ABSTRACT

The Siberian World provides a window into the expansive and diverse world of Siberian society, offering valuable insights into how local populations view their environments, adapt to change, promote traditions, and maintain infrastructure.

Siberian society comprises more than 30 Indigenous groups, old Russian settlers, and more recent newcomers and their descendants from all over the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. The chapters examine a variety of interconnected themes, including language revitalization, legal pluralism, ecology, trade, religion, climate change, and co-creation of practices and identities with state programs and policies. The book’s ethnographically rich contributions highlight Indigenous voices, important theoretical concepts, and practices. The material connects with wider discussions of perception of the environment, climate change, cultural and linguistic change, urbanization, Indigenous rights, Arctic politics, globalization, and sustainability/resilience.

The Siberian World will be of interest to scholars from many disciplines, including Indigenous studies, anthropology, archaeology, geography, environmental history, political science, and sociology.

Chapter 25 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

part I|92 pages

Indigenous Language Revival and Cultural Change

chapter Chapter 1|16 pages

Language vitality and sustainability

Minority Indigenous languages in the Sakha Republic

chapter Chapter 3|15 pages

Kŋaloz'a'n Ujeret'i'n Ŋetełkila'n—Keepers of the Native Hearth

The social life of the Itelmen language—documentation and revitalization

part II|96 pages

Land, Law, and Ecology

chapter Chapter 7|16 pages

Customary law today

Mechanisms of sustainable development of Indigenous peoples

chapter Chapter 8|17 pages

Indigenous land rights and land use in Siberia

Neighboring jurisdictions, varied approaches

chapter Chapter 9|10 pages

Evenki “false” accounts

Supplies and reindeer in an Indigenous enterprise

chapter Chapter 11|13 pages

Nature-on-the-move

Boreal forest, permafrost, and pastoral strategies of Sakha people

chapter Chapter 12|13 pages

Fluctuating human-animal relations

Soiot herder-hunters of South-Central Siberia

chapter Chapter 13|12 pages

Ecology and culture

Two case studies of empirical knowledge among Katanga Evenkis of Eastern Siberia

part III|106 pages

Co-Creation of People and the State

chapter Chapter 14|13 pages

Dancing with cranes, singing to gods

The Sakha Yhyakh and post-Soviet national revival

chapter Chapter 15|14 pages

Double-edged publicity

The youth movement in Buryatia in the 2000s

chapter Chapter 16|15 pages

Soviet Debris

Failure and the poetics of unfinished construction in Northern Siberia

chapter Chapter 20|12 pages

Sanctioned and unsanctioned trade

part IV|106 pages

Formal and Grassroots Infrastructure and Siberian Mobility

chapter Chapter 22|15 pages

Evenki hunters' and reindeer herders' mobility

Transformation of autonomy regimes

chapter Chapter 23|12 pages

The infrastructure of food distribution

Translocal Dagestani migrants in Western Siberia

chapter Chapter 25|14 pages

What difference does a railroad make?

Transportation and settlement in the BAM region in historical perspective

chapter Chapter 26|15 pages

Stuck in between

Transportation infrastructure, corporate social responsibility, and the state in a small Siberian oil town 1

chapter Chapter 27|12 pages

Hidden dimensions of clandestine fishery

A misfortune topology based on scenarios of failures

chapter Chapter 28|11 pages

Infrastructural brokers in a logistical cul-de-sac

Taimyr's wild winter road drivers

chapter Chapter 29|13 pages

Ice roads and floating shops

The seasonal variations and landscape of mobility in Northwest Siberia

part V|100 pages

Religious Mosaics in Siberia

chapter Chapter 31|15 pages

The making of Altaian nationalism

Indigenous intelligentsia, Oirot prophecy, and socialist autonomy, 1904–1922

chapter Chapter 32|14 pages

Missionaries in the Russian Arctic

Religious and ideological changes among Nenets reindeer herders

chapter Chapter 33|13 pages

Nanai post-Soviet Shamanism

“True” shamans among the “neo-shamans”

chapter Chapter 34|13 pages

Feeding the gi'rgir at Kilvei

An exploration of human-reindeer-ancestor relations among the Siberian Chukchi

part VI|94 pages

Conceptions of History

chapter Chapter 37|18 pages

Economics of the Santan trade

Profit of the Nivkh and Ul'chi traders in Northeast Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries

chapter Chapter 38|14 pages

Power, ritual, and art in the Siberian Ice Age

The collection of ornamented artifacts as evidence of prestige technology

chapter Chapter 39|12 pages

Archaeology of shamanism in Siberian prehistory

chapter Chapter 40|12 pages

Rock art research in Southeast Siberia

A history of ideas and ethnographic interpretations

chapter Chapter 41|20 pages

A history of Siberian ethnography

chapter Chapter 42|16 pages

Cycles of change

Seasonality in the environmental history of Siberia