book integrates perspectives on schooling, Evenk intellectuals, life histories, and the place of material culture and museums in the definition of Evenk identities. Throughout I engage in what Rethmann aptly calls “positioned storytelling” (2000: 2), in an attempt to allow the individual lives of those often overlooked in social science writing on the Russian Federation—women, children, and rural communities, among others—to become central. “Positioned storytelling” is a discursive practice frequently employed by anthropologists (for example, Abu-Lughod 1993; Constable 1997; Wolf 1992); as Rethmann explains, it “disrupts the possibility of reading for certainty and fixed meanings” (2001: 177). Applying this approach to ethnographic writing on post-Soviet contexts is one powerful way of countering a prevalent policy-oriented body of literature that tends to homogenize local experience, leaving out the divergence of views and the ways that people negotiate daily lives.
Contemporary ethnography on Siberia is increasingly turning its attention to gendered experience (Kerttula 2000; Balzer 1993; Chaussonnet 1988). Only Rethmann (2001), however, has made this the crux of her work. As in anthropological writing more broadly, the tendency in writing on Siberia has been toward homogenizing experience as if members of a community or ethnic group share perspectives and social roles irrespective of gender.14 I aim to demonstrate in different ways throughout this book how Evenk men and women encountered the Soviet state in distinctly gendered ways. Furthermore, I examine gendered experience as it was cross-cut by regional, educational, generational, and emerging class differences in the 1990s.
Here I seek to highlight the ways in which Soviet cultural practice continues as a signpost for many, and perhaps especially for Evenk women, who were both the particular focus of Soviet efforts to transform indigenous social practices, and in some ways the most significant beneficiaries of the social supports offered by the Soviet system. As explored throughout the following chapters, Evenk women’s experience of Soviet power structures was distinct from that of men; social mobility within Soviet structures was facilitated for indigenous women through affirmative action and emphasis on women’s labor within Soviet systems of knowledge. In contrast, Evenk men easily found employment herding and working close to the land, and while they were not discouraged from avenues of social mobility beginning with higher education, they tended to avoid these.
The following chapters seek to reflect on the differential ties indigenous Siberians had and continue to have to Soviet structures of power such as residential schooling. In this endeavor, however, this book aims to avoid homogenizing “Soviet power,” “the Evenki,” “the Russians,” or “indigenous Siberians.” For decades Evenk men’s and women’s lives were subject to an institution that was quintessentially Soviet and based on ideals of creating an egalitarian society, albeit through rigorous means of assimilation. In paying attention to the experiences of Evenk individuals, we can learn how people negotiate power and interpret and reframe ideologies in their lives.
Schooling, False Consciousness, and Resistance
In my first trip to the Evenk District, in the summer of 1992, the Soviet Union had recently given way (in December 1991) to the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose consortium of many of the former republics belonging to the Soviet Union, and the Evenk District was now part of the Russian Federation. I spent the summer traveling to various reindeer herding brigades and villages in the Evenk District, meeting with people and listening to them as they began to make sense of the possibilities for political change and restructuring of economic and social life. The legacy of residential schools was one topic widely discussed. In this time of optimism and idealism, some Evenki thought that the schools should be shut down and students should be educated at home. One scholar suggested creating new practices of child socialization rooted in “traditional” family forms (Popov 1993).15 Others considered returning to the early Soviet practice of a roaming teacher who would visit reindeer herding brigades and small villages periodically; this would allow children to live in the taiga while not missing out on formal education so essential for social mobility (Shebalin 1990: 78).
By 1993, when I returned to conduct long-term fieldwork in the Evenk District, talk of alternatives to the residential school and other radical transformations in the local relationships to the federal structure had diminished. Federal financing for education was severely curtailed, and there was no money for fundamental reorganization. Money that did reach the regions was not going to be released by regional administrations and departments of education for any experimental projects. What could have been a radical departure from Soviet systems of schooling for indigenous peoples was stymied by bureaucratic channels. As examined in the chapters that follow, however, in the mid- to late 1990s, Evenki began renegotiating a relationship to the nation-state and turned to transforming existing structures such as the residential school to meet their needs.
Around the world, schooling has served as a critical element in state-building and molding citizens (Reed-Danahay 1996; Stambach 1996; Chatty 1996).16 Indigenous peoples in particular have been subjected to mass education as a key instrument of colonial domination and nation-state consolidation. In North America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, a system of state-run boarding schools operated from the 1920s until at least the 1970s and sometimes the 1980s; numerous accounts exist detailing the pain of detachment from families and the trials of forced assimilation (Simon 1990; Haig-Brown 1991; Lomawaima 1994; Child 1998; Kelm 1996). In the case of western and southern Africa, a widespread system of boarding schools continues to operate as the legacy of colonial pedagogy is widely absorbed and transformed in the context of post-colonial administration (Stambach 1996; Bledsoe 1992). In the Middle East, and specifically Oman, compulsory schooling for many groups that were nomadic until recent decades only became established in the 1970s as oil profits expanded and the government sought to link nomadic populations into the world economy (Chatty 1996). Across the world, however, not only governments are involved in designing schooling. Indigenous groups are also becoming involved in designing systems of education to meet the needs of their communities and to replace old models of education that were tools for state hegemony (Battiste 1999; Regnier 1999; Thies 1987; Cojtí Cuxil 1996).
In the extensive literature on the anthropology of schooling, the portion of work addressing dynamics of power and concepts of difference within school settings is especially instructive in thinking about residential schooling in central Siberia (see Giroux 1981; Ogbu 1991; Gibson 1988; Wax et al. 1989). The discussion about types of consciousness, resistance to institutional structures, and the social reproduction of educational behaviors is particularly relevant. For instance, Ogbu’s work (1991) provides a compelling critique of the idea that educational “failures” of children in school contexts can be viewed as the result of a deficit in knowledge about the system, cultural capital, or language use. Ogbu writes about the types of cultural difference at stake in schooling and how cultural difference, along with active strategies, determines educational success.17 In this way, Ogbu’s work suggests that focusing attention on schooling as an instrument of the state also requires us to pay attention to the role cultural difference plays in the strategies families employ for interacting with school institutions.
In contrast to Ogbu’s focus on cultural difference and active family strategies, Willis’s work (1977) emphasizes how class structures are reproduced in schooling. Willis’s study, focusing on working-class boys in a British school, dissects the broad social relations of power maintained by and reproduced in school settings. While this ethnography of schooling remains unparalleled in its intricate detail of the social reproduction of class among young men, it denies the dynamism of cultural practices and appears deterministic. From Willis’s perspective, schooling is an instrument of dominant class sensibilities and the “false consciousness” of the “lads” prevents them from veering from the preordained confines of class.
This central concern in educational anthropology about the degree of agency people have in educational settings and in transforming their life worlds more broadly is at the crux of this book as well. The concept of “false consciousness” sits uneasily in a context in which the state is in crisis and people are engaged in rethinking structures of state power, such as schooling. While people do not
