Page date:
3/18/02
Finally
at a price anthropologists and university libraries can afford! (What was Oxford
thinking with that insane pricetag on the hardback?) This is a first-hand account
of a reindeer-herding collective in the remote Taimyr peninsula of Siberia.
The author gives an intimate description of the day-to-day lives of a little-known
group of Evenkis as they face both economic and ecological challenges. His study
addresses questions of identity, nationalism, and ecological theory, as well
as mapping the changes caused in the region by the formation of and the recent
breakup of the Soviet Union.
Your webmaster recommends you read this book and get your library to acquire
it. It is really good and has interesting stuff for for any anthropologist worth
her/his salt.
Read Chapter
1 courtesy Oxford UP.
Table of Contents
List of Plates
Listof Charts
List of Maps
List of Tables
The Legend of the Khantaika
1. Evenkis in the Lower Yenisei Valley
Arrival
The road to the Khantaika
Evenkis and Dolgans
Mapping the tundra
2. The Number One Reindeer Brigrade
The most Evenki brigade
Herders and tundroviki
An Evenki pedagogy
State nomadism
3. Feeding the Village
Building collectives
Industrial parochialism
The 'villagers'
National rivalry
4. The State Ethnographers
Sparse peoples and the Russian state
Soviet ethnography and the 'origin' of Dolgans
Taimyr's 'wondrous mosaic'
5. National Inflation
Authorized and relational identities
The circulation of identities
Inflationry strategies
6. Sentient Ecology
Knowing the land
'The old people travelled everywhere'
7. Exclusive Territories
Territorial formations
The puzzle of privatization
8. Divergent Trajectories
Clans, surnames, and the eclipse of extensive kinship
National endogamy
Belonging to a kollektiv
Finding relatives
9. Three Senses of Belonging on the Khantaika
National identity and belonging
Wild meat and the wild market
Departure
Appendix. Genealogical Charts
References
Index