which brings recovery from misfortune or illness. Figure 2 illustrates local patterns of productive absence. These are numbered 1 to 3 on the diagram, where it will be seen that they are only the first of several more trajectories to be discussed later. I shall range these first three from the most routine to the most extraordinary. Each of them, even hunting, involves what we might call magic;

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Figure 2: Diagram of returns and spatial trajectories

but as we shall see from the parallel with young Eveny’s projected futures, the point of them is not so much magic as such, as a concentration of enhanced agency in a situation which is perceived as difficult or hopeless. A hunter’s return at the end of a hunting trip (1) provides everyday human needs such as wild animals’ meat, fur and skin. The degree of the effect produced by a hunter’s return is not as large in scale as in the case of a hero’s or a shaman’s return. Therefore, it belongs to a realm of ‘routine’ productive absence. The second scenario in which a local hero brings salvation to a native community (2) is reproduced in the following legend I was told by an aunt of Kirill, the local adolescent boy whose ethnographic account featured in Chapter 5. This story narrates a heroic deed performed by Gerakha, a local Eveny leader, and goes as follows: Once there was the time when famine came, reindeer fell ill and started dying and animals left for other places and disappeared. People were starving and dying from famine. Then Gerakha asked people to come together and made a speech. He decided to send a group of people to the Okhotsk Sea to get some fish, so they left for that region. He decided to walk to Ityk-Kuel, which used to be a centre of Bayagantai district. He went to Ityk-Kuel and entered the office [the narrator used the term kantseliaria used in tsarist/pre-Soviet time] and asked the people sitting there for help. Ilia Nikolaevich Zakharov who told me this story said that they did not like the fact that he was asking for help and even slapped him in the face. He

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got insulted and his spirits sank because he had to bring something back to help people to survive. He thought: it does not matter which direction I walk, either towards my native Tompo or to Yakutsk. So he directed his steps towards Yakutsk. He managed to reach Yakutsk on foot and found the necessary people to ask for help. There he was received with understanding. They gave him food products, gunpowder and bullets. Then they agreed to send a lorry with supplies and a thousand head of reindeer as aid. He walked back on foot and reached our mountains. On the way back he stopped near the area called Cheraptaniakh and decided to die because he was so exhausted. He had a special knife with a beautifully embroidered case which always hung over his shoulder. So he took this knife and wrote a message on the ice about himself, saying that he had fulfilled everything he had to do. After that he sat down to die because he did not have any strength to keep on walking. But by luck some people found him; they were looking for him. Two men were riding uchakal [plural for riding reindeer]. As soon as they found him they slaughtered one of the reindeer and gave him fresh reindeer blood, nimaen [arterial blood] to drink. For the first week he was given only this blood to drink, then for another two weeks they started giving him boiled reindeer soup. After he had recovered and was able to ride a reindeer, they all returned home. On their way they hunted an elk so they came back with meat. After a while that lorry of food products, gunpowder and bullets arrived. Also a herd of reindeer reached their destination in summer; that is why people were very happy. He distributed that wealth evenly and each family received reindeer. Those people who went to the Okhotsk Sea arrived with fish too. After that a good time came. He was respected and loved after that. When next elections for the headman came people wanted him to be the headman again, but he declined this suggestion because he was too old. He said he wanted somebody young to be the headman and suggested his relative – Khinguli. That Khinguli told this story to Ilia Nikolaevich, my grandfather. He remembered this story because Khinguli was always telling interesting stories.

The story of Gerakha’s attempt to save the community represents a scenario of rescue in which the central character brings salvation to his people. In a very Proppian way, the model involves the following archetypal stages: the hero’s people are starving; he goes with great difficulty on a long journey to a realm of more powerful beings; he has to struggle to persuade them to provide their superior, powerful help; the ordeal is so severe that it amounts to a near-death experience; he is presumed lost but then returns with help, and as a result is loved and respected. Thus, the story of Gerakha contains two important elements for this discussion: the hero’s productive absence and his glorious return that brings rescue to the community. A shaman’s productive absence (3) involves extraordinary agency which is more obviously in the domain of magic. His or her journey brings resolution and recovery very definitely in the world of spirits. That is to say, the return of the shaman at the end of his cosmic journey brings the community of humans back to a healthy condition. Like the hero, the

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shaman’s departure and return are performed in order to restore wellness to human beings. There is a large corpus of anthropological literature on various forms of shamanism, involving analysis of the variety of its forms, rituals, cosmologies and types of shamans (e.g., Hamayon 1994; Hugh-Jones 1994; Vitebsky 1995; Pedersen 2001; Swancutt 2008). The issue of differences in the shamanic forms and meaning is not important for this analysis, since I am only interested in the scheme of a shamanic journey and, more specifically, the function of rescue. In this sense, the shaman’s voyage and feats come close to those of the hero. In her discussion of the poetics of legends about shamans among shamanic cultures, including the Eveny and the Evenki, the Russian folklorist and ethnographer Elena Novik writes: ‘The figure of the shaman with magic faculties, as well as the topography of his journey developed in the cosmological realm, always parallels the heroic story in which a hero acts and performs his deeds following the same scenario’ (1984: 234, my translation). That is to say, the topographies of a hero’s and a shaman’s journeys and their deeds are framed within the same scheme, where a protagonist’s actions have the following sequence: departure of the shaman or hero, shaman’s or hero’s journey (the period of what I have called productive absence), the acquisition of a magic skill or gift by the shaman or hero, and, finally, return of the shaman or hero back to the community where the acquired gift, wealth or game is distributed among members of the community (1984: 55–7). The character of the hero or shaman appears to serve as a composite archetypal figure, so that the topography of their actions is framed within one scheme of distress and rescue. Both shamanic and heroic scenarios are in effect identical narratives and enactments of a journey from a problem to a solution. On the way, both hero and shaman have to pass through an arena of transformation or a shamanic or heroic battle. The element of shamanic transformation or battle with an evil spirit has been summarized typologically by Piers Vitebsky in his discussion of the shamanic séance which highlights the following stages of what he calls shamanic procedure: The action taken by the shaman brings his or her qualification into the cosmic arena, through the technique of trance which makes possible the journey to the realms of spirits. The centrepiece and turning point of the rite is the encounter between the shaman and the spirit who has power over the client. This may take the form of a physical battle between warriors, a tender coaxing between hunter and animal, a negotiation between business partners, a debate between a cunning opponent and even more ingenious shaman, or a plea for mercy from a supplicant to a mighty lord. Whichever form this encounter takes, the shaman must prevail if the problem is to be resolved. The opposing spirit must be defeated, outwitted, won over, led to a compromise or made merciful. (1995: 126)

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This element of performing extraordinary agency is also present in an Eveny adolescent’s future life-story since his or her future productive absence brings social, economic or political resolution to the situation. In the light of this, I view the future life-stories narrated by the forest adolescents as containing a common scheme which heroic and shamanic scenarios share. But this is where forest and village adolescents are so different. The elements of transformation and problem solving can be observed in the topography of the forest children’s and adolescents’ journey, as they opt for a productive absence in the city, attending a university or college where they become transformed into knowledgeable professionals who then return to their native community to bring a resolution to the critical situation. This particular scenario creates a point of connection between the model of rescue in heroic or shamanic legends and these children’s and adolescents’ future autobiographies, which I interpret as components of the local category of person. This allows us to observe the culmination of forest children’s and adolescents’ stories as a narrative of fulfillment of a particular kind of personhood. Thus, the question that arises out of this discussion is: what makes the perception of an adolescent shift from the routine, small-scale agency of a hunter to the extraordinary scale of heroic or shamanic return? I suggest that a clue to our understanding lies in a child’s gradual and growing perception of his or her community as being in a state of crisis, and that this is what triggers this particular response. It is this situation that requires the extraordinary agency of a shaman or a hero, and awareness of this which moves the child’s fantasies into the key role. Hence this heroic scenario is activated at a critical moment when a community needs a heroic or shamanic return and endows a child, adolescent or young person with the qualities of a potential hero or shaman, in the hope that he or she will fulfill his or herself as an agent, strong enough to affect positively his or her own life and the lives of their family or community, just like the character of Gerakha in the legend recounted above. In other words, this scenario gets activated and configured in a distinctive situation of hardship and crisis. This situation is a reflection of what a large corpus of anthropological literature has been referring to as post-socialism, i.e., economic, demographic and psychological crisis as an outcome of dramatic transition, collapse and failure of the whole worldview (Verdery 1996; Hann 2002; Humphrey 2002; Ssorin-Chaikov 2002; Vitebsky 2002; Yurchak 2006). In other words, children’s and adolescents’ vision of the role they are called upon to play reflects this particular historical moment, which is locally associated with economic breakdown, a sense of despair and abandonment, and isolation from the outside world. This moment of need is historically special, and quite unlike the stability and uneventfulness of the

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1970s–1980s. This archetypal scenario of crisis also serves as a template for action or justification for a child’s action, while the hero or shaman serves as role model for the child as actor. To a significant extent, that hero’s or shaman’s return which forest children reproduce in their stories serves as evidence of the ways the scenario of a hero’s return operates on the level of self-reflection. Every child and adolescent who reproduces this scenario foresees how he or she becomes the locus of extraordinary agency, through performing as a hero or a shaman who has the power to rescue people from famine, misfortune or crisis. In this sense, the element of a hero’s return in the forest children’s future life-stories serves as a celebration of personhood and an ultimate achievement of agency. I find support for this argument in the following: when I questioned the children’s parents and grandparents about the character of Gerakha I found that even if they have not heard this particular story, they would tell me other similar stories about different characters. They would start telling stories about people who had also committed themselves to the wellbeing of the community by going through the same type of ordeal, including the long journey in search of help, remorseless hardship throughout, the near-death experience, and the bringing of salvation and receiving social recognition at the end. Given this particular circumstance, when people repeat the same plot with heroes supposedly known to them, they reveal to us the point that the hero is not just one person with one name, but is also multiple heroes who have performed similar kinds of heroic deeds sometime in the distant past. In other words, this kind of character is generic. This is how the cultural archetype is actualized as a role model for so many children. It is not a matter of historical truthfulness: what is implied is that potentially anyone could have been, and can still be, that hero who saved his or her native community. The action by which a hero brings fortune, wealth and wellbeing back to the community might, and should, be performed by any member of society. In this sense, agency, conceived as the ability to perform a heroic deed, is seen not as a property of one specialist but as potentially distributed among multiple heroes or multiple shamans. In this light the scenario of Gerakha’s return serves as a composite, multiple and archetypal pattern. Gerakha’s story contains a moral imperative, but it is potentially everyone’s story; and in these children’s eyes, everyone has a duty (at least in their optimistic imagination) to act out this role in order to be a full, moral person. The scenario which children and adolescents are drawing on in their future life-stories is one of fulfillment of personhood, in which moral worth is conferred on the individual through the acting out of altruistic scenarios of productive absence.

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In terms of my earlier description, the concept of productive absence contributes to an adolescent’s movement from self to person, and parallels the gradual growth into the sharing practices of borichaen and nimadun. Children’s early experiences in the forest define, categorize and constitute a symbolic representation of the social world they foresee in their own futures. In Chapter 3 the episode in which the girl Anya recalls her first hunt as a small child has illustrated an earlier stage of a forest child’s development, in which a riding reindeer, uchak, is viewed by Bayanay as an embodied extension of a child’s self. In Chapter 5 I have shown a later phase when, in the process of a forest child’s socialization, the reindeer as a developmental trope appears to be a central component of a ten-year-old child’s selfhood (the cases of Vitya and Ilona), which then moves into a social domain of personhood when an adolescent has the ability to shape and affect social relations through the sharing rituals of nimadun and borichaen (Kirill’s account). Hunting is the most routine and everyday form of productive absence, one which we have seen is frequently experienced by forest children but one in which the obligation to serve one’s companions rather than oneself is already explicit and fundamental. We saw in Chapter 5 how a growing child’s successful participation in sharing practices associated with hunting is celebrated as part of the growth and fulfilment of their personhood and agency. Hence, we can say that hunting is a child’s first experience of being a hero. The cases of forest children and adolescents have also illustrated that the Eveny category of reindeer involves the three concepts of a guardian reindeer (khavek), a reindeer as a developmental metaphor and a mythological white reindeer with golden antlers. These three types of reindeer represent three types of agency: protection or protective agency of the reindeer (guardian reindeer); the developmental or formative level in which a reindeer serves as an agent that assists and shapes a forest child’s development (reindeer as a developmental metaphor); and a reindeer’s extraordinary and magical agency (the white reindeer with golden antlers). These three constituents of one conceptual set have significant implications for the formation of a forest personhood, and thus of children’s notion of present, past and future. The construct of the future depends on and is shaped by the type of agency one imagines one can have in one of the spaces within the cosmological triangle of the forest, the village and the city. In other words, a child or adolescent views the future in terms of which space and by what sort of agency he or she foresees himself or herself performing. The forest offers a certain kind of agency in which the child–reindeer interaction and the metaphor of a child as a reindeer calf is a part of one’s acquisition and accomplishment of agency. In this agencyscape the reindeer is understood

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as a cooperative partner in their mutual effort to survive and maintain life in the forest environment. It is a kind of agency that can be performed only in the forest, which is why an intention to return to the forest in the future is a consistent part of forest children’s and adolescents’ chronotope. Village children and adolescents, by contrast, construe themselves as agents in relation to the space of the city. In a very broad sense, they reproduce a local sense of isolation from the rest of the world in which the village is an agency dead zone. Instead of the forest, the city is understood as a main locus of agency. ‘The city’ is viewed as the rest of Russia and the outside world. The ultimate source of agency is far away, in some kind of abstract hyperspace of the city of Yakutsk, Moscow or outside Russia. Referring back to Figure 2, we see how the finales of the village adolescents’ stories, in which a village adolescent settles in a city, are related to a quite different sense of movement, which follows a linear, progressive trajectory (7). This entails a quite different construct of agency, which implies that one’s life-history unfolds in time and space together with a linear movement towards a point of fulfilment which is totally elsewhere. In this vision of the future, the present is never perfect and the future is not recursive. One has to move into a future that is new, empty, fresh and waiting for a new life-story to be unfolded. In this view of the future, agency is located in some unknown and new space of the city, and this gives rise to a longing for agency which is not available here and now in the space of the village, but which for these village children cannot be met by going to the forest. Both village and forest adolescents seek to redeem their parents and their village, but we have observed a significant and, as I have shown throughout all my ethnographic case studies, consistent difference: if forest adolescents talk of returning to rescue and redeem in person, by going back to help their parents to look after their family reindeer herd in the forest, village adolescents rescue and redeem at a distance, by sending help back from the city to the village, or even by moving their family out of the village altogether to the city (a new kind of redemptive space).

Time: cycles with and without destination Returning to the diagram, within the space of the forest we may observe five cycles, which signify a forest type of imagined life-trajectory. I have already discussed the hero’s (2) or shaman’s journey (3) and would add the hunter’s trip (1), the nomadic cycle of a reindeer herd (4) and sovkhoz/obschina reindeer herders’ movement between forest and village kontora (5). The five types of journeys can be classified into cycles with destination and cycles without destination. ‘Cycles without destination’ are the continu-

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ous movements that do not have a point of return. These are the trajectories of the ‘nomadic cycle’ and ‘reindeer herders’. The nomadic cycle (4) is unending and does not have a culminating point of return as it follows its route from season to season. Herders’ cyclical movements are never finalized, as there are no fundamental points of departure and return. The nomadic cycle is all about the reindeer herders’ necessity to maintain an ongoing negotiation with nomadic landscape through feeding the spirits of the land and ensuring a productive use of reindeer pastures maintained by a herd’s movements along a seasonal route. As Vitebsky eloquently puts it in his discussion of the cyclical movement of Sebyan herders and their reindeer: in the sacred space of the Eveny, there was no final destination, no one camp site that was more spiritually charged than the others. The herders progressed around a succession of places that never came to an end. The sacredness of each place was equally intense – but the herders would engage with it for only a few days, until they were forced by their animals’ onward migration to move on to the next place. (2005: 313)

In other words, the cycle without destination may be productive but it is never about absence. In this sense the nomadic cycle entails continuing presence, but this presence moves around together with the movement of the reindeer herders and their herds. I would also see reindeer herders’ movement between the space of the forest and the village administration (5) as continuous, in that it is never meant to have a point of finalization. In relation to these cycles I would like to return to the point I made in Chapter 5 where I suggested that a forest child at the age of ten reproduces the movement of reindeer herders along their annual itinerary in which there is no punctuating point of a return. At this developmental stage their stories lack the punctuating point of a finale or destination. They still follow a nomadic cycle together with their parents and herds of reindeer (Chapter 5, the accounts of Vitya and Ilona). ‘Cycles with destination’ imply a cyclical movement with a moment of return and rescue at the end of each trajectory. These returns are also a point of rescue. As the diagram shows, the element of return after productive absence can be observed among three types of cycles, not simply hunting trip (1), the hero’s journey (2) or the shaman’s soul flight (3), but also a forest child’s trajectory (6). These three circular trajectories return to the same spot in the forest. In this sense, a hunter’s return from a hunting trip with game back to a camp, a hero’s or shaman’s return to the world of humans at the end of his feat or séance, and a forest child’s return from education in the city to a native community are all problem-solving journeys which often return to their starting point.

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The four examples of the ‘cycle with destination’ are scenarios of the productive absence and return of a hunter, hero, shaman and forest child. As we can observe, heroic, shamanic and a forest child’s journeys are similar because they are oriented towards a culminating point of their return and, particularly, to the resolution of a critical situation back at the start of their journey. They bring solution for a critical situation. If we now look at the village child, we see a long line that starts in the village and moves via the space of the village towards the city (7). An arrow shows the linear progression from the village to the city, where the child settles without following any cyclical movement. This obvious difference in adolescents’ imagined trajectories corresponds to the distinction between the types of time. In cyclical time (Evans-Pritchard 1939; Bloch 1977; Mauss 1979; Gell 1992), everything comes out of the world around us and goes back into it, unlike historic or linear (Foucault 1977; Greenhouse 1996) or ‘evolutive’ time (Overing and Rapport 2000: 257–61), which is oriented towards becoming something different rather than being. That is to say, forest adolescents’ cycles with or without destination and village adolescents’ linear movement may even be viewed in terms of a distinction between immanent and transcendent tendencies in divinity (Grosz 1999a; Deleuze 2001). Immanent implies that divinity (including any means of help, salvation or redemption) is inherent in the phenomena of the world, like the spirits of landscape and animals in a shamanic and animist cosmologies, whereas transcendence posits that the divinity and power lie somewhere beyond the world around us, as with a monotheistic god in heaven or communism at the end of the socialist project. If we connect the distinction between immanent, i.e., concrete and process-linked, and transcendent, i.e., abstract and homogeneous, times (Gell 1992; Shieffelin 2002) in Eveny children’s and adolescents’ constructs of agency, then it is possible to observe two distinct formulations of space in relation to the spaces within their cosmological model. In this model, the city is fully transcendent, the forest still largely immanent and the village a ‘non-place’, as a site from which to escape. Another type of return, which is indicated on the diagram, is the return of a frustrated village kid (8). Village adolescents have hardly ever narrated this return, since this concept is associated with failure and frustration and, though well known to adults, somehow omitted in their narratives. This was the way my own return was understood. The local adults construed my return as failure. In their view I had failed to gain wealth and become settled in the space of the city, and that was why I had returned to the village (see Introduction). This trajectory is the most undesirable (though as it was emphasized in Chapter 3 that it happens quite often to the local youth), and therefore is not projected in future autobiographies.

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The trajectories of forest and village adolescents’ futures are both finalized, but the forest type of trajectory is close to the model of the shaman or epic hero, while a village adolescent’s type of trajectory corresponds to the modern, global model of urban migration, set in the context of what could be in effect a remittance economy. Then, both forest and village adolescents stop their narratives at the stage of their adulthood, i.e., they have not really developed their future life-stories until elderly age. To a certain extent my adolescent informants have selectively narrated the future events they wished to be fulfilled and by narrating them they have pre-empted potential failure. In her discussion of Latvian narratives, Skultans considers life testimonies of victims who survived state violence, famine and forced labour in GULAG camps, and deals particularly with illness narratives when people ‘complain not only of the painfulness of past narratives but also of the incoherence of their life stories’ (1998: xii). According to her, by having failed to have coherent life-stories they feel they have failed twice, both as agents and as authors (ibid: xii). Relating Skultans’ insight to Eveny adolescents’ stories, I suggest that while narrating their coherent future autobiographies, adolescents pre-empt this particular problem of failure. They foretold future events, and by having done so they fulfilled them in advance. In pre-empting failure, one pronounces one’s own wish in order to have one’s wishes fulfilled.

‘Future autobiography’ as an activator of djuluchen This point brings our discussion back to an issue of genre that I have discussed in Chapter 1. In Soviet times the act of confirming that one is indeed a proper and highly moral Soviet citizen was canonized within the frame of the genre of kharakteristika (certificate of recommendation or reference of a person’s political reliability). In this sense, adolescents’ written autobiographies could be viewed as auto-kharakteristika, in the sense that they author their own recommendations. They had to demonstrate their own moral goodness, in order to get their wishes fulfilled. But how can one cause one’s wishes to be fulfilled? This perhaps always entails an element of magic. Firstly, we can see that in virtually every autobiography, education features as a magical or transformative tool to the goal. The vision of oneself as a highly educated person is fused into the narrative of epic hero and to a significant degree becomes part of a view on morality. The Soviet value of ‘being obrazovanny’, which implied being educated and thus a highly moral person, merged with morals and values of being a rescuer and saviour in the local Eveny construct of personhood.

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Further, I suggest that the motifs of pre-empting failure by pronouncing one’s wish amount to a form of the genre of prayer. When one is praying one foresees the desired outcome. As a performative utterance it tries to control the future and serves as Austin’s illocutionary act. The issues of performative speech acts such as prayer have been considered in depth by Csordas, who identifies a prayer as an address to a deity and distinguishes three types of a prayer: ‘worship, petition or intercession on behalf of another, “seeking the Lord” for divine guidance, and “taking authority” in the form of a command for evil to depart from a person or situation’ (1997: 322). The type of prayer which involves ‘petition or intercession on behalf of another’ is what we have here. While narrating their future autobiographies and listing their future deeds, these children and adolescents performed an act very similar to an intercession on behalf of their families and native community as well as for their own key role in this. In this regard Csordas suggests that a pronounced utterance and its motive involve a complex of meaning which orients action (1997: 322). It is also, following Austin (1962: 6), an illocutionary act, in which the uttering of the sentence cannot merely be described as saying something, but is also the doing of an action. This particular premise allows me to look at the future autobiographies produced, particularly, by Eveny adolescents as illocutionary acts which make a bid for the event’s actualization, or as I put in local terms, activating one’s djuluchen. When looking at the issues of efficacy of religious language, Webb Keane considers the question of relations between performance, text and context in speech situations in which divine forces are addressed by means of prayers. Taking into consideration a large corpus of literature on various religious practices, he observes that: interaction with invisible beings as a speech situation is made possible by general properties of language that allow otherwise nonperceptible beings to play a role in human societies, interactions that some scholars view as defining religion (Boyer 1984) … As a speech event, prayer often seeks to bring about interaction between human beings and other kinds of beings that would (or should) not otherwise occur … Spirits may be the real audience, even of performances not explicitly directed to them as addressees (Becker 1979, McDowel 1983), and even practitioners who agree on how to pray may disagree on who their prayers actually address (Frisbie 1980a). (Keane 1997: 49–50)

Relating Keane’s views, specifically, to Eveny adolescents I understand their future autobiographies as particular speech events in which an adolescent’s will is articulated and serves as an address to divine forces. In this light it is the future orientation of the Eveny adolescents’ autobiographies which supersedes their classification as mere autobiographies.

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Now, I would like to attend closely to what has been pending in the course of the entire discussion, i.e., the component of adolescents’ personhoods – djuluchen – in order to uncover the ontological framework from which it stems. As I have stated earlier, such analysis may be possible only in retrospect, when the narrated future is no longer the future which a young person was narrating six years ago but has turned into a fulfilled recent past. The ethnographic data have suggested that the moment of adolescents’ narration of their future life-stories has of its own impetus served as some catalytic force that foreshadowed actual enactment of their future life scenarios. Those narratives virtually functioned as activators of the authors’ future life scenarios and, as I argue, emerged as specific projections of the Eveny concepts of destiny and destination intrinsic to nomadic ontology ingrained in the concept of djuluchen. The issue of divisibility and partibility of human personhood has been a focus of anthropological research for several decades, most notably Strathern (1988, 1999). In Strathern’s view of Melanesian personhood, partibility is particular to the exchange of gifts or people which, as her ethnography shows, are equivalents of each other. With partible people the act of separating creates a distinct but not complete, temporary identity (1988: 185). She writes: ‘… the general enchainment of relations means that persons are multiply constituted. There is no presumption of an innate unity: such an identity is only created to special, transient effect’ (1988: 165). Hence, in Melanesian ontology a singular person is composed of multiple partible elements, as people continually shift between their dividual personhoods maintained and composed by multiple relations. Their partible components, i.e., people, can arrange, rearrange, assemble and reassemble parts of themselves that are in fact the product of multiple relations with others. Here, personhood is always in the process of incorporation and adjustment as it moves through different spheres of relations and exists at a range of different scales (see also Strathern 2004). In the Eveny case the concept of djuluchen also emphasizes partibility of Eveny personhood. However, it is manifested in a quite distinct way. If the Melanesian concept of divisible personhood points to a person as a multiple product of others (clan or kin) and the person is temporarily individuated as partible by gift-giving, djuluchen offers a conceptually different treatment of its partible capacity as it is understood not in relation to extraction of parts of the person such as gifts but in terms of separability of one inherently unstable component of one’s self which is perceived as a ‘shadow of a person’ (in translation from Eveny, djuluchen is a ‘shadow that falls or runs ahead of oneself ’). Thus, djuluchen is not fully individuated but is extended and advanced into a person’s destination.

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It is important to note that djuluchen should be viewed as embedded in the reindeer herding practices of movement in which envisioning one’s destination, visualizing and even narrating one’s arrival at the end of one’s travel, amounts to near actualization of the envisioned event, as in seasonal migration patterns of reindeer herds. Reindeer herders refer to djuluchen as ‘one’s travelling spirit’ which departs ahead of its owner and arrives at the destination prior to the owner’s actual arrival (see also detailed discussion in Chapter 2). What I find remarkable is that at the point of a person’s destination, prior to the person’s arrival, people hear and see the arriving person’s djuluchen. The djuluchen is seen as a shadow that imitates the body image of the arriving person and even reproduces the movements and sounds of the person’s walking around the camp and unpacking. So without even knowing that the person is travelling towards their camp, people may recognize that such and such a person will arrive in their camp some time soon. Respectively, djuluchen stays on hold until the person’s actual arrival, and thus the person catches up with the djuluchen part of his or her personhood later, upon ‘actual’ arrival. In other words, within the Eveny construct of the person, the moment of a person’s planning, narrating and envisioning forthcoming events not only is viewed as some act of mere contemplation of some future possibilities but equals an act of the djuluchen’s separation from its owner as it departs and runs ahead of its owner towards the owner’s future destination. In this sense a person’s catching up with his or her djuluchen is a subsequent act of the owner’s reassembling with his or her separable and unstable component. Thus, it is the act of planning, narrating or envisioning the future event, heavily charged and empowered by djuluchen, that moves the future event to its fulfilment. Since the adolescents whom I interviewed six years ago were about to embark on their life-journey, their acts of narration of their future lives can be viewed as the acts of sending djuluchens forward, ahead of themselves into the future. That is to say, my young Eveny informants’ fulfilment of their future autobiographies has been their acts of ‘catching up with their djuluchens’ six years after. I suggest that the partibility of djuluchen might even be interpreted as the act of spatial extension of one’s personhood, as the ‘shadow’ does not completely separate itself from the person but falls ahead of the person, creating some sort of shadow imprint for the person’s future movement trajectory. In this sense, separability or partibility signifies shadow extendability of human personhood. Moreover, djuluchen extends the lived present into the future, and thus transforms the future into an extension of the present. That is to say, djuluchen involves stretching into both the past and the future as a result of infinite expansion of the present. What follows is that the djuluchen’s temporal framework may allow us to view the future in the Deleuzian sense of aion in which ‘the past-future

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is in an infinite subdivision of the abstract moment which endlessly decomposes itself in both directions at one and forever sidesteps the present’ (1990: 77). So the present of djuluchen should be understood as a shadow moment between a person’s coming and going, since djuluchen is always in-between departure and arrival. Moreover, we can see that these future autobiographies, which were fulfilled six years after, present us with a quite distinct mode of futururity, as they cannot be easily placed within the well-established distinction between intuition and intellect and, respectively, pre-reflective and reflective (cf. Young 1987: 11–12; Grosz 1999b: 21). They also go beyond matters of chance and mere human calculation and rather offer us a glimpse into the ways human personhood operates in shamanic and animist ontology, or, more specifically, a wider Eveny shamanistic cultural complex (Shirokogoroff 1999 [1935]; Vitebsky 1995, 2005; Brightman et al 2012). In his seminal work on the psychomental complex of the Tungus, Sergei Shirokogoroff pointed to the significant role of prayers in the Tungus’ communication with spirits (1999 [1935]: 203–7). Though his ethnographic material is related to the Tungus of Transabaikalia and Manchuria, some of his observations on all Tungus cultures are still highly relevant to their Northern relatives, the Eveny of north-east Siberia. In his discussion of prayers, Shirokogoroff posits that prayers and addresses are heard and understood by spirits since they share the same language with human beings, and therefore it does not matter for these spirits which language is used in a prayer, Tungus, Russian or Manchu. For example, the Tungus spirit buga is believed to be common to all peoples and ‘it can understand all human beings whichever language they would use in praying’ (1999 [1935]: 204). If people are in need of spirits’ favour or are menaced by spirits, there is no other means but to satisfy them with prayers and sacrifices, for these spirits cannot be avoided. Within this shamanic ontological framework, the children’s and adolescents’ future autobiographies can be understood as certain speech events among Eveny in which one tries to ask spirits to assist and send luck in vital activities such as hunting or herding, e.g., while feeding the first portion of food or sprinkling vodka on the fire, one discreetly utters one’s wish in order to make a wish come true. One’s spoken wish for luck or safety during a hunting or herding trip makes a narrator heard by the spirits, so, in this sense, pronouncement of this wish is directed both inward and outward. In this respect I suggest that the Eveny adolescents’ speech acts corresponded more to the genre of prayer than to autobiography per se. Figuratively speaking, in a prayer one is plugging one’s own wish into the mains electrics of the cosmos in order to have the wish make its own way to a moment of fulfilment in the future. Precisely because it is an

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autobiography of the future, it cannot simply be a narrative account – it has to be a wish. The pronouncement is for the sake of the self and for all members of a social domain. As John Austin puts it in his discussion of acts of uttering and awe-inspiring performatives, what is uttered outward ‘is a visible sign of … an inward and spiritual act: from which it is but a short step to go on to believe or to assume without realising that for many purposes the outward utterance is a description … of the occurrence of the inward performance … It is not merely a matter of uttering words! It is an inward and spiritual act!’ (1962: 9–10). However, apart from Austin’s inwardness, young Eveny’s acts of pronouncing their wishes for the future not only were inward, spiritual acts but appeared to be outward-directed illocutionary acts that triggered the movement of their djuluchens. In a sense, they activated my informants’ personal ‘travelling spirits’ or djuluchens. If in most ethnographic literature on shamanic societies throughout Siberia and Inner Asia it is virtuoso shamans, game players and other elite practitioners who come closest to mastering their spiritual transportations for the purpose of divination and voyages of their souls to other realms at will (Eliade 1964; Vitebsky 1995: 70–71; Swancutt 2007), the djuluchen provides us with evidence that lay people, including adolescents, inherently possess a capacity to foreshadow events in the future by having part of one’s personhood travel ahead of oneself. In a sense, it operates on the level of inchoate potential, which is several degrees or stages away from shamanic divining skills. Notionally, djuluchen is foreshadowing agency which is literally opened and accessible to any ordinary person. This material on Eveny youth suggests that the experience of adolescence may not necessarily be associated with the state of limbo, i.e., uncertainty and unknowing one’s own future, as often emphasized in adolescence studies (Hall 2003; Lancy 2008). As we have seen, adolescents have construed their own future lives as it pertained to them and according to the available social, cultural and economic resources, but they have also been inadvertently aware of what trajectory life may offer, how their life may unfold in the course of the next several years, and to a significant extent and in a culturally specific way have emerged as agents in forging their own life pathways. Hence, this stage in one’s life-cycle has defining capacity and is extremely important for all subsequent life stages of a person, as whatever an adolescent may wish for the future may play a significantly potent role and serve as pivotal for his or her own destiny.

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Conclusion This work has been an attempt to explore possible ways of understanding Eveny adolescents’ narrated futures, one of which has been to look at an adolescent’s narrative not only as some kind of text with its content and structure but rather as an illocutionary act of addressing and activating hidden forces and as a medium through which morality, social practices, ideologies and personhood are communicated. I have treated young Eveny’s spoken and written stories about their own futures as a resource of a certain ontological status expressed through cultural tropes of reindeer and such metaphors as critical situation, redemption and rescue, GULAG ghosts (arinkael), and shamanic or heroic return. In the context of the contemporary situation of the Eveny community of the village of Topolinoye, the genre of future autobiography has emerged in a new light. Adolescents’ acts of narration about their own future lives have amounted to a performance of a prayer. By narrating their own wishes for the future, Eveny adolescents respond to the contemporary situation local Eveny face by viewing themselves as agents, strong enough to redeem their own life and the lives of their family and community. The scenarios of one’s actual return and the return of remittances as distillations of Eveny personhood emerge as cultural resources which sustain local constructs of sharing, and kinship and marriage patterns. Contrary to the discourse of extinction, this study has shown that young Eveny have a very dynamic cosmological vision of the future and a very strong sense of moral purpose. By presenting their own response to the ongoing situation of crisis and social suffering, children and adolescents serve as agents and active creators of their own future realities. As authors of their own future life autobiographies, they have created the spaces for djuluchen’s foreshadowing potency that is potentially and ideally open to anyone. This also serves as an expression of a whole community’s quest for that extraordinary agency which draws partly on the figure of the indigenous shaman who was suppressed by the Soviet regime, and partly (through the kharakteristika) on the Soviet regime itself, the all-controlling superagent which has so recently failed, opening up other possible futures, roles and obligations for new agents and rescuers.

Notes

1. I adapt the phrase ‘productive absence’ from Dr Andrew Moutu, whose discussion of migrant labour in Papua New Guinea in a paper presented at the ‘Magic Circle’ seminar in Cambridge in June 2007 will inspire a further level of interpretation below.

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Index

A abandonment, 18, 135, 149 absence, 6, 37, 41 productive absence, 155–62 accommodation, 29, 49 actualize, 4, 132, 135, 160 actualization-in-progress, 46 administration, 9 administration of a former state farm, 33 corruption, 103 kontora politics, 104 village administration, 39, 98 adolescence, 1, 16, 30, 32 adolescent agency, 83 adolescent personhood, 43 adolescents, 1, 2, 13, 16, 25, 41, 62 puberty, 45, 53 adult, 4, 22, 47, 48 adulthood, 4, 23, 45 adult hunter, 30 transition into adulthood, 52 young adulthood, 42, 45 age, 25, 32 age cohorts, 31 age groups, 32 coming of age, 51, 53 agency, 3, 18, 63, 72, 151 quest for agency, 18 alcohol, 9, 22, 53, 70 alcoholism, 18 Aldan, 11 Alice, 2 American Museum of Natural History, 13 analogy, 18, 140, 151 Anderson, David, 15, 39, 118 animal, 17 act of killing an animal, 30 animal behaviour, 66 animal fur and skin, 60 animal sacrifice, 30, 68

predatory animals, 60–61 respect for a hunted animal, 67 snow ram, 65 wolf, 61 anthropology, 4 anthropological research, 16 anthropology at home, 4 anthropology of Siberia, 15 arinkael, 12, 14, 40, 131, 131–41 articulation, 3 emergent and pre-emergent articulations, 3 Austin, John, 167 autobiography, 2, 33, 40, 77, 80 future autobiography, 23, 24, 27, 40 motive, 34 plot, 34 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3, 34, 109 Balzer, Majorie, 15 Barber, Karin, 3 Barthes, Roland, 3, 42 Basso, Keith, 132 Bateson, Gregory, 4 Beach, Hugh, 10 Benedict, Ruth, 47 Bloch, Alexia, 15, 55 Bloch, Maurice, 39, 67 Bluebond-Langner, Myra, 48 blueprint, 2, 19 boarding school, 7, 54, 72 Boaz, Franz, 13 Bodenhorn, Barbara, 72, 119 body, 16, 52 closed, 15, 44, 52, 64, 66, 120 open, 16, 43, 52, 63 Bogoraz, Waldemar, 13, 14 Bogoyavlensky, Dmitri, 9, 69 Bolshoi Niever, 11

186 Bowlby, John, 150 bricolage, 50 Briggs, Jean, 29, 47, 61, 67, 87, 111 Bruner, Jerome, 34, 38 C Carroll, Lewis, 2 Cheney, Kristen, 23 childhood, 1, 16, 23, 43, 46, 48 child development, 16, 45, 51 child learning, 61, 63, 66 child personhood, 43, 45, 68 child play, 52 child socialization, 45, 49, 66 childhood studies, 16, 46 children, 1, 2, 32 children as agents, 18, 48, 68 children’s auto-conversations, 50 forest and village childhood, xi, 22 institutionalized childhood, 54 Christianity, 104 chronotope, 17, 18, 109 forest chronotope, 17, 109 circle, 2, 96 Cohen, Anthony, 78, 81 collapse, 1, 28, 106, 149 collapse of the Soviet Union, 8 economic collapse, 9, 21, 134 collectivization, 8, 20n9 communication, 67 communism, 8, 20n9 Communist Party, 13 community, 5, 18, 24, 27, 36 Siberian communities, 15 Condon, Richard, 53, 86 cosmology, 5, 16, 56 cosmological context, 17 cosmological triangle, 16, 56, 57 Crapanzano, Vincent, 38 Cruikshank, Julie, 24, 29, 38 Csordas, Thomas, 166 curse, 69, 76, 131 accursed locality, 12, 142 ningichapche tor, 11 D Dalstroi, 11 death, 14, 69 dead, 14 spirits of the dead, 14, 137–41 violent death, 9, 70 Deleuze, Gilles, 50, 124 Descola, Philipp, 111 desolation, 69, 70

Index despair, 18, 70 destiny, 3, 46 destination, 56–57 future destinations, 27 life destination, 19 dialogism, 85. See Bakhtin discourse, 1, 38 discursive exploration, 38 plane of discourse, 42 displacement, 4 distress, 18 djuluchen, 4, 16, 17, 19, 41–42, 46, 52, 107, 120, 165, 171 forerunner, 16, 46, 107 foreshadowing, 16, 19, 41, 42, 106, 154, 167, 170, 171 travelling spirit, 16 Dreyfus, Hubert, 151 Durkheim, Emile, 67, 107 E economy, 6, 8, 58, 134, 154 education, 26, 32, 80 higher education, 87, 93 Eliade, Mircea, 170 emergence, 4, 18 emotions, 53 boredom, 95 loneliness, 72 envisage, 4, 27, 93 envision, 4, 19, 24, 25, 46, 91, 154, 168 ethnography, 3, 5 ethnographic case studies, 23, 25, 42 ethnographic observation, 3, 22, 25, 31, 44 Russian and Soviet ethnography, 11–16 Evenki, 55, 137 event, 2, 40, 124, 130–31 event horizon, 4 relationship between narrative and event, 40 Eveny, 1, 3, 7 Eveny childhood and adolescence, 48 Eveny of Kolyma river, 13 Eveny or Lamut, 6 Eveny language, 13 Eveny Magadanskoi Oblasti, 14 Eveny of Omolon river, 13 Eveny of Sebyan-Kuel, 63, 69 Eveny of Tompo, 7 Eveny youth, 40 Tomponskye Eveny, 7 experience, 3, 17, 22, 23, 35, 39, 49, 51, 72, 83, 93, 146

Index F failure, 6, 41 family, 1, 10, 18, 30 family history, 22, 43 problem family, 143 unhappy families, 141 fieldwork, 22, 25 Finnegan, Ruth, 35 Firth, Raymond, 47 Fisher, Raymond, 7 folklore, 13 Fondahl, Gail, 15 forest, 15, 16, 56, 58, 72 forest children and adolescents, 16, 33 forest socialization, 60 Master of the Forest, 63, 64, 67, 105 transition from forest into village, 72–73 Fortes, Meyer, 47–48, 112 Tale children, 47 Foucault, Michel, 164 frustration, 6, 22 fulfilment, 2, 3, 4, 22, 40, 100, 106, 107 funeral, 14 fur tribute, 7 yasak, 7 future, 1, 3 forging future life trajectory, 3 future autobiographies, 2, 23, 33, 34, 37, 40, 56, 75, 78 future life scenarios, 2, 34, 36 future-oriented narrative, 4 futurelessness, 1 uncertainty about the future, 41 G Gavrilov, Vtor, 7 Gell, Alfred, 164 gender, 15, 28, 30, 58, 60, 84, 88 gender of a child, 30 manhood, 52 womanhood, 52, 89–91 generation, 15 genre, 13, 34, 38 Gerakha, 156–62 Goffman, Erving, 40 Gogol, Nikolai, 10 Golovnev, Andrei, 15 Gordillo, Gaston, 39 gossip, 5, 92, 93, 96, 103 Goulet, Jean-Guy, 128 Grant, Bruce, 15 Grasseni, Christina, 61 Gray, Patty, 15 Green, Sarah, 39 Greenhouse, Carol, 164

187 Grisha, 16, 77, 100 Grosz, Elizabeth, 164, 169 growing up, 3, 31 physical growth, 52–53 GULAG, 11, 12, 14, 17, 24, 69, 131 ghosts, 133–41 Gosuderastvennoie Upravlenie Lagerey, 11 GULAG concentration camp, 69 GULAG prisoners zeki, 12, 18 Gullestad, Marianne, 40 H Habeck, Otto, 15 Hall, Stanley, 51 Hall, Tom, 170 Halverson, John, 34 Hamayon, Roberte, 158 Hankiss, Agnes, 40 hero, 6, 19, 123, 154, 155, 156 heroic return, 6, 18 heroic scenario, 18, 158 heterogeneity, 4 Hirschfield, Lawrence, 48 Holland, Dorothy, 151 homogeneity, 4 homology, 110 house of culture, 6, 71 klub, 6 household, 10 domestic space of a reindeer herding camp, 59, 64 Hugh-Jones, Stephen, 158 human, 15 human–animal relations, 52, 55, 63 human social sphere of the encampment, 15 humanize, 15 inter-human relations, 52 Humphrey, Caroline, 39 hunting, 6, 58 children’s participation in hunting, 30 first hunt, 64 hunting narrative, 15 prohibition on hunting, 67 I identity, 1, 31, 112 forest identity, 91 territorialized identity, 4 ideology, 3, 13 ideological censorship, 14 imagination, 2, 45, 151–53 imaginative device, 18, 153 imagined stage, 2 inequality, 9

Index

188 infrastructure, 9, 10, 22 village infrastructure, 95 insider, 4 internat, 7, 54 Inuit, 53, 61, 111 Canadian Arctic, 86, 119 Canadian Inuit, 53, 61, 86 inversion, 3. See reverse inverted sequence, 3 invocations, 13 Ira, 27 isolation, 9, 22 Ivan, 28 J Jackson, Anthony, 4 Jahoda, Gustav, 49 James, Alison, 48 Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 13 Jokhelson, Vladmir or Waldemar, 7, 13, 14 K Keene, Webb, 166 Kehily, Mary Jane, 51 Kerby, Anthony, 38 Kerttula, Anna, 15, 29, 68 Khandyga, 5, 11, 41 Kharkhordin, Oleg, 54 Khlinovskaya-Rockhill, Elena, 54 Khudjakov, Ivan, 13 kinship, 27, 28, 55 affinity, 28, 75 bilateral exogamy, 28 consanguinity, 28, 74 descent, 28 kin-making, 26, 27, 28, 29 Kirill, 31, 68, 124 Kolyma, 13, 20 Kolyma river, 7, 19n1, 20n7 Kolymskaya trassa, 11 Korbin, Jill, 48 Krupnik, Igor, 15 Kultbrigady, 13 Kwon, Heonik, 15, 83 L Laempede, 63 Lambek, Michael, 133 Lancy, David, 49, 52, 118, 170 landscape, 39, 58, 43, 63, 137, 163–64 Lavrillier, Alexandra, 137 LeVine, Robert Alan, 48 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 50, 110, 121 life, 1–18

life-cycle, 51, 77 life-history method, 23 life-journals, 23 life-scenarios, 2 life-trajectories, 1, 3, 16 Linde, Charlotte, 3 liquidation, 9, 13 literacy, 5, 25, 76 computer literacy, 5, 79, 143 locality, 12, 17, 60, 69, 131–32 sense of place, 58, 69 luck, 41, 64, 68 M Magadan, 11 magic, 13, 155, 158, 165 magic power, 13, 122, 157–58 magic reindeer, 161 Mainov, Ivan, 7, 13, 14 Malinowski, Bronislav, 47 Malynovka, 12 map, 8, 9 market relations, 9 marriage, 26, 27, 29, 55 Mauss, Marcel, 112, 164 Mead, Margaret, 47 mediator, 4, 129 memory, 2, 17 topography of social memory, 39 metaphor, 110 metaphoric identification, 111 metonymy, 68, 111 misfortune, 40, 44, 67 modernization, 7 Montgomery, Heather, 47 Morrow, Phyllis, 29 Morrow, Virginia, 48 Moutu, Andrew, 171 movement, 5, 22, 56–57 cyclical movement, 57 mobility, 60, 70 movement and marriage, 29 nulgachaek, 90 seasonal movement, 58 seasonality, 71 mutuality, 29 N name, 44 narrative, 1, 2, 3, 15, 46 narration, 24, 49 narratological sequence, 3 narrator’s anticipations, 38 primacy of the narrative, 3

Index native, 4, 8, 20 native’s point of view, 5 Nikolaev, Semen, 14 NKVD, 11 nomadic, 7 nomadic camp, 23, 71 nomadic ontology, 60 nomadic time, 18 nomadize, 7 North America, 13 North-East Asia, 6 North Eurasia, 13 Novik, Elena, 158 O obschina, 9, 36, 37, 58 Oktia, 32 Ol’chan, 12 Ong, Walter, 34 ontology, 3, 60, 167–69 animist ontology, 139 Melanesian ontology, 167 ontological framework, 3, 5 oral, 2, 20 oral narratives, 16, 23, 34 oral tradition, 13 oral and written, 23, 34, 35 Ortner, Sherry, 128 Osherenko, Gail, 15 outsider, 4 Oymiakon, 11 P parenting, 18 child–parent partnership, 68 future parenthood, 26 helping parents, 26 parents in the forest, 21 separation from parents, 72 partibility, 46. See djuluchen past, 11, 24, 29, 39, 49, 77, 84, 96, 102, 121, 132 past disguised as their future, 2 Pedersen, Morten, 158 Peirano, Mariza, 4 perestroika, 14 person, 3, 37 becoming a person, 3, 47, 51 Eveny personhood, 4, 16, 58 Melanesian personhood, 167 personhood, 3, 68, 77, 155 Petia, 32 Piaget, Jean, 49 Pika, Alexander, 8, 9, 69

189 pokazateli, 10 pokazukha, 10, 98 Poole, Fitz John Porter, 49, 112 Popova, Uliana, 14 poselentsy, 11 post-colonialism, 15 poverty, 18 practice, 3, 27, 35, 40, 49, 53, 57 prayers, 13 nirgaechaen, 13 prediction, 2, 19, 40, 106. See fulfilment primitive, 8 primitive past, 14 Propp, Vladimir, 36 Prout, Alan, 47 R reindeer, 14, 82 agency of a reindeer, 44 domestic reindeer, 50, 64, 82 guardian reindeer, 44, 52, 82 reindeer calves, 32, 62 reindeer as a developmental trope, 17, 113, 121–22 reindeer herding, 6, 10, 58, 75 reindeer herding brigade, 30 reindeer herding kit, 75 reindeer herding skills, 30, 33 reindeer movement, 60 reindeer pastures, 60, 116, 120 wild reindeer, 50 relocation, 8, 9, 20 resources, 1, 23, 39, 104, 170–71 Rethman, Petra, 15, 68 return, 4, 5, 37, 156 departure and return, 15, 26 my own return, 4, 5 return of a hero or shaman, 6, 157–59 reverse, 2, 18 reversed mirror image, 2 ritual, 13 hunting ritual, 67 hunting and shamanic, 13 reindeer herding ritual, 62 Road of Bones, 11 Rosaldo, Renato, 15 Russian, 7, 10 Russian Academy of Sciences, 12, 13 Russian Arctic, 7 Russian Far North, 6, 7 Russian kosaks, 7, 12

Index

190 S Sakha Republic (Yakutia), 1, 5 Sakha (Yakut), 10, 145 Sarris, Greg, 119 Schieffelin, Bambi, 38, 111 school, 21, 49, 71, 84 school attendance, 86 school teachers, 72–73, 84, 143 Sebyan, 14, 69, 95 sedentarization, 9 self, 3, 78 present and future selves, 81 selfhood, 80 Senduchen deposit, 11 sequence, 2, 15, 33–36, 56, 122, 158 shaman, 6, 159 shamanic chanting, 13 shamanic ritual, 13 shamanic scenario of return, 158–59 sharing, 3, 17, 55, 57, 67, 154 borichaen, 17, 125–28 ceremonial exchange, 129 nimadun, 17, 125–28 Shirokogoroff, Sergei, 169 Shuman, Amy, 2, 35, 38 Siberia, 1, 7 Siberian studies, 15 Skultans, Vieda, 165 Slezkine, Yuri, 8, 15, 21, 39 social change, 2, 9, 15, 24, 51 socialism, 8 socialist present, 14 socialization, 3, 17, 55, 68 Solovetsky kanal, 11 Sonia, 27 soul, 138. See body Soviet, 6 post-Soviet, 14 Soviet citizens, 13 Soviet development policy, 42 Soviet ideology, 13 Soviet society, 8 Soviet Union, 6, 39 USSR, 13 space, 3, 17, 21, 56, 70, 76 spatial organization, 21 speech, 16, 41, 66 reticence, 66. See child socialization spirits, 13, 39 ancestral spirit, 44 malevolent spirits, 43 non-human spirits, 44 spirit of a killed animal, 67 spirit of the land, 67

Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai, 15, 21, 39, 54, 131–32 Stadukhin, Mikhail, 7 stagnation, 8 Stammler, Florian, 15 state farm, 8, 28, 45, 55, 70, 123 Steedman, Carolyn, 151–52 storyability, 38 Strathern, Marilyn, 51, 112, 116, 129, 146–47, 151, 167 structures of feeling, 3 subjectivity, 5 Swancutt, Katherine, 158 T time, 3, 58, 162 cyclical time, 58, 163 Soviet temporality, 134 time-travel, 4 timing, 67 Tompo, 7, 9 River Tompo, 7 SPK Tompo, 9 Tonkin, Elizabeth, 38 Tonya, 16, 68, 77–91 Topolinoye, 5, 8, 9 Toren, Christina, 47–48, 111 transportation, 22, 71 Tungus, 6 Northern Tungus, 7 Southern Tungus (Evenky), 7 Tungus-speaking groups, 6 U Ukrainians, 10 Ulturgasheva, Olga, 30, 44, 111 unemployment, 9, 33, 34, 69 V Vakhtin, Nikolai, 15 Ventzel, Aimar, 15 Vera, 16, 17, 31, 69, 77, 92 Verkhoyansky mountains, 7 village, 6, 16, 68 village administration, 31 village background, 16, 91–92 violence, 53, 72 violent deaths, 9, 70 Vitebsky, Piers, 9, 14, 15, 29, 39, 66, 69, 158 Volodia, 36 Vygotsky, Lev, 45, 47

Index W wellbeing, 80 White, Hayden, 38 Whiting, Beatrice, 51 Whiting, John, 51 Willerslev, Rane, 15, 30, 44, 53, 61, 111 Williams, Raymond, 3 Wolfe, Sally, 15, 66 Wollheim, Richard, 38 written, 2, 24, 27, 31–36 written stories, 23

191 Y Yakutia, 7 Yakutsk, 5, 22, 71 Yanstroi, 11 Young, Katharine, 40, 169 Yukagir, 7, 15, 19n1, 43, 53 Yurchak, Alexei, 159 Z Zastoi, 8