ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how contemporary Evenki communities relate to the landscapes they inhabit. Using materials from extended fieldwork among Orochen Evenkis in Southern Iakutiia and the Amur Region, the chapter investigates how tracts of remote forest become organised into cultural landscapes imbued with ancestral and spiritual meanings. The Orochen Evenkis inhabit larch forest, which includes pine, fir, birch and cedar, often with a rich under-storey vegetation of lichens, mosses and berry bushes. Evenki communities inhabiting these forests practice a mobile hunting and fishing economy, keeping small herds of between 5100 domestic' reindeer per person for transport purposes. For the Evenkis, there is no part of this forested world that can be considered to be secular, since each and every location is inhabited by spirits. In the areas of deep forest, the Evenkis also encounter traces of much older forms of marking the land in the form of rock paintings.
