ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Christian conversion reshaped gender roles, marriage practices, and family structures among the Nenets. Evangelical missionaries introduced Christian kinship categories, hierarchical gender ideals, and regulated marital practices that both challenged and reinforced traditional Nenets norms. Missionaries assumed the role of matchmakers, arranging marriages in ways that mirrored Nenets exogamic customs while emphasizing religious endogamy, moral discipline, and ritual propriety. Baptist gendered values—patriarchal leadership, female domesticity, and moral piety—aligned with Nenets cultural expectations, enabling conversion while preserving traditional ideals amid modernizing influences. Baptist teachings were interpreted by many Nenets as a return to the “pristine Nenets tradition”—whether lost, imagined, or desired—becoming as a means of cultural continuity.
