The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia 9781503617858

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The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia

The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia

NIKOLAI V. SSORIN-CHAIKOV

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 2003

Stanford University Press Stanford, California www.sup.org

© 2003 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai V. The social life of the state in subarctic Siberia I Nikolai V. Ssorin-Chaikov. p.

em.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8047-3462-3 (cloth : alk. paper) I.

Arctic peoples.

2. Arctic peoples-Russia, Northern.

peoples-Russia, Northern.

5· Siberia (Russia)-Sociallife and customs.

20th century.

6. Russia, Northern-History-

7· Russia, Northern-Ethnic relations.

Politics and government. GN673.S69 2003 306'.0947'I-dc2I

3. Indigenous

4· Russia, Northern-Social life and customs. 8. Russia, Northern-

I. Title.

Original printing 2003 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: I2 II IO 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Designed and typeset at Stanford University Press in ro.5/I2 Bembo

2002I54094

To my mother

Contents

List of illustrations and table Acknowledgments I.

Introduction

IX

x1

I

State: Deferral, Difference, and Diffusion Power:Time and the Other

5

9

Site: Nesting Hierarchies, Nesting Orientalism, and Capitalism as I4 "the Other" 2.

Making Wildness and Empire: From the Seventeenth to the Early 23 Twentieth Century Russian Iasak over Central Siberia Politics of Gift and Tribute

25

26

Meanings ofLawlessness

30

The Katonga Area at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 35

Recording Social Categories The FurTrade,

32

39

I900-I9I7

3. Primitive Communists on the Podkamennaia Tunguska River 47

Constructing Soviet Meetings

"Ethnographic Principle" as a Knowledge Practice

49

Siberian Social Organization in Early Soviet Scholarship

53

57

Designing Clan Soviets Structuralist Politics

44

65

4· After Capitalism: The Tenacious Visibility of the "Old Regime" in the 73 Early Soviet Politics of Difference Unmasking and Uprooting

75

viii

Contents

The Soviet "Ethnographic Present-Perfect"

81

Second Nature in the Mirror of Social Constructivism Ethnography and Reporting Class Origin as Genealogy

92

98 103

The "Eye," the Socialist "I," and the Capitalist "He" in the Soviet Ethnographic Present Perfect 106

no

5. Poetics ofUnfinished Construction The Visibility of the State

II3

Vanishing as Unfinished Construction The Economy of Labor Shortage

n6

II9

Expansion in an Economy of Shortage

125

Poetics ofDevelopment as Employment Poetics ofUnfinished Construction

134

6. From State Orphans to Children ofNature Boarding School

129

140

142

Fosterage and Apprenticeship

147

Distinction and Proper Place

150

Social Life of the State: Commands

154

Social Life of the State: Call-Signs and Nicknames Narratives of Autonomy 7- MotheringTradition

157

162

170

Surrogate Workers and Modes of Production Female Workers in the Katonga Collective

173 179

The Making of Professional Housewives: Katonga The Making of Professional Housewives: Theory The Social Space ofTraditionalism

182 188

193

The Specter ofDomesticity and the Invention ofTradition 8. Conclusion Notes

2II

Bibliography Index

201

247

231

197

Illustrations

Map of Siberia

XIV

Figures I.

Reindeer brigadier Chapogir of the Red Star collective farm (no date)

21

2. All participants of the communal suglan in Baikit dance the Evenki national dance, iokhor'io (1926) 3. Map of the Yenisei river basin showing points of indigenous economic gravitation (1925) 4· Scheme oflocal soviets in Yanovich's proposal

45 6o 63

5. Physical exercises in Evenki boarding school (1930s)

144

6. Evenki female fur hunters taking a smoking break (1930s)

174

7· An Evenki woman taking part in a shooting competition (1930s)

175

Table I.

Social Stratification in Katonga in the Early 1930s

105

Acknowledgments

This book is a product of both Western and Russian anthropological traditions. I conducted fieldwork in northern Siberia in 1988-89 as a research student at the Moscow Institute of Ethnography, and in 1993--95 as a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University. This project would not have been possible without the collaboration and hospitality of the inhabitants ofKatonga and without the financial support of the Soviet-Russian Academy of Sciences, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation (Anthropology and Arctic Social Science Divisions), Stanford University's Department of Anthropology, the Center for Russian and East-European Studies, and the Stanford Humanities Center. I am grateful to Alexei Alexeevich Nikishenkov of Moscow University for introducing me to Western socio-cultural anthropology, to Zoia Petrovna Sokolova of the Moscow Institute of Ethnography for letting me experiment with it at the Soviet Academy of Sciences' expense. Thanks also go to Alexandra Alexeievna Kudria, who taught me the rudiments of the Evenki language. This research benefited from rigorous and friendly intellectual exchanges with Sergei Abashin, Jouko Aaltonen, David Anderson, Genevieve Bell, Alexia Bloch, Hellen Gremillion, Aida Hernandez, Stefan Helmreich, Heimo Lappalainen, Mark Mancall, Bill Maurer, Natasha Novikova, Liliana Suarez Navaz, Heather Paxson, Sergei Sokolovskii, and PerttiVejalainen.The Stanford Anthropology Department accommodated my research interests as well as my academic background. I was also fortunate to discuss my work in the interdisciplinary environment of the Stanford Humanities Center, particularly with Keith Baker and Susan Dunn. I completed the book manuscript during my fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthopology in Halle, Germany. The questions that I took to the field from Stanford, my research in Siberia, and my writing crystallized under the insightful guidance of my academic advisers, Carol Delaney, Jane F. Collier, George Collier, and Caroline

xn

Acknowledgments

Humphrey. Many thanks for comments and suggestions to K. Sivaramakrishnan and Bruce Grant, who reviewed the manuscript for Stanford University Press. I am very grateful to Pamela Ballinger for extensive comments on the content and form of the manuscript, as well as for her companionship. And my deepest thanks go to my mother, Vera Nikolaievna SsorinaChaikova, who supported me in countless ways and encouraged my anthropological projects at home and abroad.

The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia

YAKUT Yakutsk

Olekminsk~

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Russians and other newcomers Forest-Tundra Line YAKUT Ethnic groups -

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500 Miles

CHAPTER

1

Introduction

"r FOUND MYSELF as if in an enemy camp," wrote tax inspector I. I. Pokrovskii after his 1908 trip to the trading posts on the banks of the Podkamennaia Tunguska, a northern tributary of the Yenisei River basin in central Siberia. 1 Initially mistaking him for a fur trader, Evenki forest hunters and reindeer herders (the "Tungus," in Pokrovskii's and Russian imperial usage) were eager to meet with him, but their enthusiasm evaporated as soon as they learned who he was. News traveled faster than he did, and once the word about him began to spread, he often found trading posts along his travel route abandoned before his arrival. Still, he was able to uncover abundant evidence of"illegal trade" that prevented the fur tribute (iasak) on valuable sable from being collected. Private trade flourished instead, and locals looked at him with suspicion and hostility. Pokrovskii's report illustrates the political weakness of imperial tax officers in the Siberian aboriginal hinterland, particularly in comparison with the apparent influence of the fur traders. Pokrovskii was no Gogol's Inspector General. 2 He had difficulty making people talk to him, and once, when visiting a post that was a popular trading location, he was even arrested and "locked up under guard as if a political exile." 3 More generally, his text conveys the sense of a weak state that seems barely present in the Subarctic despite several centuries of colonial history dating back to the Russian conquest in the early I6oos.Yet the report carries one Gogolesque episode that contradicts this impression and in fact reveals not merely the presence but also the political salience of the state. On one occasion when Pokrovskii did manage to spend some time with Evenki, the ice was broken after they had shared a few drinks, and he heard their complaints about a certain "Tungus prince," the state-appointed local community head responsible for collect-

2

Introduction

ingthe state fur tribute. At this point, the shyness ofPokrovskii's interlocutors gave way to assertiveness, and each of the Tungus at the party approached him demanding appointment as a "prince." "They supported their claims," writes Pokrovskii, "by proudly displaying some old but carefully preserved receipts of donations to the Turukhansk [Russian Orthodox] monastery." 4 What drew my attention to these historical materials, and to the problem of the state within the seemingly stateless Siberian hinterland, was my own field experience on a state collective farm (sovkhoz), Katonga, 5 which grew out of one of the trading posts that inspector Pokrovskii visited in 1908. One particular episode reminded me of the predicaments of statehood that Pokrovskii's inspection revealed. In early October 1994 when Vladimir, an Evenki hunter in his early sixties, came out from the forest to buy supplies for the upcoming fur-hunting season. While conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Podkamennaia Tunguska area in 1988-89 and 1993--95, I spent much of my time with Vladimir; in 1994, we had come together from the forest to Katonga. As we walked down the street to the village store, we passed by the collective-farm office. The farm director opened his office window (fortochka) and yelled atVladimir:"Come up here at once, or should I go and hunt you down in the forest?" As Vladimir later described the encounter to me, he walked into the office and found himself being shouted at. "In front of him," explained Vladimir, "you always are guilty of something, but when I managed to inquire what was wrong, he asked about the combined fodder." Combined fodder (kombikorm) is an industrially produced foddc;r for cattle (including reindeer) that was widely used in Soviet collective farms. During the Soviet period, the fodder was cheap and abundant. But the director, a Russian man in his mid-fifties who had spent his career managing northern state farms, took pride that during the current economic crisis (also known as "the transition") he was still able to get the fodder for "his" collective. The combined fodder that was the issue of his confrontation with Vladimir was a joke in Katonga throughout 1994. The previous winter, the director spent quite a lot of time procuring it. He somehow managed to "beat out" (vybit') a subsidy for it in the provincial capital, Krasnoiarsk, purchase the fodder, and truck it to Katonga over the winter road-a long route from the southern part of the province that is the only ground access to the area and is cut through the snow every winter only to melt and disappear every spring. The director distributed the fodder among the collective-farm reindeer brigades and left Katonga to fight for more state subsidies. Vladimir got a few sacks for his small reindeer herd, and like everyone else was waiting for the collective farm's cross-country vehicle to deliver the fodder to the forest. Its delivery remained contingent, however, on the di-

Introduction 3

rector's success in "beating out" fuel for the vehicle. While waiting for the gasoline, Vladimir and other Katonga hunters and herders were fueling themselves with spirits. They had already spent all the money they had earned from the previous winter's fur-hunting season, and Vladimir sold his portion of the fodder to a Russian who could use it to feed her pigs. This triggered a chain reaction of drinking parties in Katonga, and when the director returned with the fuel for the tank he found the entire annual supply of fodder gone, as well as the hunters and herders, who had fled guiltily to the forest. I have heard this story from many sources, who disagree only about the identity of the collective farmer who first started the trade.Vladimir insisted that he was the first one because he wanted to sell only his portion ("only four or five sacks"), that he "didn't know" about any other trade, and that he was in no way responsible for "the drunks": "So I told him [the director], rather than wait for the fuel, I bought the food supplies and went back to my herd. Rather than depend on the fodder, I [decided that I] should herd the reindeer more attentively-spend time with the herd rather than in the village." At the spur of the moment,Vladimir even decided to resign his collective-farm membership and "go private" as an individual fur hunter. To his (and my) surprise, the director accepted his resignation and signed a sheet of paper certifYing Vladimir's "private" ownership of fifty reindeer from Reindeer Brigade Number Four where Vladimir and his family were registered. However, neither Vladimir nor the director acted on this resignation. The director ran the state collective farm as a sable-hunting firm, and throughout the precarious 1990s tried his best to preserve its monopoly over the Katonga hunting territories.Vladimir was also not very keen on going private. The director was the main fur trader in the Katonga area, and Vladimir preferred to deal with him as a member of the collective, and not as an outsider. More generally, the desire to leave the paternalistic cover of the state collective, however ruined in the 1990s, was much more frequently expressed by the Russian newcomers in Katonga than by Evenki. In another conversation that I had with Vladimir about a year later, he stated that, "as a Communist and a patriot," he was "against this privatization altogether." 6 Northern Siberia provides a case in point that much of current cultural theory makes regarding the role of the imagination of the "primitive" and "indigenous" in making of modern empires. "From the birth of the irrational savage in the early eighteenth century to the repeated insurrection of the natural man at the end of the twentieth," writes historian Yuri Slezkine, the inhabitants of Russia's northern borderlands "have been most consistent antipodes of whatever it meant to be Russian. Seen as an extreme case of backwardness-as-beastliness and backwardness-as-innocence, they have pro-

4

Introduction

vided remote but crucial point of reference for speculations on human and Russian identity." 7 In turn, Siberian Tungus have long supplied an iconic image for this point of reference: "the Tungus, still wild" of Alexander Pushkin's poem (Tungus, i nyne diki1); Tungus the "ideal hunters" (Idealiste ]i:igeifolk) of the Finnish ethnographer M. Alexander Castren, the leading nineteenth-century authority on Siberia; orTungus the archetypal shamanist in whose language, according to Mirca Eliade, the very term shaman originated. 8 Indeed, despite his own examples to the contrary, the tax inspector Pokrovskii identifies the Podkamennaia Tunguska area as one where "we already don't meet statehood" (uzhe ne vstrechaemsia s gosudarstvennostiu) and where "the natives of the wild North" were pushed by "a more cultured tribe." 9 The adverb "already" (uzhe) here directs the tax inspector's gaze from the state center to its periphery while also signaling the movement of the categorical elaboration of statelessness after statehood that later became so central to Soviet evolutionary anthropology. 10 However, the episodes with which I started this book tell a very different story. They convey the presence of the Russian/Soviet state in remote corners of the Siberian taiga (forest), which has long been seen as beyond the state's reach. They also, ironically, reveal practices of identification with the state by people who normally figure otherwise in a well-established tradition of writing about indigenous Siberians. In their portrayal as stateless kinbased societies, whose cultures are determined by long-term adaptation to the harsh northern environment, they come across as only suffering from their proximity to Russian/Soviet state institutions. In contrast with this image, the episodes that I presented above show that, even ifEvenki Qid supply data for their ethnographic displacement to the imagined landscape beyond and before the Russian and Soviet state, these transactions are part of a larger economy in which the state symbols and identities were traded back. In this book, I chart this two-way traffic of symbols and representations. I explore what one may call cultures of Russian/Soviet statehood among the very people whom the state consistently rendered stateless. In doing so, my goal is not merely to undo the displacement of indigenous lifestyles and identities to the imagined landscape beyond and before the Russian/Soviet state. Neither is it merely to read discourses that inaugurate the Russian and Soviet "savage slot." 11 It is to chart forms of governance that expand alongside these displacements, to examine the social life of the state in everyday contexts that extend beyond formal state institutions, and to theorize statehood from the unique vantage point of its self-perceived limits at northern "borderlands" (okrain). The two episodes I laid out above highlight changes in forms and meanings of statehood that I detail throughout the chapters that follow. During Pokrovskii's visit in 1908, "the state" appears as a loose tributary structure,

Introduction

5

manifested in honorary titles and symbols of state loyalty such as donations receipts. In the "combined fodder" episode of I994, the state is a form of employment, with "hunter," "herder," "female tent-worker" (chumrabotnitsa) designated as state-salaried employees in state-run work units such as reindeer brigades and hunting teams. 12 Between these two historical junctures at the beginning and end of the twentieth century, statehood in the Podkamennaia Tunguska area took various forms. The loose tributary frameworks of the tsarist period, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 2, were superseded by the early Soviet state, which in the I920S and I930s conducted ethnographic and socioeconomic surveys, as well as exemplary punishments that culminated in the purge of I938 (see Chapters 3 and 4). The collectivization of the I930s triggered the etatization of work, 13 which accelerated in the indigenous villagization and collective-farm enlargement campaigns of the I96os and I970s (see Chapter s).Yet, as I show in Chapters 6 and 7, this etatization led to the production of new foraging lifestyles and identities, which in turn cast a "traditionalist" authenticity on products of state development programs and development discourses. The remainder of this introduction outlines the theoretical assumptions that I make in order to account for these continuous changes. This book is an attempt at ethnography that takes transformation as ontologically prior to a given social form. I am not arguing that one can divide the twentiethcentury history of the Katonga area into "tributary," "socialist," and "traditionalist" phases and then chart a "transition" between them. These social forms make up historically specific configurations that are in a process of continuous displacement. Transformation is a constant state of these configurations-just as at a given historical point these forms do not appear as unified institutional bodies but, rather, as constantly shifting political boundaries. For example, both the tax inspector and the "combined fodder" episodes reveal the flight of the state as embodied in the figures of the tax inspector or director of the collective farm, as well as strategic side-switching and identification with the state that is visible in the desire to become a state representative, such as a tribute-collecting "prince;' or in claims to being "a Communist and a patriot." Let me now turn to what kind of processes underscore these fragmented forms of statehood, how these processes can be understood as relationships of power, and what they tell us about the Podkamennaia Tunguska area as a field site.

State: Diferral, Difference, and Diffusion The fluid and fragmented character of state forms is a classic theme in Russian/Soviet historiography-the theme of the weak state, which seems paradoxically in contrast to the endurance of statehood as a culture and an

6

Introduction

identity. This contrast is as ubiquitous in post-Soviet Siberia as it is in Russian/Soviet history in general. For example, the 1994 episode illustrates the difficulties of a state farm in adapting to postsocialist conditions. 14 Shuttling between the provincial capital Krasnoiarsk, the Evenki District capital Tura, and even Moscow, and desperately trying to restore "law and order" upon his return to the collective, the director almost suffered a heart attack trying to make the state collective work. Yet even during the Soviet period, stress and heart disease were all too common occupational hazards among collective-farm directors. A cursory glance at the collective-farm minutes is enough to see that the collective was on the verge of collapse from the moment of its inception in the late 1920s: supplies never arrived on time, technical equipment was almost always broken, reindeer were continuously lost, and plans were unfulfilled. The "beating out" of resources-in other words, procuring promised supplies or subsidies such as combined fodder or fuel from the state-is a Soviet-era idiom that conveys the physical effort required of collective-farm managers in transactions with other state institutions. Just as the winter truck route from the south to this village melts every spring and needs to be built anew every winter, the Russian/Soviet state structures present an example of a Hobbsean social order that, in the words of Emile Durkheim, "is generated by an act of will and sustained by the act of will that must be constantly renewed." 15 For Durkheim, however, the Hobbsean social order is not a type of society but an example of the "prehistory" of sociology. For him, sociology starts with an assumption that society is a reality sui generis-that is, independent from the will of its members. In contrast, for Hobbes, a social order disintegrates into a "state of nature," a war of all against all, without constant intervention from above by a political agency (Leviathan). While following Durkheim in rejection of Hobbsean sociology, I am nonetheless struck by the relevance of such a Hobbsean framework for understanding specific forms of, and discourses on, statehood that I examine here. In other words, I seek an understanding of Hobbsean forms of governance without subscribing to the Hobbsean ontology of the social. Throughout the chapters that follow, I undertake an archeology of such forms of governance in which late-Soviet state collectives make up only one layer. They are preceded by Tsarist tax-collection districts and "clan soviets" and "elementary co-operatives." All of them needed to be "sustained by the act of will that must be constantly renewed," most of them experienced the shortage of such will, and in state documents and everyday discourse they are typically described as existing in a permanent state of failure. In other words, if there is a continuity between the late-imperial administrative regime, illustrated by reports like Pokrovskii's, and the later (post-) Soviet one, it lies in this condition of perpetual disorder that both defies and

Introduction 7

invites state intervention. If specific forms of statehood are very dynamic historically, in turn, discourses on failure and inefficiency are perhaps among the few coherent constructs in a landscape of otherwise historically unstable political forms. And while it is a cliche to say that empires thrive on ruins, this coherence and ubiquity invite, nonetheless, the question whether these failures and fragmentation have their own normalizing, and indeed, culturally constructive, effects. One way of approaching this question has been suggested by James Ferguson in his ethnography of development in rural Lesotho. The developmental project that he examined had failed in its goal to transform the local economy and eliminate poverty. It succeeded, however, in the "expansion and entrenchment of state power," which took agricultural transformation and poverty as a convenient point of entry. Through failures, Ferguson argues, developmental projects expand as they both reproduce their own necessity and present it "under cover of a neutral, technical mission to which no one could object." In such projects, therefore, failures are hardly "side effects" of well-intentioned developmental designs, but rather Foucauldian "instrument effects" that are "at one and the same time instruments of what 'turns out' to be an exercise of power." 16 This argument is relevant for the Siberian case that I examine. However, using Ferguson, I would like to advance this argument further in three directions. First, developmental failures constitute only one layer of a much longer history of failed projects. I find it productive to look at failures as sequences, "a century of peres troikas," 17 that do not reach a point of closure. In other words, failures defer; they create what Derrida calls "delay effects" in social order, which "in no way implies that the deferred presence can always be recovered." 18 In envisioning this long-term social process, one can look at the delay effects of failures as nodal points of"social imperialism," a concept that Mark Bassin suggests in his study of Russian expansion in the Far East in the 184o-6os but that has broader implications as "a connection between the drives for social and political reform on the one hand and the political-territorial expansion" on the other. 19 Second, in addition to being points of expansion of governance, failures can be seen as naming or identification devices. Failures defer, but they also differentiate, and in doing so they reveal what Slavoj Zizek calls "a surplus of signification." 20 The delay effects that they create operate also as a signification technology. I argue that what such Hobbsean politics do through failures is produce and inscribe a Hobbsean "state of nature." In the Katonga case, this state of nature is not the state of war of all against all, but the realm of unpredictability and "irrationality" where the collective-farm state of affairs seems to disintegrate once "the act of will that must be constantly renewed" is suddenly not applied. Failures of law and order highlight who

8

Introduction

Evenki "really" are. It is the deferral of the act of will that renders differences visible, and thus expands, rather than undermines, the dominant discursive framework. One of the best examples of such an operation of failure as a signification device comes from Archbishop Nil, a nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox observer of central Siberia. In his travelogue, he notes the impressive progress made by the Orthodox faith among the Tungus who, "like the Mongolians ... started to accept Baptism" in the early eighteenth century. However, this progress could not be taken for granted, and missionary practices needed constant maintenance work because "nobody can guarantee that baptized parents have baptized children." Once the missionary activities stopped or simply slowed down, he writes, the Tungus, "in their wandering and dispersed ways, were lost from sight and sank, so to speak, into the sea of forests." The metaphor of the sea is important for Archbishop Nil, who cites Scripture in wondering if Siberian forests are similar to the primordial emptiness of the world before the Creation: "Wasn't that the way our planet just emerged from the primeval ocean, and wasn't it similarly empty and void?" He also phrases his vision of Siberian wilderness by drawing upon Ovid: In all that world, Nature had one appearanceOf matter, rude and irregular, Of ever-changing, unrelated, discordant substances. 21 Thus I suggest approaching failures not just as nodal points of postponement of a social order but also as points of what Foucault calls "discourse incitement."22 I argue that this allows us to connect large-scale textual visions and everyday conversation and politics. Once failure is mentioned, conversations erupt or intensifY, new reports are requested, and archives grow-together with an understanding that "problems" should be fixed, administration improved, society reformed, and so forth. Furthermore, failures specifY-they make visible, for instance, differences between the "nature" of "the world before. Creation" in Archbishop Nil's text and the "wildness" of the mercantile capitalism envisioned in Pokrovskii's report and in Soviet Marxist anthropology. ParaphrasingTolstoi's famous remark that every happy family is happy in a similar way, while each unhappy one is unhappy it its own unique way, one may observe that the narratives of otherness that are confirmed by failures or difficulties in the operation of given administrative projects reveal their "unique unhappiness." They are specific, allowing for a deeper contextualization and historicization. Third, I find that in discourses on failure "the state" travels far beyond its institutional context in the formal sense of the term, as well as beyond political contexts that are carved out with titles such as "prince" of a tributary

Introduction 9

district and "brigadier" of a collective farm. Some contemporary ethnographies of the state have focused on the "re-enchantment" of state forms in popular culture. 23 Discourses on failure highlight another side of this process-a social life of the fantasy of its functionality by dispersing "the state" as a subject of conversation in the minute texture of everyday routine. 24 In this sense, the social effects of discourses of failure are similar to those of the "discursive art of suffering" and discourses on corruption. 25 These practices have been recently theorized from a vantage point that, on the one hand, de-reifies the state as a unified political agency or a mere background figure in social practices, while also illustrating how the state and authorities exist in public discourse as such "as if" reified entities. "The network of institutional arrangement and political practices that forms the material substance of the state is diffuse and ambiguously defined at its edges;' argues Timothy Mitchell, "whereas the public imagery of the state as an ideological construct is more coherent." 26 I argue that, ironically, it is precisely outside bureaucratic locations that the state makes itself conspicuous by its absence. In discourses on failure the state as a reified or objectified "it" acquires a social life in settings defined by difference from the statesuch as the domestic sphere or "stateless societies."

Power: Time and the Other Two related currents in anthropological theory underscore this argument. One consists in a substantive, as well as historiographic, critique of the evolutionary distinction between state and stateless social forms. In this critique, an interest in the operation of modern colonial and nation-states replaces the classical problematic of "state formation." The other body of critical work follows from the understanding of statehood as a framework of governance that is widely dispersed in the social body, rather than centered in and confined to "localized offices, institutions, practices." 27 The work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offers a starting point that connects these two lines of argument. In their polemic against the "evolutionary scenario" of the development of the state from statelessness ("from clans to empires" and "from bands to kingdoms") they propose "an inverse hypothesis." States do not "evolve" from stateless social forms but in fact thrive on them: "The State;' they argue," ... has always been in a relation with an outside and is inconceivable independent of that relationship." This "outside" appears, from their point of view, simultaneously in two different "directions." On the one hand, it takes the form of"huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire ecumenon at a given [historical] moment," such as, for example, global commercial structures but also religious formations like Christianity and Islam. On the other hand, the "outside" ap-

I

o Introduction

pears as "the local mechanism of bands, margins, minorities, which continue the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of State power." 28 In following this observation, I approach the outside not merely as a relation of the state structure but also as its relational category. Pokrovskii's report suggests (as do my own field materials on late-Soviet and post-Soviet Siberia) that the same people who flee the state in some circumstances seek to represent it in others. In other words, they position themselves differently in relation to the "directions" of state governance, and the notion of a "segmentary society" could be applied to Siberian administration similarly to the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari used it (after classical structural anthropology) to describe stateless social forms. But such a perspective on the state is part of a broader critique of genealogical metaphors in knowledge practices that Deleuze and Guattari develop. Therefore I find this perspective also useful for undoing some of the evolutionary assumptions in the understanding of modern power technologies that stem from the work of Bourdieu, Gramsci, and Foucault. In order to understand the incomplete and fragmented culture of statehood in this Siberian case, I draw on Pierre Bourdieu's focus on practices, which allows us to account for "the partial and never total coherence that we associate with practical constructions." 29 It is ironic, however, that in developing a theory of domination from this vantage point Bourdieu brings back the Hobbsean ontology of the social by introducing "the degree of objectification" to distinguish specific forms of practical coherence. He contrasts "social formations" in which relations of domination are "mediated by objective, institutionalized mechanisms such as the 'self-regulating market,' an educational system or a legal apparatus, where they have the permanence and opacity of things and lie beyond the reach of the individual consciousness and power," and the ones in which the relations of domination "are made, unmade, and remade in and through personal interactions." The latter, "directly expressed in the history or prehistory of social thought," such as in the Hobbsean reduction of society to the will of its members, constitutes "universes of social relations that do not contain in themselves the principle of their own reproduction and have to be kept up by nothing less than a process of continuous creation," and where, therefore, the dominant agents "have to work directly, daily, personally, to produce and reproduce conditions of domination." 30 Gramscian and Foucauldian narratives of power also restate this contrast, although they do so in a framework of power which is historically European and in which domination is only one component. In their analytic gaze, it is the visibility of the center of power relations that distinguishes the "old regime" from "modern" power configurations. What Bourdieu calls a social universe of objectified domination, Gramsci describes as a social

Introduction

I I

hegemony of the "superstructures of civil society" in which the center of power loses its visibility. Gramsci envisions this type of power relationship by analogy with modern trench warfare, when "it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy's entire defense system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves by a line of defense which was still effective." Once this line of defense is taken, the next one appears, and so on, ad infinitum. "Of course," he argues, "things do not remain exactly as they were; but it is certain that one will not find the element of speed, of accelerated time, of the definitive forward march expected" of the earlier politics in which the power center was visible and which was exemplified by the nineteenth-century "wars of maneuver" and political class struggle. 31 Foucault, in turn, articulates a similar contrast when he opposes the European old regime in which power emanated from its visible center in the absolutist state and the later modalities of"bio-power" in which power was diffused through microtechnologies of discipline and "knowledge-power relations." 32 My argument in the chapters that follow restates the relationship between these two modalities of power as contemporaneous and mutually constitutive. Let me anticipate this discussion with a joke that circulated in Katonga in the late I98os: A regional inspector comes to Katonga to check the collective farm. He arrives by river, steps out of the boat, and asks an old man, who is fishing nearby, "So how is the collective farm?""The collective farm is fine," answers the old man, "but he is gone hunting." In this joke, the "collective farm" is the nickname of its director, and its institutional form is embodied in his figure. And although this anecdote is attributed to the time when collective farms were just being established (the I930s), its circulation in the I98os is symptomatic of a political framework in which a state institution is at its center. I argue that in this case the expansion of governance through Soviet discipline technologies and the etatization of work did not create a universe of social relations that contain in themselves the principle of their own reproduction. At the same time, as this joke demonstrates, it is in the spaces of statelessness, carved out by these politics, that the state actually achieved the "opacity of things" (Bourdieu)-in this case, of the director's body-and it is through this embodiment that the Soviet-style power relations are dispersed. The laughter at this joke itself makes the state present by its absence, and expands it as a hegemonic point of reference for daily conversations and practices. But the governmentality that expands here is what Foucault may call an absolutist framework and Gramsci the war of maneuver. Though these poetics of power display its center on the figure of tax inspector or director of collective farm (or, by extension, the Winter Palace

12

Introduction

or the Kremlin), this does not mean the centralization of power itself-just as the totalitarian appearance of Soviet-type power relations does not mean, as Caroline Humphrey points out, that they can be theorized best as a relationship between a dominant state "core" surrounded by dominated subjects. "Even at the bottom," she argues, "in the remote enclave of some herding collective, the. brigadier could subordinate his workers by the same principles, and with the same equivocal relationship to the ideology of' discipline,' that obtained at structurally higher levels." The overall structure of power relations appears, rather, as "a series of equivalent positions in nesting hierarchies, such that a similar domination may be exercised at each level." 33 Katherine Verdery echoes these remarks in her theorization of state socialism when she points out the inherently decentralized character of power: to the "extent that even the Stalinist regime appeared all-powerful" it did so not with a functional ability to command everything from a center but through a pervasive diffusion and "privatization" of the instruments of coercion, "which-far from being concentrated somewhere at the top-were made available to everyone, through the mechanism of the denunciation." 34 Recent, mostly historical, scholarship on denunciation supports this observation. People who have been normally seen as positioned politically outside and below "authorities" appear to be making, through denunciation, successful claims to statehood and display a considerable mastery in using tools of state power. 35 I argue that, in a similar fashion, discourses of failure generate claims to statehood from below-rather than imposing structures of citizenship from above-and they do so in social settings that are beyond formal administrative locations. As Pokrovskii's report illustrates, failures make up a background for Evenki competition for state "prince" titles and, in doing so, rework local social identities. In the following chapters, I show how such relational political frameworks diffuse power by creating drives to take up both tributary and Soviet state identities, to be vigilant on behalf of the state, and to treat daily practices far away from state offices as a "business of state importance" (delo gosudarstvennoi vazhnostl). In my argument about this Siberian case, I make, however, a more general poststructuralist assumption. Using Bourdieu's formulation, I suggest that "universes of social relations" hardly" contain in themselves the principle of their own reproduction"-just as, for Foucault," conditions of possibility" of a given episteme are axiomatic within it: they enable it without being verifiable within its own epistemology. I view such universes not as self-contained units but as processes in which otherness is constantly generated, or in other words, in which these social universes appear as unequal to themselves. If this leads me to doubt the usefulness of distinguishing between these two ontological modalities of power relationships, it also invites an observation that Russian and Soviet cases figure in the Gramscian and Foucauldian

Introduction

I

3

narratives of power as examples of the old regime. For Gramsci, the storming of the Winter Palace in the Russian Revolution of 1917 is the "last occurrence" of the prehegemonic "war of maneuver." 36 And in his celebrated essay on governmentality, Foucault positions the Russian Empire on the other side of modern governance, as an example of old-regime power relations that he envisions as a ''fragile" external relationship between a sovereign and his subjects and territoriesY In the conclusion of the essay, Foucault emphasizes that "we need see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of the disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government." 38 Yet as historian Laura Engelstein has pointed out, Foucault elsewhere retained the distinction between old regimes, in which power emanated from the state, and liberal, bourgeois society, in which power operates through "normalizing" mechanisms based on "scientific knowledge" and is implemented through disciplinary practices widely dispersed in the social body. Moreover, she argues, "the chronological vector is never entirely lost: whatever the overlaps and collusions, Western nations have allegedly proceeded from absolutist monarchies, through Polizeistaat-enlightened despotism, to liberal states that delegate power through social self-regulation and control their citizens through the operational fiction of individual autonomy." 39 Engelstein voiced this concern at a juncture when the work of Foucault inspired a strong new current in cultural historiography of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. But her warning against taking "Foucault's paradigm for a universal model, for some 'discursively' disguised reworking of modernization theory" resonates well not merely in Russian/Soviet studies but also in current anthropology. For example, as Lisa Rofel points out, the uses of Foucault in anthropology frequently" convey an implicit assumption that modernity constitutes a unified set of practices." This assumption becomes visible in links that anthropologists make "between epistemology, power, and subjectivity" in various social contexts, which then can be rendered as "creating 'efficient,' 'productive,' and 'functional' orders from the crisscrossed terrain of transnational flows."What this assumption obscures, however, is the multiplicity of disciplinary practices that are deployed in this process, such as the factory discipline in China that Rofel exarnines. 40 Yet the implication of this critique for me is not merely that Russian/ Soviet modernity (or any other modern social order) is different. It is also that, specifically in the Russian/Soviet case, this difference is too easily cast as difference in time within the dialectic of modern sovereignty-disciplinegovernment. This leads me not only to question an evolutionary divide that enables this vision of modern governance, but also to consider the operation of this distancing in its very dialectic. 41

I

4

Introduction

In order to do so, I draw on Talal Asad's classic essay, in which he calls attention to the difference between orientalist historiography and functionalist anthropology in the representation of social order. In the former, the social order appears coercive, almost to the point of arbitrariness, and ultimately "inefficient," while the latter displays "an inherent efficiency of the traditional system of government" even in hierarchical and "complex" political systems. 42 Asad argues that these differences articulate not "essential" differences between the subject matter of these Western discourses, but rather differences in their axiomatic assumptions, in which it is the implicit identity of modern Western European empires that informs an overt difference between "Islamic" and "traditional" precolonial societies. It is in this contrast that the coercion, corruption, and inefficiency made visible in the former render invisible, and in doing so naturalize, colonial domination in the latter. In other words, Hobbsean and Durkheimean visions of social order, and the "old-regime" and "modern" narratives of power, work simultaneously in the production of difference. In the Siberian case that I examine by focusing on different modalities of power relationships, therefore, my goal is both to highlight these differences as such and to reveal a continuum between them in what one may call the chronotope of modern governmentality. 43 I argue that this chronotope is visible in the social production of"fragile" external relationships between the state and its subjects, and in mechanisms of" overt" coercion, alongside the expansion of internalized disciplinary regimes.

Site: Nesting Hierarchies, Nesting Orienta/ism, and Capitalism as athe Other" One of the contexts in which these two modalities of power operate simultaneously is in the identity of the Russian/Soviet state. While the Russian Empire shows its "Western" face in "gauging" its eastern and southern regions as backward and stagnant, 44 its own practices of rule were "invented," in the very "Western" discourses that it deploys, as non-European. 45 The "backwardness-as-beastliness and backwardness-as-innocence" of Yuri Slezkine's Arctic Mirrors is as easily projected on Evenki in contrast with Siberian Russians, as it is on Siberian Russians in contrast with Muscovites or St. Petersburgians. In relation to his subjects, the Katonga collective-farm director embodies the microtechnology (and ideology) of self-discipline, while in relation to the Western models of economy and society that postSoviet Russia took as reform targets in the early 1990s, the rural farm "director's corps" have been consistently orientalized as inefficient and corrupt social agents. Paraphrasing Fredrik Barth, I find it more useful to explore these differ-

Introduction

I

5

ences from the vantage point of the state as a boundary rather than of the "cultural stuff" that this boundary encloses. 46 I argue that this equivocality of the identity effects of orientalizing and being orientalized permeates the social life of the Russian/Soviet state in forest reindeer brigades and households, and in doing so construes relational meanings of ethnicity, class, and gender. I find it ethnographically useful, therefore, to complement the notion of"nesting hierarchies," which Caroline Humphrey suggests. for understanding Soviet-type domination, with "nesting orientalism," which Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert Hayden propose to account for relational meanings of otherness within broader" orientalist" discourses in the sense of Edward SaidY Writing about identity politics in Yugoslavia in terms of a cultural boundary between a "progressive," "modern," and "rational" Europe and a "stagnant," "traditional," and "irrational" Orient, Bakic-Hayden and Hayden point out a peculiar "tendency for each region" ofYugoslavia "to view cultures and regions to the south and east of it as more conservative or primitive" while identifYing itself as an outpost of modernity and civilization. "The entire hierarchy may be seen in terms of symbolic geography as declining in relative value" ofWesternness, or, in other words, as "a system of'nesting' orientalisms." 48 This observation holds as well for the Russian imperial and (post-)Soviet symbolic geography. 49 But I also read "nesting orientalism" as a framework that ascribes otherness in "nesting hierarchies" where being stagnant, traditional, and irrational is as equivocal as nesting hierarchies themselves. The same people who appear stagnant, traditional, and irrational in some contexts are identified, or identifY themselves, as progressive, modern, and rational in others. 50 The structural ambivalence of these political positions is, in my view, what connects the everyday processes on this adminiscape to discursive formations that are both broader and historically enduring. At the same time, this relational interpretation of identity meanings enables us to avoid homogenizing effects that not only characterize orientalist discourses themselves but also frame some of its discursive critique. 51 Drawing on the concept of"nesting orientalism;' I develop this analysis further by looking at a specifically socialist problematic of commodity form as "the other"-which informed the Soviet occidentalist imagination on the one hand, 52 but which, on the other hand, was central to the early Soviet imagination of the "enemy within" and, in this Siberian case, easily incorporated a paternalistic state concern of "protection" of indigenous lifestyles from "pernicious" capitalist influences, visible in reports of imperial officers like Pokrovskii's. The "enemy camp" where Pokrovskii found himself was not a lodging of forest nomads but a trading post; and the Soviet state marked capitalism as the state's most significant"other"-and only after that the indigenous "backwardness-as-beastliness and backwardness-as-

I

6

Introduction

innocence." The subject of Soviet governance was not merely "traditional" modern/colonial subjects but also the very logic of commodity production and exchange. While Marx rendered this logic legible in its classic form of industrial capitalism, Soviet anthropology elaborated this political-economic vision so as to include colonial capitalism in which the commodity form overwrote and dominated seemingly noncapitalist social forms-such as, for example, kinship- and prestige-based political loyalties in Siberian "administrative clans." In particular, in Chapters 3 and 4 I show that the Soviet state expanded both through political and ethnographic deconstruction of these loyalties in relationship to the operation of commodity form, and, at the same time, by reconstituting them as the "enemy within" the Soviet social order. By looking at this "internal frontier" of the state and the capitalist old regime as a site of microphysics of power in the Katonga state collective, I argue that these forms of power relations are inseparable from larger yet specifically socialist forms of governmentality. However, I also argue that these socialist forms do not constitute points of analytical closure of the meanings of indigenousness in Soviet society; rather, they open up these meanings in a process of serial displacements within, and of, the modern chronotopes of domination and difference. This relational interpretation of statehood informs my vision of the Podkamennaia Tunguska and Katonga as field sites. The orientalist image of the Soviet state as an artificial and inefficient construct, imposed from above, inspired my own original ethnographic quest for a Durkheimean social order in the Podkamennaia Tunguska River basin. When I first arrived in the area in 1988, I was a researcher at the Moscow Institute of Ethnography, and my task was to explore it as an enclave of"traditionallifestyles" surviving at the forest margins of the socialist state. I was interested in finding pockets of lifestyles that were less affected by the Soviet policies of forced collectivization of the 1930s and the villagization of the 1960s. I selected the Podkamennaia Tunguska as one of the most isolated areas in the Yenisei River basin. The name of the Podkamennaia Tunguska River is Russian for "the stony river of the Tungus." "Stony," or" [flowing] under-stones," refers to the highland plateau that this river dissects and whose rocky bed forms numerous rapids that isolate villages and posts of the Podkamennaia Tunguska from the rest of the Yenisei basin. In turn, Katonga remains one of the most isolated villages of the Podkamennaia Tunguska River. I came to the stony river of the Tungus to study the survival of what Russian/Soviet ethnography labeled the "Tungus complex"-a configuration of forest lifestyles and a linguistic identity whose continuity across the Siberian Subarctic struck early Russian observers. "Tungus" is an older colonial name for a Siberian hunting-gathering and reindeer-herding people who call themselves Evenki (plural Evenkil), Ilel, or

Introduction

I

7

Orochil-"people," or "reindeer people." This name also came to signify a northern branch of the Tungus-Manchu linguistic family and a relatively uniform cultural complex. From Russian sources of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries we learn that most of the Tungus-speaking groups are nomadic; that their subsistence economy centers on hunting, gathering, and reindeer-breeding; and that their society consists of small-family groups that nonetheless maintain communal ties over long distances. Given this linguistic and cultural uniformity, the Russian ethnographers often used the term "Tungus" generically for all Tungus-speaking groups extending from northern parts of China to the Kamchatka and Taimyr Peninsulas. 53 In Katonga, I joined Vladimir and his family of forest hunters and reindeer herders because they appeared to maintain a traditional lifestyle and seemed most "authentic" in their relationships with the Soviet state: Vladimir lost his father in a Stalinist purge that swept the Podkamennaia Tunguska area in 1938.Yet it was precisely in this forest location that I found the antinomy of the state and indigenous traditions hard to maintain. In August and September 1988, I participated in the construction of a twentyfive-kilometer fence for containing reindeer belonging to the collective farm's Reindeer Brigade Number Four. Throughout this period, a "traditional" forest location appeared to be bureaucratically managed, with "the traditionally oriented" forest reindeer herders cum Sovietized work supervisors willing to use the carrots and sticks so typical of the socialist planned economy. For example, Vladimir, who was a head of the construction team, frequently complained to me that under Stalin the work discipline was much better, that the younger herders (including his sons) do not "always" understand the fence construction as a "business of state importance," and that he had to resort to threats of filing a report with the collective-farm director about these herders' work performance, which could harm their upcoming winter fur-hunting, as well as their access to coupons for canned vegetables and vodka in the village store. Vladimir, who lost relatives in the 1938 Stalinist purge, came across as almost Stalinist in these conversations, yet at other moments he was extremely critical of Stalinist collectivization as well as of the more recent state policies-including the economic and ecological rationale for fence construction in the 1980s. Furthermore, in Katonga he enjoyed a reputation as a "last bastion" of the work traditions of those wealthy reindeer herders who were the main targets of the purges. Where should one position him, then, in the framework of the antinomic relationships between indigenous cultural traditions and the state? Does his support of the "business of state importance" make him an example of the success of Soviet development? Does his critique of the collective-farm order indicate its failures? Does his reputation as an independent hunter and a last bastion of the work traditions of

I

8

Introduction

wealthy reindeer herders (kulakt) demonstrate the persistence of an autonomous indigenous tradition? I became convinced that Vladimir's contradictory opinions, and indeed the contradictory political position of Evenki elders in the collective farm, illustrate the operation of"the state" and "the indigenous" not as fixed cultural domains but as relational identities whose boundaries are drawn differently in different social contexts. When I returned to Katonga in 1993-95 for more field research (this time as a graduate student in anthropology at Stanford University), I found these elders' statism only reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet state farm economy. The economic crisis of the 1990s had pulled the rug of state subsidies out from under the northern state economic sector, and the new privatization rhetoric dominated regional and local administrative centers. In this context, the Soviet-style state farm vocabulary of"brigade;' "plan," and "female tent-worker" acquired new currency at this post-Soviet periphery-particularly in the reindeer forest camps, which no longer were formal collective-farm brigades. With very little state interest in "business of state importance," this vocabulary came to signifY the familiar in the face of new policies and hierarchies. This vocabulary unites and divides a group of people among whom I did most of my fieldwork in 1988-89 and 1993-95. Most of them are employed at the Katonga collective farm as fur hunters and herders and have Katonga village residency. In the summer of 1989 and most of 1994, I lived in the family of Nikolai, a retired reindeer herder, who adopted one of the sons of Vladimir, the Evenki character in the "combined fodder" episode with which I started this chapter. This adopted son's name isVasilii orVas'ka, as he is commonly referred to by his relatives and neighbors.Vas'ka is married and has three daughters. His wife, Alena, works in the village as a kindergarten nurse and spends most of the year in Katonga; the daughters' time is divided almost evenly between the forest and the village. Vas'ka and Alena were in their late twenties in 1994, whereas Nikolai is one of the oldest Evenki in Katonga. His passport has 1908 as his birth date, although this date is approximate because he received his passport only when he volunteered for the Soviet Army in 1941; before that he did not need to express his age in these terms. Nikolai is referred to by his relatives simply as "the old man" (sagdy in Evenki; starik in Russian), and throughout the book I call him "old Nikolai" to acknowledge his age as well as to differentiate him from myself. Old Nikolai's family also host several young Evenki who have helped old Nikolai with his reindeer and domestic work since the death of his wife in 1991. But they are registered as herders' apprentices, employed by Reindeer Brigade Number Four. This brigade is the home of another one of my eldest informants, whom I call here by her nickname, Military Grandmother, which she received af-

Introduction

I

9

ter she was wounded in a fur-hunting accident during World War II. She is the grandmother ofVas'ka's wife, Alena, and the Fourth Brigade is an economic center of gravity for surrounding camps of hunters such as old Nikolai's and Vladimir's. They all join the brigade's central camp at least twice a year to help with herding, and they receive reindeer from this herd for food and for transportation. They also spend at least two months a year in the village. In the 1980s they took on some village-based jobs such as unloading cargo for the village store and working in winter as firemen in the stokehold of the Katonga's coal-based heating system. During the economic crisis of the 1990s, some of these part-time jobs disappeared, and the remaining few went to village residents who had lost more permanent collective-farm positions. In the 1990s the village was less a place to make money than to spend it: to buy supplies for hunting and fishing and to drink. Until 1995 Katonga retained, however, the infrastructure for distribution (however irregular) of state funds (such as retirement benefits for old Nikolai and Vladimir) and allowances to support families with more than one child (like that ofVas'ka and Alena). All these people have relatives who live in the village, some of whom are married to newcomers to Katonga. The category "newcomers" refers to migrants to the Siberian North from Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union-trappers, collective-farm blue- and white-collar workers, technicians, and other specialists who have moved to villages like Katonga since the 1950s and by the 1980s and 1990s made up about half of the Katonga population of 300 people. Most of the newcomers are ethnic Russians, but there are also some Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Germans. However, "Russian" as a social category is commonly applied in Katonga to all newcomers, and to all who carry passports indicating a nonindigenous nationality. "Evenki" is one such passport nationality, but in Katonga there are also a few Kets and Sakha (Yakuts), who are also recent migrants to Katonga but who are not identified as "newcomers" because they share Siberian indigenous origin with Evenki. An overarching social division based on origin is, in the case ofKatonga, between "Russians" (russkie) or "newcomers" (priezzhie) and "indigenous" groups (korennye). "Indigenous" is a Russian state category-there is no equivalent of this term in the Evenki language. This category is a product of the Russian colonization and Soviet development of the Siberian North, and it is a twentieth-century replacement of the older categories of people who were marked in various periods as "tributized" (yasashnye), "different by faith" (inivertsy), and "different by birth" (inorodtsy) or "numerically small nationalities" (malochislennye narody) depending on the identity of the Russians and the Russian state against which they were systematically _distinguished. 54 This discursive distinction runs contrary both to the Evenki/Tungus

20

Introduction

maps of difference and to the centuries-long legacy of participation of these northern groups in various forms of statehood. Long before Cossack bands exerted Muscovite rule over this area in the seventeenth century, it had already been integrated into tributary conglomerates that thrived on sable fur-the Subarctic currency that still remains of value. The water and sleigh routes of these tributary allegiances gravitated south and southeast-toward the upper Yenisei River and Lake Baikal. The Cossacks switched these allegiances westward, along a thin line of fortresses and winter blockhouses that connected Yeniseisk, Turukhansk, and other Russian posts in the Yenisei basin to Moscow and the European market. The institutional presence of the state greatly expanded during the Soviet period, when the state (and state-run co-operatives) became the main employer in Katonga, when Evenki were listed among the Soviet "titular" nationalities, and when the eastern parts of the lower Yenisei were integrated into the Evenki Autonomous District (1931). The growth of a small trading base of the early twentieth century-a storage area with no permanent residents-into a village of about 300 people occurred through the organization of population into a "primitive production unit" (1930-38), collective farm (1938-67), and state collective farm (1967-present). A sense of close and direct affinity with the Russian/Soviet state became important for Evenki identity-particularly, in contrast to the identity of Russian settlers and newcomers. The latter were increasingly present in the Yenisei River basin from the seventeenth century on. Instead of tribute, however, they paid regular taxes (which were higher than tribute), and most of them had escaped the persecution of Orthodox "old belief" in Europe as well as the burdens of the state and neofeudalland tenure. The hventiethcentury newcomers' opposition to the state is less pronounced, but nonetheless present. Some of these newcomers to the Podkamennaia Tunguska arrived in Katonga after serving sentences for criminal offenses; a few arrived as a result of the Stalinist resettlement of people of" wrong" social or ethnic origin, such as Russia's ethnic Germans, many of whom were exiled in the Yenisei North after the Soviet Union entered World War II. The majority of newcomers, however, migrated to villages like Katonga between the 1960s and 1980s in pursuit of employment opportunities and significant "northern benefits," which often doubled the state salary for people willing to move to the "harsh northern environment." And although the "romance of the frontier" played its part in the newcomers' consciousness, I 'found the ideology of economic opportunism, mixed with the ideology of victimhood in relation to the state, more dominant among the newcomers in Katonga and in neighboring collectives. It is ironic that the conflict with the state is more pronounced, albeit in different forms, among this newcomer population than it is among Katonga

Introduction

2I

Figure I. Reindeer brigadier Chapogir of the R ed Star collective farm (no date). Courtesy of the Krasnoiarsk Kaievedcheskii Musei.

Evenki. Soviet honors and titles such as "the winner in the socialist competition" appeared to have a greater appeal to Katonga Evenki than to the newcomers; and in the 1990s I found ethnic Russians in Katonga much less nostalgic for the Soviet Union than the Evenki were. However, Evenki were awarded these honors for success in fighting their "backwardness," and while they kept the Soviet medals, they were photographed by district and other inspectors on their reindeer (see figure r).The twentieth-century identity of Katonga Evenki was formed by the gap between modernity and tradition that they were supposed to cross, and in which they were discursively frozen, first by Soviet development and then by its crisis. 55 The case of Katonga Evenki parallels the case of the Meratus Dayaks (in Indonesia) that Anna L. Tsing describes: Meratils relations to state power were rarely absent from local discussions of culture and community. In contrast to the self-generating solidarity basic to most ethno-

22

Introduction

graphic accounts of community, I heard Meratus describe community formation as a state project that they could fulfill or frustrate. Local leaders constructed their authority not by reiterating community hierarchy but emphasizing their ties to the state rule. Yet, this enthusiasm forms the crux of a contradiction: Rather than integrating Meratus into Indonesian politics as citizens, national political discourse demarcated Meratus as savages outside its reaches. 56

This paradox led Tsing to reformulate a traditional project to study an isolated culture as an ethnography of social marginality. "Marginals," she notes, "stand outside the state by tying themselves to it; they constitute the state locally by fleeing from it. As culturally 'different' subjects they can never be citizens; as culturally different 'subjects' they can never escape citizenship." 57 I find this reformulation useful for the Evenki case. If the "Russians" in Katonga were "natural" subjects of the state who fled from Russia and other Soviet states to "statelessness," it was indigenous statelessness that constituted Evenki as state subjects. But I also argue that there are specific state structures and policies that are constitutive of Subarctic statelessness. Throughout this book, I demonstrate how the tsarist tributary regime engendered fluid and "irregular" nomadic lifestyles, how Soviet policies of "modernization" reproduced a foraging periphery of the Siberian state farm economy, and then how attempts to create an ethnicity-neutral "Soviet man" encouraged Evenki cultural practices that mark them as a distinct ethnic group. At the same time, I argue that, at these social junctures, failures also evoke and maintain dominant discursive idioms that shift the "problems" created by Russian/Soviet indigenous governance to an imaginary landscape outside the state administrative frame. Thus failures also constitut~ political points where the state order is confronted with, and c"antested by, social forms and invented traditions that are products of specific state policies but have not been generated according to these policies' designs. My focus here is on how the expansion ofRussian/Soviet statehood in the North coincides, paradoxically, with a reverse process of writing the products of this expansion out of the boundaries of the Russian/Soviet state. The more aboriginal lifestyles were integrated into the Russian/Soviet bureaucratic and mercantile regimes, and the farther the culture ofRussian/Soviet statehood spread in the forest, the more Evenki were inscribed by the state as existing as if outside the boundaries of Russian/Soviet society. The more the state administration shaped aboriginal identities, the more it defined them in terms of pure ecological constraints and structural properties of stateless social formations.

CHAPTER

2

Making Wildness and Empire: From the Seventeenth to the Early Twentieth Century

"THE MAIN DIFFICULTY in the study of the Tungus," wrote the ethnographer Ivan Mainov in I898, "is that they wander almost all year across unknowable forest thickets. Chasing the Tungus all over the taiga [Subarctic forest] to meet two or three of them here or there does not make any sense. In order to make at least a sample of one hundred ... I had to find out where and when they get together in significant numbers." 1 At the end of the nineteenth century, such places were fairs where the Tungus came out in order to turn their state fur tribute (iasak) and renew supplies of gunpowder, flour, sugar, and other goods. Mainov attended two such fairs between the Lena and Amur River basins. However, the Tungus that came out to the Ust' -Maiskoie fair had been largely assimilated by the Turkish-speaking Yakuts (and were therefore uninteresting to Mainov). For another fair, at the Ulanakh trading post, he was late. When he arrived at the post, the majority of the Tungus had already left for the taiga. Mentioning difficulties in contacting and studying the Tungus became commonplace in Siberian ethnographies and travelogues of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as in early Soviet materials. The irony of most of these remarks is that the Tungus/Evenki struck the same authors as curious and engaging, and not avoiding contact: "Lone as he is in ~he mountain backwoods, the Tungus is still very mobile. No luck in one place-he travels to another, farther and farther, and in doing so, constantly moving, often making short passages, he visits the most remote places and meets all sorts of different neighbors." 2 The problem for these observers was that the Tungus were too mercurial, as it were, to stand still long enough for

24

Making Wildness and Empire

systematic questioning, or for regular taxation. The frustration of these authors reveals an implicit contrast between the mechanical regularity of the state machine and contingent relationships that "need constant maintenance work." 3 "They easily engaged in conversation, and easily agreed to teach me to speak their language," wrote the philologist German Gut about his fieldwork experience among the Evenki in the r88os in the Podkamennaia Tunguska River area, "but their willingness did not endure long." He had to abandon his "plans to record their grammar quickly ... and spend, instead, a lot of time merely writing down particular expressions." 4 The ethnographer Ivan Mainov finally joined a Russian Orthodox priest on a visit to the Kangalas forest camps to conduct services and collect the church tax: "This trip was a success. Father Ioann, with his knowledge of the area and of the people, with his authority among the parish, and with his tireless help in interviewing and taking notes, was for me an indispensable colleague. Without him I could not have gathered even one half of the evidence that the Kangalas excursion yielded." 5 In these excursions, ethnographers frequently found themselves in the same boat with priests and tax officers. Indeed, difficulties in research were not dissimilar from the ones in maintaining missionary and administrative structures. These impediments to research among the Evenki, as well as to "their registrations at a given post where they should pay their fur tribute," 6 were ascribed to Subarctic cultural ecology. For example, the 1925 report by the Land Tenure Committee of the People's Commissariat of the Buriat Republic calls the reindeer Evenki (orochen) of the upper Angara River "essentially a cosmopolite: his motherland and fatherland are where his hunting and game are. He is constantly moving." 7 Such a view exemplifies a lasting tradition of writing that privileges relationships with the natural landscape as the explanatory framework for understanding Siberian indigenous societies. This tradition has been recently critiqued as a discursive idiom of the Russian/Soviet state in Siberia, which designates itself as "culture" and "civilization" against this mirror. 8 This chapter takes this critique further by reading this movement within the framework of Siberian politics rather then cultural ecology. I look first at the relational framework of tributary relationships, and particularly at what was politically at stake in the overt irregularity of indigenous taxation. Second, from the vantage point of these tributary politics, I examine the making of the idiom of wildness. I argue that the difficulties that these authors mention did not constitute an impediment to state governance, but on the contrary, political and discursive points of its expansion alongside the nomadic fur-hunting economies. My focus here is on those political and discursive frameworks that integrated the Tungus into the tsarist colonial regime while simultaneously constructing "the Tungus cultural complex" as existing beyond the reach of its adminis-

Making Wildness and Empire

25

trative and ethnographic gaze. Thirdly and finally, the goal of this chapter is to provide a historical background for the Podkamennaia Tunguska River area. Thus the chapter starts with a broad discussion of the Russian tributary regime in northern Siberia and concludes with a discussion of social categories of Katonga Evenki in the context of trade and tributary politics in the Podkamennaia Tunguska basin.

Russian Iasak over Central Siberia State revenue in sable fur was the main goal of the Russian conquest of the Siberian North. The source of these revenues was, however, not trade but tribute (iasak). The Siberian Chancellery of Moscovy acted as a capitalist agent in the European market, while, at the other end of the "social life" of fur, 9 its "serving men" acted as agents of a tributary state. In the drive to include Siberian Subarctic populations among the Muscovite tributary subjects, Russian Cossack bands moved eastward in the early seventeenth century and first encountered the Tungus on the watershed between the Ob' and the Yenisei River basins. 10 In r6o8 one of the groups of central Siberian Ostiak reported to the Russians in the Ketsk fortress that a certain Tungus prince, Danula, had arrived in the area intent on "smashing the tsar's iasak men" and desiring to "fight the tributized men of the Ket River toward the Ketsk fortress, so that they would pay the iasak to them, but not to the tsar." The serving men stationed in the Ketsk fort fought these Tungus "in God's mercy and the tsar's good fortune ... and the heathens [iazyki] were wounded, and died of these wounds, which were in their hands." 11 This battle "frightened" the Ostiak so greatly that they swore allegiance to Moscow, 12 but the Tungus continued to threaten the Ostiak area between the Yenisei and Ket Rivers. Muscovites reinforced the Ketsk garrison and in r6r8-r9 built the Makovsk andYeniseisk fortresses farther up the Ket River and on the Yenisei River bank. Yet" [I]n his persistent thievery;' prince Danula, together with his people, who "from the mouth up the Tunguska River count up to three hundred men," was unwilling to pay tribute to the tsar, and even besieged the Makovsk fortress. 13 The fighting, however, did notresume. "On the rsth day of May [of r62r J the Tungus kniaz Iulym came to the [YeniseiskJ fortress and, with thirty sables ... , bowed his head [udaril chelom, 'hit the forehead'] to the tsar. On the 19th of May, two Tungus men, Irkanda and Ilin, came to the fortress and, with ten sables ... , bowed their heads to the tsar." 14 From that point on, the iasak books of the Yeniseisk fortress mention the Tungus, among other groups of the Yenisei River basin, as routinely paying the tsar's tribute: On the 3d day of June [of r622], the Tsar's iasak of twenty-eight sables was apprehended from the Upper Tunguska River's Aplen men ... and from the Kuldul and

26

Making Wildness and Empire

Shenega [Rivers]. And from the Middle Tunguska River's prince Kondel and Iandega and from their comrades the tsar's iasak of twenty one sables ... was newly apprehended.15

Closer to my fieldwork territory, in 1626 the Muscovites built a post at the mouth of the Middle, or Stony (Podkamennaia) Tunguska River-the "middle" of three "Tungus" tributaries of the eastern part of the Yenisei River basin (the other two being the Lower Nizhniaia and the Upper Verkhniaia, or Angara, Rivers). And in 1628 they added another two winter blockhouses, the Chunskoe and Teterskoe, in the upper Podkamennaia Tunguska River basin. These posts were wooden huts where the iasak men from larger posts, such as Yeniseisk and Turukhansk, stppped (usually in winter) to collect the tribute from the neighboring groups. 16

Politics

cif Gift and Tribute

Siberian Subarctic groups did not offer much military resistance to the Russian state and quickly switched their tributary allegiance to the new political power. The tributary system, however, was harder to maintain than to establish. The main trouble for the state was not the conquest itself, but the establishment of the system of regular tax returns, which was easily frustrated by the intentional ambiguity of" tribute,"" gift-giving," 17 and trade in transactions between the Muscovite state and its tributary subjects. This tributary political economy worked by separating the meanings of fur as a "commodity" and as a "tribute" in its social life: Moscow acted as a capitalist agent in the European fur market and as a tributary state in Siberia. My argument here draws on the recent advances in economic anthropology that move beyond analyzing the meaning of transactions in the context of a single cultural complex and toward unpacking a multiplicity of meanings in the "social life" of things across different "value regimes." The advantage of the notion of a "regime of value" is that, as Atjun Appadurai argues, it does not "imply that every act of ... exchange presupposes a complete cultural sharing of assumptions." In fact, a transaction "as a social matter, may bring together actors from quite different cultural systems who share only the most minimal understanding ... about the objects in question and agree only about the terms of trade." 18 The terms of trade are also a political matter, and the ambiguity of trade, tribute, and gift-giving facilitates the n~gotiation of these terms. In looking at the meaning of these politics of transaction, I also, therefore, extend my analysis beyond spatial metaphors of the "social life of things" 19 and add the framework of micro political temporality in the relationship between Russian "serving men" and their tributary subjects. 20 When local leaders were convinced of the military superiority of the

Making Wildness and Empire 27 Cossacks, they quickly bowed to the new power-"bit the ground with their foreheads," as chronicles phrased it21 -with pominki (gifts) of sable pelts. This transaction symbolized the cessation of hostility and, from the point of view of the more powerful side, the acceptance of tributary obligations by the defeated. But there was a trick: sending gifts, as opposed to paying tribute, was an act between equals. "Gifts" were brought before and took the place of battle, thus preserving the honor of the weaker side. Furthermore, giving gifts represented not only the donors' subjection but also their autonomy: an otherwise defeated group had the possibility of renegotiating the hierarchy at another juncture, perhaps on more favorable terms. This ambiguity of gift and tax meant that the act of surrender was also one of flight, identifying the giving subject both within and outside of the tributary system. The Russian bookkeepers registered the payment at times as "tribute," at other times as "gifts," and sometimes as both: "from the Kip an area prince Ilitik and from nine tributized [Tungus] men [we apprehended] the tsar's pominki of six sables and the iasak of two forties and eight sables." 22 Throughout the seventeenth century, a smoothly functioning tributary system was never fully established. For example, in 1625 the Cossack foreman Pozdei Firsov sailed up the Podkamennaia Tunguska River and was attacked by the Tungus already mentioned in the tribute books of 1622-23 as loyal. He defeated them and made their "princes Koldel and Ialdoga" (clearly, the same Kondel and Iandega mentioned in by the Yeniseisk bookkeepers) swear allegiance to the tsar with their "faith" (shert'). 23 In 1628 the foreman Pert Beketov built a fort "on the fishing place" on the Nizhniaia Tunguska and imposed the iasak on "those Tungus people have not yet been fixed [eshe ne ukrepilis] under Your, Sovereign, exalted hand [the report is addressed to the tsar], and [who] still give little iasak, and still only for gifts [in return] and not as assessed tax, and some even give nothing and [instead] beat the serving men, and they even killed serving men and the clerk [tseloval'nik], three men [total]." He reported that he "collected iasak with more profit than before," but in 1638 these Tungus still "disobeyed You, Sovereign, and didn't pay ... iasak and beat the [loyal] hunters and serving men." For the next thirty years he continued doing the same thing in the same area: In those years I, Your serf, Sovereign, traveled [from the Yeniseisk fort] along many rivers and lands on the Tunguska River . . . and down the Lena River . . . built many forts and winter blockhouses, and from those forts [I] brought under Your exalted hand ... many lands and princes, and their subjects [ulusnykh liudei], the Tungus, Bratsk [Buriat] andYakut, ... and in collecting the iasak [I] made great profit to You, Sovereign. 24

This political nomadism of Muscovite tax officers mirrored that of their tributary subjects, and, taken together, it illuminates another aspect of the

28

Making Wildness and Empire

Muscovite tributary relationships. The framework of tributary politics consisted of multiple centers of political gravity and multiple layers of tributary/gift loyalties. 25 Neither the conquerors nor the conquered made up uniform groups. The tsar's serving men of the Ketsk fortress, who defeated the Tungus prince Danula in r6o8, consisted of" the Surgut musketeers and Cossacks of the foreman Ivan Kaidalov with his comrades, and the Zyrian [another tributized Siberian group], who happened to be in the fortress, and the Ket River tributized Ostiak of prince Kirgei, and of prince Urnuk and of prince Nomak with his comrades." In r6r9 the Makovsk serving men approached one of the Tungus groups to propose that they come under the tsar and pay the iasak. "And the serving men say ... that theTungus princes Kharycha and Tasina came to their ship [koch] and said that we are obliged to the tsar and shall give the iasak, but our young men are jaunty [likhie], they don't listen to us and want to go to the Ket River, [to stay] under the fortresses and fight the tributized Ostiak."The obligations of" comrades" to their leaders were as easily shifted as the obligations of their leaders to Cossacks in the west or to the Buriat princes in the east (who "ordered their Bratsk people to beat Your, Sovereign, serving men and took ... the Tungus people as their subjects [k sebe v ulusy] and ordered them not to pay tribute to You, Sovereign, and to beat Your serving men") while Cossacks also fought among themselves over the rights to collect tribute from various groups. 26 Finally, I would like to point out that this relational character of tributary loyalties was reinforced by the very way the serving men practiced tribute collection. Seeing kinship as a key to more regular tax collection, .the Cossacks took local leaders hostage (amanat) in the hope that their fellow "clansmen," or "relatives" (rodovich, or rodich), would step in with the iasak. This practice rendered iasak communal ransom. Their methods were aimed at tying conquered clans together in a manner akin to that of peasant corporate communities in the western states of Russia, where "circle binding" (krugovaia poruka) constructed the collective responsibility of a given commune as a whole to the state or landlord. In Siberia, however, the practice did not work out as designed. The Russian authorities faced systematic dodging, by Evenki and other groups, of their kinship and neighborly obligations. Reports by serving men from across Siberia are full of episodes in which "fathers, brothers, and children of hostages abdicated" their kinship with them and "didn't pay the iasak for them." "This year of 1650, in the spring by the flood, we captured two Tungus, but we don't know if otherTungus will step forward for them;' reported the tax collectors of the Mangazeia fort. The Tungus princeling Mozheul, having agreed to pay tribute to the Russians, complained, "In our land the elders died, and others became too old and disabled ... so we, eld-

Making Wildness and Empire 29

ers, didn't teach the young to listen to us." Another report, from the Nizhniaia Tunguska River, pointed out, "The reason that we failed to collect the tsar's iasak in the N epa winter blockhouse is that no Tungus turned up with the tsar's iasak, because the hostage was only one, a man of the Tugoshar clan, and no Tungus came to save him." 27 Eventually the tax collectors learned, first, that local solidarity was a matter of the relational politics of subjection just like the tribute itself, and secondly, that it centered on "best men" rather than kin. As one of the collectors put it, "For a good hostage his clan [rod] pays, and other clans pay, but for a bad one, not even ... his kin deliver." The instructions of the Yakutsk administration were unambiguous: "Do not take bad hostages among the Tungus." However, their attempts to take hostage the children of the "good" Tungus failed because "for those small lads ... most Tungus did not pay the tsar's iasak." 28 In sum, the tributary politics were constitutive of flexible identities and open communities rather than fixed units automatically following kin or neighborly structural principles. I would like to point out two social effects of these politics. One is the reproduction of highly personalized communal structures, contingent on the individual authority of "best men." The Okhotsk "reindeer tributized Tungus," for example, appealed to the Cossacks to release their leader, prince Zalemei. They claimed that without their "brother Zalemei," they "would split and wander astray and die separated." A prince could fail to keep his "jaunty men" in control. The "elders" (starye muzhikt) could block the power of a prince. A community could be "talked into" paying the iasak, or persuaded to breach these obligations. Political ~u­ thority, based on the possibility to persuade, to talk into, was highly personal. For example, while most "princes and their comrades" were men, one also finds a number of cases when the most successful negotiators were Tungus women. 29 Likewise, the amount and regularity of tribute payments was always a matter of negotiation. As the iasak book of 1636-37 recorded, "The tributized men pay the tsar's iasak at the Mangazeia winter post not according to the assessment, because they are nomadic, not settled, and live wandering from one place to another, and whatever amount to whatever winter post they bring, this amount they, the iasak collectors, would apprehend." Another report complained that the Tungus "pay the tsar's iasak not as they are assessed and not evenly, but in accordance with their fortune, more or less, better or worse, how the Lord provides in their hunting luck." Some Tungus "paid according to their good will, and some didn't pay at al1." 30 The other effect was social segmentation, which increased proportionally with the co~solidation of Russian rule over the Siberian Subarctic throughout the seventeenth century. On an occasion of iasak payment, the Even

3o

Making Wildness and Empire

(Lamut) of the Zelian clan-"tributized men, Torochanov's sons Bogdashka and Guba, and their relatives"-said the following: Indeed we pay 50 and 7 sables every year as the Great Sovereign's iasak; and we are our clan-33 persons all of us and the youth; and many of us don't have names among themselves [mezhu soboiu]; and we cannot be counted in districts and tents [ulusami i iurtamt] because we wander-each tent four or three or two people or one person, and not in communities, and in different places; and we don't hear or know about each other-who is wandering where--but come together for a short time on the occasion of iasak payment in the Zashiverst fort, yet again not all together and not all at once; and having paid the Great Sovereign's iasak, we again wander away for sable-hunting, approximately two people together [cheloveku po dva], to different places and far away; and we don't have cities and districts. 31

In the interplay of these two social effects, after the Russian conquest, Subarctic Siberia witnessed a demographic and territorial expansion of the Tungus fur-hunting family groups. These groups populated a geographic area wider than before the seventeenth century-from the Yenisei River basin in the west to Manchuria and Sakhalin Island in the east. Tungus appeared in Sakhalin Island, on the Taimyr and Kamchatka Peninsulas, and on the left bank of the Yenisei River. The basin of the Podkamennaia Tunguska River, sparsely populated in the early seventeenth century, experienced a steady increase ofTungus population both from the Angara River in the south and the Nizhniaia Tunguska in the north. 32 This advancement was spurred by pressure from the Russian settlers (in the basin of the Angara) and by Yakuts expanding from the area of the Vilui River. But it was also stimulated by tributary politics and by the growing dependency on traded products. State tax collectors and private fur traders (often the same people operating in different roles, depending on the time of year and the proximity of other state agents) encouraged these migrations by creating demand among the indigenous peoples for firearms, flour, sugar, and alcohol. Building new posts along water routes, the agents were able to follow the migrations, gradually exerting political control over new territories and pushing the Evenki farther into the forest (taiga), to watersheds and to the mountain ridges (to the "Stone," Kamen'). 33

Meanings

if Lawlessness

The ease with which groups like the Tungus entered tributary obligations with the Russian state, and at the same time, the difficulties in maintaining these obligations, reveals an idiom that parallels, at the level of tributary politics, the research difficulties encountered by eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury authors. The seventeenth-century reports convey a chaotic picture of tributary relationships. However, they were not identified in these texts as

Making Wildness and Empire

3I

"wildness." For the tsar's serving men, these relationships revealed "dodging" (shatkost') of tax obligations. The Tungus and others were "thieves" (vory) and "persistent thieves" (uporstvuischie v vorovstve), 34 but not "savages." References to lawlessness exist, but it has a meaning that is different from contemporary usage. As the seventeenth-century Siberian Chronicle phrases this, "The Skewbald Horde, the Ostiak, the Samoed do not have the law, but worship idols, and bring them sacrifices as if they are God ... as if [praying] let the idols bring home plenty." 35 "Law" here refers to "Orthodox faith." In contrast, when the eighteenth-century reports mention that the Tungus "lack any law about their lives," 36 they refer to internal societal order. The head of the First Academic Expedition to Siberia (1733-43), the German scholar Gerhard Muller, noted that "the Tungus waged wars with each other too often; this prevented a, generally speaking, militant people from acting in accord against the Russians." 37 And a source from the 1780s indicates that "theTungus and the Samoed do not have the law"; that is, "they do not pay any respect to their fathers and mothers, and scold them as they please." 38 While these eighteenth-century documents clearly describe the same problems that the seventeenth-century tax collector experienced-such as dodging communal and kinship obligations in the context of tributary politics-they put them in very different terms. Two events mark this difference. The development of other sectors of the Russian economy in the early eighteenth century led to the rapid decline in importance of the Siberian sable in Russian state revenues, from I I percent in the r62os to only 2 percent in the early 1700s. 39 Hence the decline of state interest in Siberian taxation. By the end of the seventeenth century, reports of serving men ca1;ry little comment on taxation problems. At the same time, Russia engaged in the Petrine reforms, and it found itself in need of Siberian aborigines not so much in their guise as fur hunters but rather as "primitive peoples" who contrasted with the "European" Russians (at least the Russians of St. Petersburg). From the early eighteenth century on, the political tension between the tsar's men and the Siberian "thieves" was increasingly expressed as a cultural difference between the "rational state" and the "wild natives." 40 Peter the Great renamed the Moscow Tsardom the Russian Empire, and state discourses on Siberians in the eighteenth century centered on the academic mapping of imperial lands and peoples. Texts of that time in which one finds references to "lack of law" among the Tungus are not tax entries but rather questionnaires inquiring if "the inhabitants of the county [uezda], in their social life, have any strange customs, if they have anything peculiar in their mores, belief, rites, way of life, and manners, if they transmit any tales relating to ancient accidents, lives [bytiiam], if they have any differences in style of their clothing, in building their houses, in managing their households." 41

32

Making Wildness and Empire

The question of taxation does not, however, drop out of state discourse completely. Iasak continued to be collected, and from the early 1700s on, the Russian Orthodox Church became another actor in the Siberian tributary game as established missions throughout the Siberian North. However, the question of taxation changed from one of profit for the crown (though the issue of individual profit remained for the local tax officers) to a question of regularity and uniformity of state organization, as well as to whether an enlightened state should "alleviate the suffering of the tribute subjects from the collectors" and defend "poor and helpless tributized chiefs and peoples." 42 Should taxation be in kind or in money? Should taxed units be the individual hunter or the community? Should tax collection be administered by special officers, by fur traders, or by indigenous leaders? These questions were debated in the imperial iasak commission of the 1760s, which instructed the serving men to make "their princes and elders" take up the duty of"collecting iasak . .. from their communities [so svoego ulusa]." In r822, reformer Count Michael Speranski decreed the "administrative clan" (administrativnyi rod) to be a tributary unit in accordance with his Statute of Alien Administration. 43 As has been much remarked by historians of Siberia, these reforms did not succeed in creating a regular taxation regime. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, administrative clans coexisted with households as taxpaying units; indigenous princes worked alongside other tax brokers, and tribute in kind was submitted alongside the one in monetary form. 44 These reforms did succeed, however, in expanding the culture of Russian statehood in the North in the form of titles of princes of administrativ~ clans. At the same time, these reforms paradoxically codified statelessness by constructing the social category of"wandering aliens" (brodiachie inorodtsy). The Statute of Alien Administration classified Siberian populations according to the climatic zones that they occupied (Arctic, Subarctic, and Southern) and according to their economies (hunting-gathering, cattle-raising, and agriculture). Climatic zones corresponded to dominant types of economic activity and to the evolutionary "age" of their social structures-"to the level of their civil education and present way of life." Following this classification, the statute divided indigenous Siberians into "settled, ... those who live in towns and settlements; nomadic, those who occupy definite places depending on the season; and wandering, or foraging [brodiachie ili lovtsy], those who move from one place to another." 45

The Katonga Area at the Turn

if the Twentieth

Century

After the reform of r822, the Evenki of the Katonga area were registered in the Kezhma Tributary District. The name Kezhma refers to the village on

Making Wildness and Empire

33

the Angara River where Evenki of this district turned in their fur tribute. In accordance with the Statute ofAlien Administration, the Kezhma "alien district" [inorodcheskaia uprava] was organized as a community that had regular communal meetings (suglany) and was ruled by the appointed representative (the "prince"). The Katonga elders are unanimous in recalling, according to the memories of their parents and grandparents, that these communal meetings were trading fairs held in Kezhma. "Suglan was just a fair: you come out to trade and have fun [veselitsia]," remarked one of them recalling the stories of her parents; "and the prince is a person who can give your iasak instead of you, if you don't come out this year." In the early 1900s the appointed prince of the Kezhma District was Nevsei, who was sometimes referred to in the Russian documents as Nefed, baptized as Artem, and who thus gave the latter name to old Nikolai's family (Artemku). When old Nikolai was growing up, Nevsei was already retired from his administrative duties. Nikolai remembers him being "a very old man, very nice with kids." "Grandfather" N evsei was the eldest male in the forest camps of the upper parts of the Biramba tributary of the Podkamennaia Tunguska. These camps were headed by Nevsei's son Chombelei (Ev. Talkative,) baptized as Zakhar, and his brother Chodok (Gray-haired). Chombelei/Zakhar was a well-known reindeer herder. The Katonga household registrar of 1932 indicates that his family "possessed" about a thousand reindeer. 46 Tax inspector I. I. Pokrovskii reported in 1908 that Zakhar"considered himself literate and smart" and was aware that "he was cheated" by traders. 47 He attempted to start his own trade, and even to build his own post, known as "Zakhar's storage" (Zakharov labaz), but did not succeed and died in the mid-1930s. His brother Chodok tried to distance himself from this heritage of a rich herder. He let the reindeer herd be collectivized, but nevertheless was purged in 1938 for alleged shamanizing. What figured in early Soviet materials as the 1,035-head reindeer herd belonging to Zakhar Archemku was, according to old Nikolai and Military Grandmother (the nickname for the grandmother ofVas'ka's wife, Alena), instead a common possession held by a larger group that included not just neighboring Archemku but also the Baiaki and Grabkin families. "We all were one," old Nikolai explained to me, "and should have been called in fact Grabkins, but when our parents were baptized their names were confused [by the priests], and since then we were recorded as separate [families], although we lived together." Baiaki is the last name ofVas'ka and his father, Vladimir. The camps of old Nikolai and Vladimir's parents stayed together and helped each other. "You would need help to collect the reindeer;' explained old Nikolai, "in the autumn and in late winter." Nevsei's family had plenty of children, so they managed on their own, whereas the neighboring "Darofeievs used to invite their relatives from Kuz'movka-there were a lot

34

Making Wildness and Empire

of them over there-to help." "Did they pay them?" I asked old Nikolai. "Of course! They would help and then take the reindeer for the hunting season." "Most of the year," he continued, "the reindeer wandered on their own. They already knew the route and slowly moved along it. The old men [sagdyij knew where the reindeer would go. We collected the reindeer and parted to hunt sable. In December you collect the reindeer again, and in February go hunting again.You are hunting, and you know that the reindeer will come to such and such place when the snow deepens." A group of economists who visited the Podkamennaia Tunguska River in the late 1920s also noticed that in this area the reindeer were completely neglected during the winter, "when they are left to wander freely near or far from camp." "In late summer and early autumn, during the time of the autumn camps, the reindeer were kept in fences that surrounded rather large territories of several square verst." After the male reindeer fight over females in October, the reindeer are released from the fences. "Large herds occupied certain large areas, within which they wandered in groups of 150 or 200 heads .... The composition of the herds is not stable.... Smaller households wander together; there is no quarrel over land." 48 Camps that were richer in reindeer maintained kinship ties throughout the basin of the Podkamennaia Tunguska, as well as in a wider area as far north as Yakutia. Military Grandmother and old Nikolai, who married in the 1930s, agreed that the kulaki (rich) gave out brides to other rich reindeer herders, but rarely to the poorer families. The opposite was possible, and in fact frequent. In the I920S-JOS, the "middle-" and "low-" wealth families (to use the social categories of the Soviet surveys, which I discuss in. the next chapter) were connected, through marriage of their daughters, to the richer camps. An example of this was the family of Military Grandmother, whose older sister (ekin) and aunt (eneko) had married into the powerful lineage of Gaiul'skiis-one of the most affiuent reindeer herders and princes in the Podkamennaia Tunguska River basin. The family of Military Grandmother, in her words, received the bride-price (kalym) of"three hundred reindeer." In response to my further questions about how exactly the transaction was made, Military Grandmother commented that her family visited the camps of Gaiul'skiis every fall ("to help collect reindeer") and was able to take "as many reindeer as they needed to use for fur-hunting." She was certain, however, that her family was able eventually to build a herd of their own out of the initial kalym, and managed to keep it through the early Soviet reforms and World War II. In the early 1920s the family of Military Grandmother consisted of her widowed father and four children. She was the eldest child still living in the family, her older sister having already married out. She grew up helping her father in various camp and forest duties. Before she married she did not

Making Wildness and Empire

35

know how to do needlework, but she learned how to hunt sable and squirrel at an early age. Her family's clothes were made and repaired by her older sister and aunt, who collected them during regular visits to the Gaiul'skiis camps. Her father kept their herd jointly with two other "poor" families near the mouth of the Kontramo tributary of the Podkamennaia Tunguska. These families were not intermarried and belonged to different lineages. They stayed closer to the river because of the proximity of the fur traders, who rafted down the Podkamennaia Tunguska every summer. But they all went hunting sable in different areas-her father, for example, in the basin of the Nizhniaia Tunguska, near the camps of their richer relatives-in-law. 49

Recording Social Categories "When a Tungus is asked in Russian as to his clan (rod)," notes anthropologist S. M. Shirokogoroff, who worked among the Tungus-speaking groups in the Far East in the early twentieth century, "he replies without hesitation something like this: 'Before the Russians came, we lived like wild people, and did not know anything about the clan [rod] organization.' But if one asks him in Tungus [about' clan' terms such as] ... amok or kala ... , the reply is entirely different, something like this: 'We always had our clans and we lived by our clans, but nowadays, the clan organization is declining.'" 50 He goes on to say, however, that the terms amok and kala were not Tungus terms but, respectively, Mongol and Manchu. Shirokogoroff observes that ethnographers "believed in the decline of the clan system, whereas, in fact, they have been dealing with the decline of the former fixed admin,istrative and territorial units."Yet, reiterating the idiom of"living like wild people," he nonetheless remarks that "Tungus did not need any special term for 'clan' ... as the idea of clan as a unit was not yet differentiated from the name," 5 1 that is, from names for specific clans. I have argued that it is impossible to find "fixed administrative and territorial units" anywhere but on paper in Russian colonial and tributary politics, which in reality functioned as flexible frameworks for negotiation of meanings of belonging in the ambiguity of gift, tributary, and trade relationships. I have also argued, however, that discrepancies between administrative clans and taxpaying units-fixed on paper but relational in practiceconstituted one of the means for constructing an evolutionary distance within these political frameworks-after the eighteenth-century Westernizing reforms that introduced notions of" savagery" into practices of imagination in the Siberian North. I argue now that there is a similar discrepancy between the grid of tax units such as "clan" and "family" and the relational social categories of "us" and "them" that designate membership in these units.

36

Making Wildness and Empire

As labels possessing significance within larger imperial systems, the words for "clan" came to the Evenki language from languages that dominated tributary regimes. In the Far East these categories were of the Manchu origin. An agent of the Japanese government reported in the early nineteenth century that the Sakhalin Island Orokko ("people of reindeer;' from the Tungus for"reindeer," oron) have chiefs-harata, from the Manchu hara (clan), and da (chief)-"appointed by the authorities in Manchuria ... [and they] sometimes go to Manchuria to pay [fur] tribute." 52 Around Lake Baikal, terms for "clan" and "family" are of Mongolian origin. In addition to omok, Shirokogoroff cites the terms ias and iasun, derived from the Mongolian for "generation," "tribe," and "bone" in the sense of the skeletal base. 53 In the Katonga area the Russian word rod is used, and the term for "family" is of Russian and Yakut origin. The Russian terms are semya (family) and doma, from the Russian dom (house). Doma means a hunter and his family, and it is a very straight recapitulation of the entry of the pre-Revolutionary tax/trade or Soviet household registrar. This term is also used, however, in the Evenki language. Old Nikolai explained to me, for example, that "mingi domav is my family; if you have no family, I would not say domas [your family]; domav are my khutev [children], but not my father and mother." Old Nikolai also quoted a Yakut term in circulation that has the same range of meaning: kergen. It is a Yakut term for family, from the Turkish root kurgan, meaning "family,"" community," or "burial." Ias and iasan most conspicuously reveal the tributary character of the clan organization. These words derive from the same root as the term for the fur tribute (iasak), which is older than the Mongolian hegemony in ~outhern Siberia. It is old-Turkish and means "punishment" and "sin," and therefore "tribute" is a "punishment" imposed on the conquered. However, it also means "law" and "state" (cf. the name ofGenghis Khan's empire, Iasa, which comes from the same root as iasak). 54 This usage is in sharp contrast to the ethnographic assumption of a "genetic clan" (geneticheskii rody), 55 which could be isolated from tributary relationships. According to the eighteenthcentury geographer Johannes Georgi, The Tungus ... are divided, in a typically oriental fashion, into generations, and these generations, respectively, into clans [rody]. Every clan (tagaun) is started by some forefather, famous for his bravery, strength, the abundance of his cattle and children, and sometimes even for his sensibility [blagorazumie], and [a clan] is named after this person, and all belonging to such a clan are considered blood relatives. Several such clans consider each other as being in kinship, after the relationship between the forefathers, and therefore compose generations. 56

Despite his skepticism about the nature of clan relationships among the northern Tungus, Shirokogoroff follows this 1799 definition as he describes

Making Wildness and Empire

37

the Tungus clan as "a group of persons that is united by a consciousness of common origin from a male ancestor or ancestors; it is also united by a recognition of blood relationship and common appellation, and the recognition of a series of prohibitions, the principal one of which is that of marriage between the members of the same clan-exogamy." 57 The problem with this approach is not merely in its much-criticized assumption of blood kinship, which locates social relationships in the "natural history" of"true" parenthood. 58 It is also in another assumption, namely, that social terminology designates social groups, such as "relatives," "relatives-in-law," and "nonrelatives," which are assumed to have autonomous existence and clear-cut boundaries. However, this assumption cannot be supported by colloquial use ofkinship terms. According to Georgi and the Comparative Dictionary qf the Tungus-Manchu Languages, the term tego (tagaun) is accepted as signifYing "family," "clan," "people." 59 For example, the Evenki intelligentsia from the district archive and museum in Tura suggested to me that the etymology of the term lies in the notion of"root," or "basis"-tegerin in Evenki (from tegemi, "to seat"). In the area where I worked, however, I found the term tego signifYing "nonfamiliar people," "them," in contrast to dial and ibderil, which are most widely used to indicate "us" (munnil, as in munnil ilel, "our people"). In either case, however, it is not possible to tie this usage to a genealogical grid. According to Military Grandmother," dialvi are girkil, the camp neighbors, that tent [she pointed to the other tent of our camp], for example, ... tego is dial, that is, not you [but others], staying in the same ~amp," and "they [diaij could be relatives, ibderil." I was confused, and she tried to elabora.te. "We are all Momol, and all Momol are ibderil. Gaiulskie are ibderil as well, since they are Momol, Darofeievy are too-and Tamilkiny, too, since they are from Lepkoul. Tasachi are ibderil too; they are bratil [from the Russian word brat, "brother"], because our amaka [grandfather], Maxim, was their brother. They are all relatives [rodstvennikt]: they would bring over a teapot [as a gift], some tea, some flour, they would come as guests ... [whereas] tegol are dygor [living far away], such as Muktel, Chapagir, Sukochar." I asked Grandmother if old Nikolai's family was ibderil. (He identified himself as a Momo). "No," she replied, "he is a tego, because they don't come close; if they come, they sit silendy, they are not curious about how you are doing, like those from K. [another village of the Podkamennaia Tunguska River]they are also all tegol, Bukhrevy, Scherbakovy, and others." I inquired about the family ofVladimir (who are also Momol). "They are tegol, but svatal [from the Russian svat, "relative-in-law"], they are tegol, but since they are svatal, they are ibderil." Military Grandmother's emphasis on sociality ("they are relatives ... [because] they always bring a teapot, some tea") shows that "we" or "they" are

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Making Wildness and Empire

not groups but categories of relationships. In my fieldwork experience, discussion of these terms always coincided with the discussion of relationships with specific neighbors or camps, instead of clarifYing these terms. Another example of this occurs in an interview with an Evenki woman, Praskovia Nikolaievna Monakhova, conducted in I938 by one of the most famous Soviet Siberianist ethnographers, B. 0. Dolgikh. In this interview the discussion of social categories emerges from the discussion of origins of family names and designations of specific territorial groups: Uvadiarin is [Evenki for] "carry on oneself"; the Uvachan family name comes from this. Our grandfather, Monakhov, on the father's line, had ~ brother, Kaplin. All the Monakhovs sprang from him. Mata means "guest," Monakhov is perhaps from this [word] ... We call the local Evenki ... [of the Nizhniaia Tunguska River] Niurumnial, and their language we call Niurumniady. [This term comes from] ... Niur'uchil [who] are people with the iron arrows. Nuirumnin is a person with an iron arrow. We call the Baikit Evenki [i.e., of the Podkamennaia Tunguska River] Tegol . .. Dialvi are [people] who are barely familiar. Girki-if there is only one or two [of those unfamiliar people], dialvi. 60

This interview, as well as my own field materials, suggests that the meanings of these categories drift both within the single narrative that elaborates them, and in relationships with other categories that transcend kin and neighbor distinctions, as well as distinctions between groups divided by trade. This interview renders, for example, girki as an unfamiliar pe;rson. It is also, however, a term for "friend" or "companion" and a nickname for "spouse." Furthermore, it also signifies "trader"; and the verb girkudiami is used to mean "to go to the village/trading post to buy the supplies." Luchami, "to shop," literally means "to Russian," that is, "to go toward the Russians," as well as "to charge the supplies on credit" (as in hi luchamadevkiv Uchamidu, "I have always taken supplies on credit in Uchami").There are reported cases in which Evenki took names of fur traders as "their" family names during baptism. 61 Military Grandmother's last name,Tarnilkina, offers one such example: as she explained to me, Tarnila was a Russian trader from whom her relatives used to buy bread. Cases like this are particularly interesting, for they highlight a strategy of transformation of"commerce" into "camaraderie" and "kinship." Here communal/kinship identity arises after this strategy is adopted, rather than the other way around, that is, from interaction of"trade," "friendship," and "kinship" as distinct institutions, or "us" and "them" as social groups that exist before social relations are established.

Making Wildness and Empire

The Fur Trade,

39

1900-1917

The assumption of a genealogical basis of kinship enters Siberianist texts at the same time that tributary "lawlessness" is restated as generic wildness and "people of different faith" (inovertsy) are renamed "aliens by birth" (inorodtsy) within the Russian imperial identity regime. 62 In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century state discourse, the lack of generic terms for" clan" operated, ironically, as proof of such clans' existence: whether Evenki call it "clan" or not, the "biological facts" of kinship are there. The more the colonial regime supported the fur-hunting family organization, segmentary and flexible within the Russian tributary framework, the more it was interpreted by scholars as natural. The ethnographic imagination of biological kinship was just one practice of political and discursive displacement of relationships created by the Russian colonial regime in spaces conceived of as outside of and apart from this regime. Administrative institutions created in northern Siberia by Russia were inefficient in carrying out their stated purpose-the construction of bounded, "regular" communities under state control. They proved extremely effective, however, in the production of" chaos," that is, in the cultural construction of lifestyles and communities appearing to exist outside state boundaries. In this context, the failure of the imperial projects was the victory-or at least the discursive visibility-of human nature: of wildness associated with aboriginal statelessness or state corruption. Nearly all social forms produced by the practice of administrative rule were identified as "not fitting" the rigid identity structures. The Tungus who managed to become traders violated, in engaging in such commerce, their image as children of nature. Others were too mobile to be predictable subjects of taxation, which constituted them as always guilty, in the eyes of the authorities, of dodging the iasak payments. Every captured Tungus most likely owed some tribute to the state in some post. Thus ultimately for the state, the Tungus were always "thieves," guilty, unrepentant "orphans," subject to state mercy rather than "law." Successful tax collectors were not good civil servants who followed the letter of the "law" (whether iasak or "science") but those who established "camaraderie" (both friendship and trade) with their tributary subjects. 63 In this ambiguity of camaraderie and commerce, the social landscape of the Podkamennaia Tunguska area underwent rapid transformation in the early 1900s. At the end of the nineteenth century, Evenki of the Katonga area hunted sable on their way out to the Russian villages where they paid their taxes and traded their remaining fur with private merchants. Old Evenki (such as old Nikolai and Military Grandmother) recall their parents telling them ·stories about going as far as Yeniseisk and Turukhansk. In con-

40

Making Wildness and Empire

versations with me, they invoked images of churches with golden cupolas, seen from afar-a startling contrast to the grim buildings of Katonga-although neither old Nikolai nor Military Grandmother had ever been to these towns or seen these golden cupolas themselves. Their parents' and grandparents' tents were together only part of the year, while they took care of the reindeer. In October the joint camps split and the occupants of each tent wandered toward Russian towns separately, hunting sable and squirrel on the way. Those who went south reached the latitude of the Angara River around the New Year or on the Epiphany. They traded in Kezhma,Yartsevo, Yarkino, and other villages, and after trading started the long journey back to their reindeer before the spring moose-hunting season (February or March), a collective enterprise of all neighboring tents. 64 The following episode presents an example of submitting tribute and trading in Yartsevo, one of the villages on the Yenisei River. It comes from an extensive interview of an Evenki hunter, recorded by Nikolai Rychkov, a socialist exiled to theTurukhansk region in 1908.The text of the interview shows the shadow trade in which the tax collectors were engaged. In the villages and trading posts there were no formal shops or markets. Evenki and other hunters who came out for a visit were treated as guests of traders: they stayed in their houses, ate there, and most important, were served alcohol. Early twentieth-century ethnographic materials are abundant in portraying the inequalities that arose from this ambiguity of paying a visit and paying tribute, and from traders playing on the aboriginal addiction to alcohol. 65 The interview by Rychkov is unique in this regard because it describes this situation in the words of an Evenki hunter. In Yartsevo I went to visit Iefim. I came in and greeted him. While I greeted him, his charwoman [striapka] made some tea. Iefim asked, "Are you tired?"-"Yes, I am," I replied. He ordered his son to bring over half-a-bottle of wine, poured me a glass, and I drank it. [We] sat down to have tea. As we were having tea, he poured me another drink. [I] took the drink, had more tea. [Iefim] doesn't offer more! ... Wait, I thought, and told him:"Pour another!" He poured again. I finished my tea. [Iefim] started to inquire about the sable: "Where are the sables?"-"In the sleigh," I replied. "Bring them in," he said, "to take a look." ... I brought the sables to the house. Iefim told me to go to the clerk to stamp the sables [to certifY their receipt as tribute]. The son said: "The clerk left for the [village] Sukovatka."What? What to do? I went to Gregory and had another drink at Gregory's. Stayed at Gregory's a long time, went back to Iefim, and he treated me with another drink. Tqen, Sheruvul' ... came and picked me up. [I] came over, and saw Haivul' in Bokai's house. [He] wanted to sell the sables, and [I] went to bring my sables. I went to Iefim's, told him: "[I] must sell some sable." He said quietly-didn't yell at all-"To whom would you sell?" I said, "Bokai wants some." [Iefim] asked, "Do you have the stamps [iasak receipts]?" I said, "Bokai will buy without the stamps." [Then I] went over to you. 66 Iefim [soon] came over too.You put out forty rubles. Iefim started to demand

Making Wildness and Empire 41

that I return money that I owed him. I gave him twenty. He asked for another twenty. I thought to myself, whom are you taking the money from! He said, "Where do you want to take the supplies? Take mine!" [and] went home. I returned [to his place] and told his son, "Bring another half-bottle." [Iefim] brought a small glass and poured me a drink. What is in drinking! I said, "Rather, I'll take in supplies!" ... He said, "First, take the supplies, then I treat you.""I will take it," I said, "but don't throw your commodities at me! First let's drink." From this moment on, I don't remember anything. Later I understood that I woke up in the morning in the tent. 67

After 1822 the Podkamennaia Tunguska Evenki formed several administrative clans headed by princelings (kniazkz) who collected the fur tribute from their clans and delivered it to a state officer (zasedatel') in Yeniseisk or Turukhansk. These officers turned some of the fur as iasak and sold the rest. In 1898, in light of the recent reforms in peasant communal administration, the basin of Podkamennaia Tunguska was attached to the Kezhma and Pinchug peasant districts (volostz). The position of zasedatel' was abolished. Instead Evenki were allowed to establish trade links with "peasant representatives" (krestianskie nachal'nikz) of the Russian villages. Iasak became part of the tax (obrok) paid by settled communities. 68 The interview describes this situation. The abolition of the zasedatel' position and the subjection of the Evenki to the power of peasant representatives enlarged the local grain market of the Angara peasants. Local residents, such as Iefim, Gregory, and Bokai of this episode, started trading with the Evenki directly. This created tension with merchants who had been involved in fur trade for a long time and were losing the competition to new traders. These merchants lobbied the Irkutsk governor-general to restore "aboriginal autonomy": to move the indigenous communal meetings (suglany) to the north-which would ensure their more exclusive access to the Evenki fur hunters-and to authorize building the road between Kezhma and Preobrazhenskoe village in the Irkutsk District, which served as a base for Russian trade routes into the Podkamennaia Tunguska River basin. This is not to say that in the nineteenth century the fur traders were not present in the basin ofPodkamennaia Tunguska and other Evenki areas. But most of the time they were there illegally, and at that time they did not have permanent trading bases there. They rafted down the river, buying the fur that the Evenki obtained in the second half of the winter, after they left the Angara River villages inJanuary. 69 Tax inspector I. I. Pokrovskii, who visited the Podkamennaia Tunguska River in the summer of 1908, was told by one Evenki that his visit disrupted this trade: "Traders are afraid of you as if you are a bear [amikan], so they don't sell vodka [araka] to us." 70 By 1908, however, the question was not the illegality of trade but what proportion of the iasak was turned over to the state and what was sold on the side. "Iasak is

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Making Wildness and Empire

collected by the traders .... And prince N. Iadonchin categorically stated that the trader ... P. Kh. Sizykh applied all means in his power to prevent him from coming out to the Panolik village, and particularly to the areas populated [by the peasants], saying that iasak was canceled now and you have nothing to do there." 71 Competition among traders for indigenous hunters was intense. A report of the peasant representatives of the Yeniseisk District in 1915 describes this jockeying: A Tungus is approaching his suglan place and fires his gun several times to signal his arrival. The traders at the post get busy, take out vodka .... Men rush to meet the native, running ahead of each other. The Evenki has a custom: he would trade with the one who treats him with the first drink. Hence the fight between the "friends" using feasts, sticks ... and sometimes revolvers. The strongest wins and gets to invite theTungus into his house [to treat him and trade with him]. 72

Traders, competing with each other for the Evenki hunters, started to set up trading bases on the outskirts of the villages in order to meet the Evenki before they arrived in the village. In competition with each other, these bases-both those of the Angara peasants and those of the larger trading companies-soon moved farther away from the Angara River villages. In 1895 the Angara traders established a sleigh route from the village Panovo on the Angara to the upper part of the Podkamennaia Tunguska River, where they founded the post known as the Upper Office ( Verkhniaia Kontora). Moving from there down the river, between 1895 and I9II, traders founded more than ten posts, including Katonga. 73 This trade expansion was interrupted for several years by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the civil war (I918-2r). But by the mid-1920s trade was active again. In the basin of the Podkamennaia Tunguska, traders not only restored old posts but also started to move into the watersheds of the Podkamennaia Tunguska and the Nizhniaia Tunguska Rivers, building storage facilities closer to the migration routes of the Evenki herds on Kontramo, Uchami, Makhtur, Surinda, and other small tributaries of these two rivers. In the period from the 1930s to the early 1950s, the number of trading bases reached its peak (seven on the contemporary territory of the Katonga collective, or approximately one base for each ten to fifteen tents ofEvenki hunters). Only the centralization of the collective farms and the "enlargement" of the late 1950s and 1960s put an end to this expansion. 74 In this chapter I demonstrated that in order to understand the cultural construction ofEvenki lifestyles and identities in the tsarist period it is important not to privilege the Evenki relations on the northern Siberian "natural" landscape over those on the political landscape of the Moscow Tsardom of the seventeenth century and the Russian Empire (r700-I9I7). I also

Making Wildness and Empire 43

suggested ways in which we may ground the discursive practices of the "invention" of Siberian "wildness" in historically specific forms of colonial governance. Let me conclude this chapter by commenting on both the continuities and the discontinuities from the tsarist to the Soviet period. The continuity lies in the presence of the state and trade institutions, which was increasing at the turn of the twentieth century but culminated during the Soviet period. Yet, during the Soviet period, this presence was articulated within a very different cultural idiom of scientific "rational redistribution." This marks a closure in the process of transforming the meaning of state "law and order" from "law" as "faith" (Russian vera) and "tribute" (Mongolian Iasa and iasak) to "law" as "science" (nauka). In Siberian politics, this process started with the reforms of Count Speranskii (1822), but it was continued with renewed energy under state socialism.

CHAPTER

3

Primitive Communists on the Podkamennaia Tunguska River

in 1926 by ethnographer and reformer lnnokentii Suslov on the banks of the Podkamennaia Tunguska River shows participants performing the Evenki "circle dance" (see figure 2). In the 1970s, Suslov donated this photograph, together with some other of his field materials, to the museum in Tura, the administrative center of the Evenki Autonomous District. From Suslov's commentaries to the photo, which are also in the museum archives, we learn that the "circle dance" (iokhor) was performed on occasions of communal meetings of nomadic clans ofEvenki hunters and reindeer herders when several tents joined in a larger camp for a communal meeting. He concluded his comments, however, by pointing out that the photo of the dance was not "ethnographically correct": A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN

In the Baikit shot, there is some distortion of the ethnographic veracity of the iokhor, or osukhai (in the Yakut language): the tarpaulin tent is not removed, and the figure ofM. I. Osharov is in the center of the circle dance. [Osharov] ... began the iokhor and could not hear my request to leave the center and join the circle. I was calling to him from the top of the birch tree, from where I took this unique shot. Because of this, comrade Grishikhin, the photographer of the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR [in Leningrad], on my request removed from the negative both the tarpaulin tent and the figure of Osharov. The negative thus was made ethnographically correct. ... This shot was made by myself from the top of a tall birch tree, where I was hidden in the branches.June 1926,Baikit. [Emphasis added.] 1

The photo and the commentaries illustrate the making of the Soviet ethnographic canon. The signs of modern life are what make this event not sufficiently "ethnographic" for Suslov. The tarpaulin tent does not fit the image

Primitive Communists on the Podkamennaia Tunguska River 45

Figure 2. All participants of the communal suglan in Baikit dance the Evenki national dance, iokhor'io (1926). Courtesy of the Tura Kaievedcheskii Musei.

of" authentic" Evenki traditions. The signs of staging, however, are the most important target of Suslov's editing. Once this editing is done, and Osharo_v is removed from the center of the dancing circle, we see what looks like a spontaneous social gathering. This almost Boasian construction of ethnographic fact "in its fabricated originality" 2 reveals a complexity in the making of the Soviet ethnographic canon that cannot be reduced to the evolutionary modes of representation of Lewis Henry Morgan and Frederick Engels. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, there were strong intellectual as well as institutional links between the early twentieth-century Russian/Soviet anthropology and the school of Franz Boas. 3 Using field reports by Suslov and other ethnographers and reformers, in this chapter I uncover yet another strong current in the early Soviet ethnographic tradition-"organic" or peasant socialism , whose intellectual genealogy goes beyond both classical evolutionaty thought and discourses on cultural uniqueness in nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism. My goal in this chapter is, however, also to discuss these ethnographic visions as sites of imagination in the early Soviet social order. Indeed, not ol1ly ethnographic representations were staged on the banks of the Podkamennaia Tunguska in the 1920s and early 1930s. When Suslov

46

Primitive Communists on the Podkamennaia Tunguska River

rafted down the Podkamennaia Tunguska in 1926, the purpose of his trip was not only to collect ethnographic data, but also to organize institutions of indigenous self-government (local clan-based soviets) in accordance with the recently adopted "Provisional Statute of Administration over Native Peoples and Tribes of the Northern Borderlands." Suslov was a chair of the Krasnoiarsk branch of the Soviet state Committee for Assistance to the Peoples of the Northern Borderlands (hereafter referred to as the Committee for the North), which between 1924 and 1935 dealt with the integration of Siberian aborigines into Soviet society. The committee drafted the Provisional Statute, oversaw Sovietization, co-operation, and collectivization policies, and took part in creating indigenous autonomous districts in the Russian North. 4 In the mid-1920s these political and ethnographic representations collided. The "primitive-communist" social(ist) organization should have been, according to the Provisional Statute of 1926, both socialist and "ethnographically correct."These social projects were to follow indigenous social organization "organically" in terms of"locality" and "genealogical" differences-despite the fact that Suslov and other reformers knew very well that Siberian indigenous societies in the early twentieth century did not exist in their "pure" primitive-communist form. Just as a random photo shot of Evenki traditional practices ostensibly revealed signs of Russian culture, indigenous clans and local communities were said to display the presence of the tsarist colonial system. The organization of the clan soviets followed the logic of making "ethnographically correct" photographs: it was to rid the scene of contaminating elements of the tsarist old regime. Soviet historiography approached this "organic" wave of reforms in accordance with its vision of socialist construction as linear progress-as the first step in the same direction as the Stalinist collectivization of the early 1930s, which followed the Marxist-orthodox party line. 5 In contrast, more recent literature tends to contrast the two, romanticizing the organic policies of the Committee for the North as the collectivization's more humane yet not completely realized alternative. From this point of view, the Soviet collective farms of the 1930s appear artificially "imposed from above," while "ethnographically correct" institutions of the 1920s just as genuinely (at least in their intent) "accounted for" (uchityvalt) differences between indigenous societies and the emerging Soviet social order. 6 In this chapter I demonstrate that, if anything, organic institutions of the 1920s were as staged and imposed from above as later collective farms. Here and in the next chapter, in which I focus on Stalinist governmentality in the Podkamennaia Tunguska collectives, I question the usefulness of the distinction between "organic" and Marxist-orthodox visions and policies. I argue that power technologies employed in the cultural production ofboth reveal

Primitive Communists on the Podkamennaia Tunguska River 47

a continuity rather than a break. Both depended on the ethnographic understanding of what indigenous social structures "really" were, and both expanded, therefore, through social science discourse. Both sought to install a form of governance that constitutes indigenous collectivity and indigenous voices through surveillance and reporting. I explore the state reforms of the 1920s and early 1930s as a location for the Soviet ethnographic imagination, and vice versa, the early Soviet anthropology as a site of state reforms in the indigenous North.

Constructing Soviet Meetings In conducting Sovietization meetings, initiating agents removed themselves from the close-up in a fashion similar to that by which the ethnographer was deleted from the ethnographic picture that Suslov took. Consider a description of one suglan that he organized in the summer of 1926. This description appeared in the journal Sovietskii Sever as exemplary for most of the emerging soviets in the forest and tundra. Note that the circle stands for communal meeting and for community itself, and that Suslov is first in its center and then finds himself observing the circle from the outside, framing a seemingly closed community within his gaze: In a forest glade, the delegates of the Tungus suglan sat down in a circle. The head of the Committee for the North [Suslov] sat in the middle of the circle, read the statute, explained it point by point, and opened the discussion. After three hundred years, for the first time the natives were asked how they wanted to be governed! ... In the evening of the day when the suglan ended, [they] started a round dance. During the round game, the Tungus usually sing songs one after another, and all sing the refrain together. Such is the Tungus game iokhor'io ... It was the turn of the shaman Barkaul' to sing. His art of singing is known widely ... All listen carefully to his voice. And "the Big Russian master" [Bol~hoi russkii nachal'nik], having just now conducted the first [Soviet] suglan on the Chunia [tributary of the Podkamennaia Tunguska], gladly hears words of the shaman who is well respected in the area [vo vsei okruge]-the evaluation of all decisions of the suglan. This evaluation is very favorable ... And Suslov wrote in his field diary: "Barkaul told in his song all that had happened at the meeting. Oh, if only we had a phonograph! How many truthful, healthy, sincere opinions we hear about the measures that we take among the natives [tuzemtsev]." 7

The report used in this publication was written by Suslov. Suslov also took the minutes of the meetings, and the indigenous voices that his notes convey overwhelming support of Soviet reforms: "We ... the Tungus, illiterate but deeply feeling, deeply honor the Soviet power" and "all as one deliver

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Primitive Communists on the Podkamennaia Tunguska River

our gratitude ... for the help provided to us." 8 From these minutes, however, we cannot tell exactly where Suslov was at the meeting or what role he played. He did not chair the meeting; in the minutes he lists local Evenki activists in that role. In one of his later publications, Suslov mentions that he was elected to the presidium of the meeting on the suggestion of one of the Evenki elders. 9 But in the minutes themselves we find that he was "simply" one of the speakers who "joined the circle," to use the language describing the "circle dance" photograph. The symmetry of the ethnographic and political representations here is underscored by the notion of the audience for this spectacle that Suslov has in mind. Readers watch Suslov watching "the natives" and recording the authenticity of the new Soviet power. Suslov writes about the" ethnographically correct" photograph of the Evenki circle dance: "The district museum in Tura may request at Leningrad an enlarged 30 x 40 [centimeter photo of the] iokhor'io in several copies. This picture could be a marvel for the Tura museum, of the Party and Soviet organs and the best schools of the district." 10 The audience here is the Soviet subject, and its Soviet identity is affirmed through both experiences-by reading the article and seeing the photograph. In the latter case, the image of the ethnographically correct tradition, with the neutralized position of the ethnographer/ reformer, was to be projected back to the Evenki in new (Soviet) sites such as boarding schools and collectives. However, the making of ethnographic facts and local soviets shared not only this technology of vision. According to the Provisional Statute, local soviets in the indigenous North were to correspond to indigen