Review
of
Piers Vitebsky. 2005. Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia. London: HarperCollins Publishers.
Nearly twenty years after he began his fieldwork in the Russian North, primarily among reindeer herding Eveny of the Sakha Republic, Piers Vitebsky has produced an ethnographic monograph that affords an intimate look at where he went and who he met there. At first glance, the book appears to be all about Vitebsky’s many visits since 1988 to the reindeer camps of Sebyan, a village in the Verkhoyansk Mountains of central Sakha; yet after one is deeply immersed in the narrative, it becomes clear that this book is nothing about Vitebsky, and is all about the Eveny he came to know. The roughly chronological account of his travels is merely a narrative device used to draw the reader deeply into the lives of several Eveny families and understand the nature of what they experienced in the Soviet period and in the years of reorientation following the Soviet Union’s demise.
After years as an east India specialist, in the late 1980s Vitebsky found himself among the avante garde of field researchers in late Soviet Siberia. Yet while a number of Ph.D. students who came to Siberian field sites after him quickly produced monographs, heeding the call of their career paths, Vitebsky took his time with the material he gathered, allowing life trajectories to play out over 15 years before committing them to print. The result is a longitudinal study of unprecedented richness and depth. The link between Vitebsky’s earlier Indian work and this more recent Siberian work is an interest in shamanism and spirituality. Vitebsky explores this mainly through the relationships between Eveny and their reindeer, and the ways that reindeer become metaphors for relations between humans.
The book is divided into four parts, preceded by a Prologue in which Vitebsky explores the ancient association of reindeer with flight. In Part I, “The Partnership of Reindeer and Humans,” Vitebsky sketches a broad historical background beginning in prehistory and progressing through the Soviet mission of civilizing Siberian reindeer nomads. In Part II, “A Tale of Two Herds,” Vitebsky begins to introduce the contemporary lives of the reindeer herding families who are at the heart of his ethnography. There is some excellent detail here of the changes that came with Russia’s state farm reorganization, and the havoc it wreaked on the reindeer herders. This is followed by an “Interlude,” which recounts Vitebsky’s somewhat liminal experience of following an elder Eveny man on his annual winter hunt for sable and ermine. Following this hunter, Vitebsky learns how signs in the tundra tell of the movements of others, inspiring him to comment that “the awareness of who was where seemed almost paranormal, as information and messages moved around the hushed forest like radio waves.”
In Part III, “Beads for the Natives,” Vitebsky begins with contemporary ethnographic detail and skillfully uses it as a portal to the Soviet past. He conveys Soviet tactics of colonization as well as Eveny modes of resistance and accommodation to them. The result is a fresh perspective on topics that have become standard for Siberian ethnographies: boarding schools, the gendering of women, the gulag (as experienced by Eveny), environmental pollution, and the persecution of shamans; these are interwoven with contemporary snapshots of both joys and despairs of tundra family life. In Part IV, “Spirits of the Land,” Vitebsky turns more directly to the spiritual side of Eveny life, giving particular attention to the figure of Bayanay, the keeper of animals of the forest. Here we have accounts of divination, dream interpretation, Eveny sense of place, and funerary practice. This section includes a chapter detailing Vitebsky’s experience of bringing his wife and two children into the field with him for one summer. The book concludes with an Epilogue in which Vitebsky ponders the bleak future of reindeer herding across Siberia and insists upon seeing hope. “I do not believe that the Age of Reindeer is coming to an end,” he writes, “but that people who live with reindeer are moving to a new global awareness that opens up possibilities for new kinds of action, even turning deficiencies into opportunities.”
Rather than merely reporting data from the field, Vitebsky evokes the texture of lived experience for Eveny tundra dwellers, telling stories with literary devices that include character, scene and dialogue. He very skillfully uses dramatic plot elements as departure points for ethnographically conveying the everyday realities of life in the tundra. Thus, for example, the delayed arrival of an expected visitor triggers a call on a short-wave radio, which highlights the dependence on radio communication to maintain a complex network of links across vast spaces. The prose is engaging and readable, often poetic, at times unabashedly sentimental. There are moments when this approach may seem overwrought, such as when Vitebsky sets out a list of “Dramatis Personae” replete with deeply subjective characterizations for each individual. Here, Granny is “a shrewd and ironic matriarch,” while Kesha the brigadier has “long hair like a mythological hero.” Yet aside from being a useful reference for keeping track of people and places, the list itself is a miniature ethnographic triumph that captures the surreal absurdity of late- and post-Soviet era Siberia with surprising accuracy, as Korean antler Mafiosi, U.S. aid workers, British film crews and Alaska sausage kings enter the picture.
Vitebsky’s accounts of the personalities of individuals he encounters in the tundra will ring true with anyone who has traveled in rural Siberia. He captures seeming incongruities that actually are not incongruous at all, such as the literary bent of an Eveny reindeer herder who makes reflexive references to Pushkin’s depiction of the “wild Tungus,” or the global economic awareness of another herder who comments on the “balance of payments crisis with India” that may affect his tea supply. The playful humor of these people shimmers throughout the pages of the book, as they tease Vitebsky mercilessly or as he discovers they have given their reindeer names like Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton. Far from seeing them as passive victims of Soviet interference, Vitebsky describes the Eveny he came to know as “intelligent, flexible people, politically alert, whose inner spiritual life and reserves of irony allow them to survive and look out for each other, even while they see their world for what it is.”
This is a scholarly work of considerable depth and insight, but Vitebsky clearly intends his book to be read by a much broader audience than the academy. In the year since its release, the book has enjoyed a kind of success uncommon for an ethnography, gaining wide public exposure that ranges from a ten-minute interview on NPR’s All Things Considered (11 February 2006) to a review in my own hometown newspaper in Fairbanks, Alaska. Vitebsky is clearly media-savvy, and this is a good thing for post-Soviet social anthropology, which tends to labor in relative obscurity. I suspect his book will find success with both specialists and non-specialists. Vitebsky’s readable, sometimes poetic prose is uninterrupted by citations, and footnotes are indicated only with an asterisk. The asterisks are probably meant to be less obtrusive and off-putting than numbered footnotes, but they actually make the footnotes harder to follow. Still, the interested reader can go to these notes and find references, data, and theoretical discussions that attest to Vitebsky’s scholarly erudition, while the main text maintains a seamless narrative flow. This book would be highly appropriate reading for undergraduates, and while it is not written as a theoretical treatise, graduate students would do well to read it as an exemplary ethnography.