Book of the month for January 2005

Page date:1 January 2005

Patty A. Gray. 2005. The Predicament of Chukotka's Indigenous Movement: Post-Soviet Activism in the Russian Far North. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This is the first ethnography of the Russian North to focus on post-Soviet relations of domination between an indigenous minority and a non-indigenous majority in an urban setting. As Patty Gray investigates indigenous attempts in Chukotka to overcome this domination, she develops an anthropological approach to social movements that captures the "in-between" that is more than everyday resistance, but less than a full-blown movement. In the process, this book explores the post-Soviet transition as it occurred in the part of Russia that is America's closest neighbor: Chukotka nearly touches Alaska across the Bering Strait. Gray charts the political transformation in Chukotka as its administration sought to represent itself as "democratic" while becoming ever more repressive and demonstrates how the indigenous population in particular suffered under this new form of domination. The "predicament" refers to how the nascent indigenous movement was prepared to address Soviet-style domination, and instead was confronted with this "new Russian" style.

Patty Gray is an Assistant Professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow (2000-2003) at the Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, and Coordinator of the Siberia Project Group at that institute in 2002-2003.

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Reviewed by Alexander D. King

Table of Contents
Illustrations and Tables
Preface: Chukotka in the Twenty-First Century
Acknowledgements
Notes on Transliteration
VIGNETTE: 1948
Chapter 1: Epitomizing Events
VIGNETTE: 1956
Chapter 2: Starting a Movement in Chukotka
VIGNETTE: 1967
Chapter 3: The Limits of Resistance
VIGNETTE: 1971
Chapter 4: Toward a History of Soviet Chukotka
VIGNETTE: 1980
Chapter 5: Indigenous Culture in Russian Space
VIGNETTE: 1989
Chapter 6: Transformation of Local Politics in Chukotka
VIGNETTE: 1996
Chapter 7: Socioeconomic Conditions in Post-Soviet Chukotka
VIGNETTE: 2002
Epilogue: Rewritten Transcripts?
Appendix
Notes
References
Index

304 pages
ISBN:0521823463, ISBN13:9780521823463
£55.00, $90.00