ABSTRACT
The émigré Russian anthropologist Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff is famous for attributing to Vitim River Orochens a special 'psycho-mental complex'. His work carries a heavy debt to the intellectual currents of his day which sought to link the diffusion of ritual across space to cultural evolution. This chapter focuses in two short six-week ethnographic excursions in the region, first in 1989 and again in 2004. The latter visit was organised in collaboration with a group of Canadian and Russian archaeologists, who directed our attention towards the material signatures of everyday practice. The chapter examines the result of many fire-side discussionsor even argumentswith the archaeologists about the degree to which contemporary Orochen society has been degraded or assimilated by the industrial vortex created by the former Soviet Union. It explains that contemporary ritual expressions of 'luck' and reciprocity provide a frame through which post-Socialist environmental and market conditions can be understood.
