For thousands of years, the reindeer's extraordinary adaptation to cold has sustained human life over vast tracts of the earth's surface. Images of flying reindeer carved into rocks and tattooed on the skin of ancient mummies illustrate one of the great mysteries of prehistory - the 'reindeer revolution', in which Siberian native peoples tamed and saddled the reindeer they had previously hunted.
Piers Vitebsky, the first westerner to live with Siberian reindeer people since the Russian revolution, enters the inner world of Eveny nomads and follows their migrations over the swamps, ice-sheets and mountain peaks of the coldest inhabited region of the world. Against a backdrop of political meetings, sledge races, helicopter mercy flights, Gulag prison survivors and reindeer sacrifices, the reader experiences the humour, wisdom and passion of a gallery of unforgettable personalities.
Soviet rule aimed to 'civilise' the reindeer people by subjecting them to productivity plans, killing their shamans and replacing their values of self-reliance and mutual help with the formalised ethics of communism. As the Eveny adapt to a new social order today, they still turn to the animal which moulds every aspect of their lives, from their economy to the intimate world of their dreams.
Reindeer People is a vivid and moving testimony to a Siberian native people's astonishing endurance at the ecological limits of human existence, as well as a frank account of how the author's own encounters with humans, animals and spirits over nearly two decades have changed his own life and the life of his family.
Piers Vitebsky specializes in the anthropological study of ritual, psychology and the environment. He has carried out fieldwork among shamans and shifting cultivators in tribal India since 1975 and among nomadic reindeer herders in the Siberian Arctic since 1988. Since 1986, he has been Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge.
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Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
Maps, Figures and Illustrations
Dramatis Personae
PROLOGUE
Soul-flight to the sun
PART I THE PARTNERSHIP OF REINDEER AND HUMANS
The prehistoric reindeer revolution
Civilizing the nomads
PART II A TALE OF TWO HERDS
The massacre of Granny's 2,000 reindeer, camp 7
Granny's herd restored: late summer site, 1-2 August
Migrating into autumn, 3-8 August
Kostya's mushroom crisis, camp 10
INTERLUDE: SOLITUDE AND SILENCE
Vladimir Nikolayevich's winter hunt
PART III BEADS FOR THE NATIVES
Frightened children and disdainful women
Men fulfilled and men in despair, camp 8
Landscape with Gulag: brushed by White Man's Madness
Killing the shaman and internalizing betrayal
PART IV SPIRITS OF THE LAND
Animal souls and human destiny
Dreams of love and death
Sacrificing at a nomad's grave
Bringing my family
How to summon a helicopter
EPILOGUE
Outliving the end of empire
Notes
Bibliography
Index
xvi + 464 pages, 16 plates of photographs, notes, bibliography
Hardback: £20,
ISBN >0-00-713362-6 (US edition Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, November 2005)