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Petra Rethmann is assistant professor of anthropology at McMaster University. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropologica, and The Anthropology of East-Europe Review.

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TUNDRA passages

The Pennsylvania State University Press

Contents

Transliteration....................................ixPreface: Orientations..............................xi1 Departure.......................................12 History of the Periphery........................253 Dissecting Histories............................474 Distant Voices, Still Lives.....................695 Research Connections............................956 Agency in Dire Straits..........................1017 Skins of Desire.................................1338 And Tradition...................................1559 Arrival?........................................175Notes..............................................183Bibliography.......................................189Index..............................................207

Chapter One

This book describes how, in the mid-1990s, an indigenous people in the northern Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East experienced, interpreted, and struggled with the changing living conditions of post-Soviet Russia. It describes how Koriak women and men actively negotiated the manifold historical and social processes-from tsardom to the Soviet state to a democratic beginning-by protesting, accommodating, and reinterpreting the conditions by which their existence was continually made and remade. It also examines how Koriak women today creatively engage with-and fight-regional configurations of power to challenge and contest formations of social inequality and male domineering. This book is about both the present and the past. It is an ethnography in the sense that it stresses the specificity of local practices and discourses of history, gender, and agency. At the same time, it attempts to contribute to discussions about the predicaments and struggles of marginalized and indigenous people and the issues they face in broad contexts of regional to global relationships.

My interest in exploring issues of gender, history, and agency at Kamchatka's northeastern shore emerged when I found that I rarely had conversations about any of the topics I was interested in-rituals, traditions, tundra uses-without paying attention to the contexts of historical changes and regional and community differentiation. The most important source of insight for recognizing the significance of these aspects for Koriak lives was that the people themselves regularly brought up such topics: cultural idiosyncrasies and distinctions between Koriaks and Russians and among Koriaks; administrative power and divisions; regional economic inequalities; femaleto-male social positionings-all were issues that made local culture worth talking about for them. As these issues were never entirely absent from our discussions, I found that Koriak women and men frequently connected them to extraregional historical and social developments. A starting point for the analyses in this book is the recognition that local meanings and interpretations are never entirely divorced from global processes and change.

A consequence of this recognition involves the reluctance to situate Koriak women and men in frameworks of either radical cultural difference or social assimilation. Koriaks were frequently described as primitives. They subsisted on reindeer herding, fishing, and hunting in extensive tundra lands. They lived in difficult, hardly accessible terrain, often several weeks' hike away from the coast or settlements. They recognized waters, animals, humans, and plants as parts of a closely interconnected world. In conjunction with these kinds of understandings, they asked spirits for help and brought their sick to shamans. These forms of existence and knowledge have invited sets of conventional imagery that described Koriaks as backward and ignorant, frequently in contrast to those who lived in urban centers. These understandings also incited forms of social policing intended to bring Koriak women and men as assimilated citizens under the sponsorship of the state.

Stereotyped understandings of cultural difference easily invite a set of imagery that positions subjects, communities, and cultures in categorical structures of "us" and "them." As both process and notion, assimilation allies different peoples under the umbrella of one homogenous, ethnicity-transcending identity, enshrouding them in an overarching category of personhood. Both understandings, difference and assimilation, leave only little room for recognizing the possibility of commonality and differentiation in the modern world. The Koriak women and men I knew did not think of themselves as a "cultural Other"; yet neither would they have agreed that they have become like the Russians and Ukrainians who had moved into the Kamchatka Peninsula. Together with anybody who reads this book, Koriak women and men share a world of expanding capitalism and natural resource depletion. Like many others, they contend with excruciating poverty, increasing social violence, and domestic abuse. As Koriak women and men, they may speak from vantage points that are distinct from those of, for example, urban or rural Russians and other citizens of the world. Instead of describing Koriak perspectives as a site of cultural difference or assimilation, it is challenging to place them within a wider web of local-global cultural politics and regional positions. By taking up this challenge, I hope to demonstrate that Koriak perspectives are not a site of cultural difference or isolation but are continually forged in response to, and in dialogue with, various social and historical developments. In such a view, I believe, lies promise as well as social and political possibility for many of the Koriak women and men I know: The challenge is to appreciate difference not as routine lip service to diversity but as a creative intervention in a world we share.

History

To describe Koriak women and men as primitive others across an abyss of space and time means to ignore their contemporary predicaments and the complex social issues with which they struggle. On the other hand, to describe them as conformist or assimilated citizens in the context of the Russian nation is to deny them the possibility of difference in the modern world. Between these two positions lies a terrain that addresses the questions mostly obscured by these classic contrasts-radical cultural difference, on the one side, and homogenous or assimilated identities, on the other side. History, I believe, is one such place. In breaking down the extreme categorical differentiations between difference and assimilation, it becomes possible to see how contemporary Koriak understandings of themselves are neither the result of cultural identities nor the sum total of cultural specificities and idiosyncrasies. For example, chronicling the encounter, the dialogue, among Koriak women and men, regional neighbors, and the state makes it possible to see how "Koriaks" were formed in the imagination of the state, regional majorities, and visiting anthropologists who learned to know "them." It makes it possible to see how such powerful discourses that form and authorize Koriak identities do not have an unquestioned hegemony. It makes it possible to show how Koriak women and men respond, reinterpret, and challenge them even as they accept and are shaped by these forms of knowledge.

In taking Koriak involvements and concerns with past events and the contemporary world as my starting point, I choose to write from a perspective that stands in contrast to that in nearly any ethnography of the region I have read. My reading of history as a complex assemblage of conflicting narratives and different voices-the recognition that different ways of telling spawn different kinds of truth-confronts the totalizing function (K. Clark 1981, ix-xii) of these texts. The narrative realism in the Soviet ethnographic record (approximately 1930-85) reveals highly self-conscious texts revolving around master plots of socialist struggle, progress, and civilization. The texts produced from roughly 1930 to 1940 attest to the enthusiasm and unswerving zeal with which agents, teachers, and administrators set out to bring history and progress to those who presumably lacked it. In time, the ethnographic monograph replaced the many essays, columns, syndicated articles, and editorials that contained the bulk of ethnographic information. In the 1950s and 1960s, the ethnographic monograph finally emerged as the privileged genre of Soviet ethnography; its defining goal was no longer to show how history inevitably advances toward an end but to emphasize the achievements of socialism and revolution. This goal was usually achieved by splitting the monograph across a temporal divide before and after the Revolution. Each part consisted of thematically distinct sections-economics, kinship, social life, and so on. In the first section, the life of northern indigenous peoples was frozen in an ahistorical archaic frame of timeless tradition. In the second part, readers were treated to ethnographic data in the form of materialist, thus objective, descriptions, statistics, and graphs. In this sense, the making of the ethnographic record in northern Kamchatka involved the fervor and ambitious zeal of Soviet administrators and political activists while building on the strength of socialist narratives and tropes.

This commentary is not intended to criticize Soviet scholarship for disingenuousness and misrepresentation, nor do I mean to show disrespect for scholarly positions against which my own readings and interpretations are set. The aspects of Soviet ethnography that rest on stark, imaginative dualisms as organizing features are aspects with which I have long struggled in this ethnography. The particular question I faced was how to incorporate a body of literature shaped by a plethora of assumptions that are partisan toward certain kinds of truth and sometimes do injustice to Koriak women and men. Yet the problem of totalizing or homogenizing styles is not intrinsic to Soviet ethnography: In recent years, anthropologists have criticized homogenous representations of "other" peoples, initiated careful textual analysis of past and present ethnographic writings, and criticized theoretically problematic assumptions such as the separation between analysts and objects of study. The point of my commentary is not to exchange one theory for another or to argue for a theoretically more nuanced Western stance: My point is to specify the intellectual challenges at hand.

The works that I find most promising for examining Koriak points of view show how cultural understandings and self-understandings are made through history and how, in turn, historical processes and meanings are created and shaped in the gap between divergent cultural positions (for example, Stoler 1985; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992). Such a perspective rejects the notion that culture is outside or parallel to history but is always and everywhere constructed in historical ways (Wolf 1982; Ginzburg 1983; Elias 1982). At the same time, such a view recognizes that history is shaped by and through the encounter of different people, value systems, and forms of knowledge. Culture cannot be placed in opposition to history; similarly, history cannot be understood as the linear, progressive motion of time but must be understood as the dynamic unfolding of particular sociopolitical circumstances and events in time. I am particularly concerned with the way in which the women and men I knew explained and commented on historical processes in the region and in the context of local dilemmas.

In this project, such a view prompts me to consider how the current social and political situation in Koriak communities at the northeastern shore has emerged from the complex processes of the past. The way in which Soviet ethnography produced highly self-conscious texts that bespeak a buoyant utopianism and an unswerving belief in the master narrative of progress has recently received much scrutiny and has stimulated a number of important responses. In North American and European scholarship, a frequent reaction has been to study issues of nationality and identity most commonly in relation to Soviet narratives of progress-with a heightened emphasis on political structures and state policies but with little emphasis on local struggles about power and meaning. Together, these critiques have set the challenge of retaining a focus on the transformative politics of the state while looking for the interstices where state power seems most uncertain.

In this book I use the term state to refer to those aspects of national and Soviet policies that were experienced as external yet hegemonic forms of government by most Koriak women and men; I thus stress the homogenous and imposing character of the state. Koriak relations to state power were rarely absent from local discussions on history and identity. I heard Koriaks describe state policies and administrative practices as projects to which they answered either by frustrating, fulfilling, or ignoring them. For example, local elders expressed their identity rarely by accusing or condemning state authority, but more often by emphasizing how they could continue cultural and ritual practices they considered important for their identity. Young people often emphasized their ties to state rule by pointing out that government policies had opened up social possibilities, such as schooling and professional training, to them. The social tensions created in this gap-in which historical identities were made and history was interpreted in cultural ways-is one feature I wish to explore in this book.

Gender

In this project, I join many other scholars who are interested in the question of how formations of gender differentiation are central to our understanding of local issues and everyday conditions of living. Conversations and local dilemmas in which people were enmeshed reminded me that Koriak women and men brought distinct perspectives and strategies of negotiation to structures of local and regional inequality and production of social meanings. Raising the question of gender at Kamchatka's northeastern shore calls attention to the complexity and specificity of social and cultural intersections. In this book, I argue for situating local commentaries-such as those of different Koriak women-within wider negotiations of power and inequality while recognizing local identity formations, specificities, and stakes.

The critique of anthropology as part of a male-centered discourse (for example, Trinh 1989; Strathern 1987) has by now become well known in Western scholarship and has provoked significant responses. Feminist anthropologists have criticized the un-self-conscious obliteration of women from ethnographic texts (for example, Leacock 1981; Reiter 1975), initiated careful ethnographic analyses in the study of gender and culture (for example, Silverblatt 1987; Bell 1983; Boddy 1989), and explored how social and economic historical developments have influenced the meanings and lived realities of women in various societies (for example, G. Clark 1994; Cole 1991). However, a number of these important works retain one of the most problematic features of feminist discourse: theoretical and analytic conventions that frequently represent women as disempowered and maltreated, as "innocent" victims of global economic and technological developments. Such responses turn our attention to the ways in which intellectual traditions are built on categories and assumptions that cast gender-in conjunction with intersecting arrangements of race (for example, hooks 1990; Mani 1987; John 1996) or colonial status (for example, Spivak 1985; Mohanty 1984)-as sites of exclusion. On the whole, they tend to study gender as a segregated category-as a stable and clearly definable category of social life-thus ignoring the connections between wider configurations of meaning and power that are formed in tandem with social asymmetries of, for example at Kamchatka's northeastern shore, inter- and intracommunity divisions, ethnic contrasts, and economic inequality.

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