The Chukchi are an iconic people in Russian society. They are one of a few ethnicities around which a genre of Russian joke has arisen. They live at the end of the earth, literally in the first time zone of the day, and images Chukchi and Chukotka invoke a kind of romantic primitivism in Russian culture not dissimilar to horse-culture Indians of the Great Plains in America. Chukotka was been much in Western news reports when it became Roman Abramovich’s pet project (“Russia’s richest man not in prison”), and television viewers were treated to footage of miserable rural villages in a frozen tundra and a fur-clad reindeer herders watching deer or throwing lassos. These images ignore other indigenous Chukotkans (Eskimo, Evens, Kereks, Koriaks) and their real lives in the modern world. Patty Gray’s ethnography of political activism among 1990s Chukotkan indigenous peoples is an excellent discussion of these real lives, neatly articulating the connections among anthropology, sociology, and political science while remaining very much an anthropological ethnography (a very good thing, in this reader’s opinion).
The fascinating thing about indigenous activism in Russia is that it is very much led by well-educated professionals who were often Communist Party members or other elites (although that may not be surprising to Soyuz readers). While it is true that they never filled top posts in the Soviet era and had to accommodate a clearly Russian way of doing things, nevertheless, the Soviet Union created more than token space for indigenous agendas, and just as things started looking up, the rug was pulled out from underneath them in the early 1990s. Gray uses a spatial metaphor to excellent effect, pointing to continuities across political and cultural arenas on the one hand, and the spatial experiences of living in cramped houses without plumbing on the other:
It was not considered important for indigenous Chukotkans to control spaces of their own in Chukotka society; it was sufficient to accommodate them within Russian spaces – a room in the Russian House of Culture, a page in side the Russian newspaper, a token appointment with the administrative apparatus. (p. 25)
Gray comes to this conclusion after reviewing three epitomizing events. The first was the demise of the "Iaranga" building in Anadyr, where urban indigenes frequently gathered for social and cultural events. As it was falling down, the administration shunted people into a room in the regional House of Culture. After promising to renovate the Iaranga building, they did nothing and eventually pulled it down. The second event was the dispossession of "Murgin Nutenut" (Our Homeland), an indigenous newspaper that published weekly editions containing Chukchi, Eskimo, and Even articles. It had started as a Chukchi-language newspaper of translations from the local Russian-language paper, but during glasnost', it created its own journalist space, editorially independent from the newspaper with which it shared infrastructure. Such a lose canon was seen as a threat by the Nazarov regime, and it was evicted from the newspaper's premises, harassed, and eventually shut down in a particularly shady manner in 1995. The third example was in the political space: Nazarov maneuvered behind the scenes of the Association of Indigenous Less-numerous Peoples in Chukotka for their official endorsement in his gubernatorial re-election bid, thus hurting the campaign of the indigenous candidacy of Vladimir Etylin.
These locally repressive tactics by Gov. Nazarov spurred Etylin and other indigenous Chukotkan's to greater activism on national and international stages, where they had some success in getting legislation passed and attracted the attention of international NGOs, including the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, IWGIA, and others.
I want to praise Gray's foil of Malina Kevyngevyt, a fictional woman whose life is presented in a series of vignettes before each chapter, starting as a girl in 1948 and ending as a wise (and resigned) grandmother in 2002. These stories surely resonate with those every ethnographer working in Siberia and the Far East has heard, and they come out of a conglomeration of real stories related to the ethnographer by several people.
Chapter 2 analyzes indigenous Chukotkan activism in the larger context of indigenous politics around the globe. Chapter 3 discusses theories of social movements and presents a convincing argument for understanding Chukotkan indigenous activism as a middle-road between Scott's 'weapons of the weak' and a full-blown social movement. Gray elaborates upon Scott's concept of hidden and open transcripts, and provides a reading of each for both the Nazarov administration and indigenous Chukotkan activists. Chapter 4 is the requisite 'history chapter', focusing on the creation of indigenous elite cadres under the Soviet system. Chapter 5 returns to the spatial metaphor outlined in the introduction through an analysis of Chukotka as a physical and social space shared by indigenous and incomer peoples on unequal terms. "Culture" is an overdetermined symbol in Chukotka, both an asset and a liability for indigenous people, who are both noble savage and dirty native. On the other hand, administrative discourses erasing cultural differences serve merely to disauthenticate indigenous claims that generations of discrimination and culturally-focused repression demand redress. Chapter 6 narrates the political machinations in 1990s Chukotka while Chapter 7 ends the book with a summary of the economic privation in Chukotka, so typical of other rural areas in the former Soviet Union.
The Predicament of Chukotka's Indigenous Movement tightly integrates thick ethnography with a theoretical contribution to political movements. It doesn't suffer from the typical structure of first ethnographies – theoretically sophisticated introductions and conclusions bracketing ethnographic discussion which seems unconnected to the ideas tossed around in chapter 1. However, I sometimes did wonder at the organization. Gray often refers the reader of early chapters to sections near the end of the book, and I wondered if a different ordering would have made a smoother flow of the argument. On the other hand, there is no obvious logic ordering the themes discussed. Gray thankfully dispenses with journey metaphors in her analysis of social spaces, and each chapter runs through the chronology of the 1990s as it examines a different topic. In the end, I've decided that the reader's discomfort is minimal, and reflects the constructedness of social life itself--everything is connected to everything else, and there is no real 'base' upon which one can build an edifice. Thus, Gray has done the poaching graduate student a service, by allowing them to dip into the book via the index, and then connect the ideas to other key points cross-referenced in the text.
Naturally I have a few quibbles, but I don't want to dwell on them here. I will complain only that Gray's discussion of indigenous culture and 'culture' as a symbolic political football could have benefited from a more sophisticated use of Wagner, Bourdieu and Peirce, but that's my trip. Other readers will probably have other quibbles, but this is a really good book, solidly conceived and presented. While the prose may not be lyrical, it is accessible and full of interesting narratives that will keep the attention of undergraduates. Teachers will find several of the chapters suitable for undergraduate teaching on topics of indigenous rights, political activism (in general), anthropology of the north, the state, the post-soviet studies, and even performance studies. I can't refrain from teasing my fellow American for her gloss of "American pop music (anything from the Beatles [sic] to rap)" (p129). However, while British academics may roll their eyes, this statement also shows that Cambridge really is now an American press! Finally, I have some doubts about the strength of claims made in the Epilogue. It opens with the May 2000 jubilee conference in Moscow held by RAIPON with international guests. After the advent of Abramovich and "Roman's Friends", life in Chukotka has improved dramatically for everyone, and not the least of all for indigenous Chukotkans. However, Gray leaves an important question unanswered: are the structures of racist oppression subtly used in the Soviet era and blatantly wielded under Nazarov's regime still firmly in place? Are indigenous Chukotkans simply bedazzled with Abramovich's largess and the positive material improvements he has made for everyone? Gray does an excellent job showing how the racist oppression of Nazarov was a more open reading of hidden Soviet transcripts, and her arguments left this reader feeling uneasy at the optimistic tone of the closing pages. While the public transcripts may have been rewritten, I suspect the hidden ones remain the same.
Full disclosure: Dr. Gray was a colleague while we were at MPI in Halle together. My assessment of her book, however, is honestly what I really think.