Page date:1 Oct. 2003

Nikolai V. Ssorin-Chaikov . 2003. The Social Life of the State in the Siberian Subarcitc. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Current cultural theory has productively explored the role of the imagination of the “primitive” and the “indigenous” in the making of modern empires. In this study of Russian and Soviet governance of the Evenki hunters and reindeer herders of Northern Siberia, the author charts the reverse side of this social imaginary, looking at what he calls “cultures of statehood” among the very people whom the state consistently rendered stateless. He examines the political uses of state institutions and the practices of identification with the state by indigenous Siberians who are traditionally described as stateless kin-based peoples whose cultures are determined by long-term adaptation to the harsh northern environment and for whom the proximity of state institutions is solely a cause of suffering. Ssorin-Chaikov’s goal is not merely to undo the displacement of indigenous lifestyles and identities to the imagined landscape beyond and before the Russian/Soviet state. It is, rather, to chart forms of government that expand alongside displacement, to examine the social life of the state in everyday contexts extending well beyond formal institutions, and to theorize statehood from a unique vantage point.

280 pages, 6 illustrations, 2003,
ISBN 0804734623 cloth

You can order the book directly from the publisher.

Reviewed by Brian Donahoe

Table of Contents

List of illustrations and table ix

Acknowledgments xi

1. Introduction 1
State: Deferral, Difference and Diffusion 5
Power: Time and the Other 9
Site: Nesting Hierarchies, Nesting Orientalism, and Capitalism as “the Other” 14

2. Making Wildness and Empire: From the Seventeenth to the Early
Twentieth Century 23
Russian Iasak over Central Siberia 25
Politics of Gift and Tribute 26
Meanings of Lawlessness 30
The Katonga Area at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 32
Recording Social Categories 35
The Fur Trade, 1900–1917 39

3.Primitive Communists on the Podkamennaia Tunguska River 44
Constructing Soviet Meetings 47
“Ethnographic Principle” as a Knowledge Practice 49
Siberian Social Organization in Early Soviet Scholarship 53
Designing Clan Soviets 57
Structuralist Politics 65

4. After Capitalism:The Tenacious Visibility of the “Old Regime” in the
Early Soviet Politics of Difference 73
Unmasking and Uprooting 75
The Soviet “Ethnographic Present-Perfect” 81
Second Nature in the Mirror of Social Constructivism 92
Ethnography and Reporting 98
Class Origin as Genealogy 103
The “Eye,” the Socialist “I,” and the Capitalist “He” in the Soviet
Ethnographic Present Perfect 106

5.Poetics of Unfinished Construction 110
The Visibility of the State 113
Vanishing as Unfinished Construction 116
The Economy of Labor Shortage 119
Expansion in the Economy of Shortage 125
Poetics of Development as Employment 129
Poetics of Unfinished Construction 134

6.From State Orphans to Children of Nature 140
Boarding School 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 157
Narratives of Autonomy 162

7.Mothering Tradition 170
Surrogate Workers and Modes of Production 173
Female Workers in the Katonga Collective 179
The Making of Professional Housewives: Katonga 182
The Making of Professional Housewives:Theory 188
The Social Space of Traditionalism 193
The Specter of Domesticity and the Invention of Tradition 197

8. Conclusion 201

Notes 211

Bibliography 231

Index 247