mere cogs of preordained social systems. Tsianina Lomawaima (1994) makes a similar point about agency in her work with Lakota Sioux oral histories focused on residential schooling. She argues that while residential schooling for her consultants was generally a painful period when they were separated for extended periods from family and friends and subjected to the disciplinary and civilizing forces of missionary schools, these students were not merely oppressed. Lomawaima shows how these experiences did not preclude a range of effective resistances to the system; these efforts ranged from girls’ avoiding wearing the bloomers required by the school dress code to some students running away from the schools. Furthermore, Lomawaima demonstrates that there was a range of interpretations of the system, with some students who excelled in academics and sports recalling their time in the schools fondly. Lomawaima does not invoke “false consciousness” to explain this range of experience but instead concludes that the system imposed its grip unevenly, with some people in positions to accommodate it consciously or even resist it, while others were subsumed and transformed by it. In particular, Lomawaima suggests that girls in the residential schools were “domesticated,” while boys did not fall as severely under the purview of the institution.
Parallel to Lomawaima’s findings, the experience of indigenous Siberians suggests that the degree of interaction with the institution of the residential school is gendered. In the case of indigenous Siberians, it is widely recognized that girls tend toward success in secondary education while boys have more difficulty succeeding. For the Evenki, this pattern appears to be related to the ways in which the state transformed subsistence practices and instituted residential schooling. As is discussed further in Chapter 3, in the Soviet era women’s labor in reindeer herding was devalued while men’s remained more constant. The Soviet state’s ideology of emancipation of women, inspired by Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1972), attached social value to women as wage laborers employed outside the household; and in the context of the Evenk District, this Eurocentric valuation significantly shaped the gendered contours of Soviet structures of power. In the 1990s, girls were expected to complete twelve grades and go on for higher education, while it was socially acceptable, and even respectable for boys to leave school after grade nine and return to villages and herding. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, these collectives of herders were generally comprised of family members, but there was only one paid position for a woman as the “tentworker” in charge of domestic responsibilities; in effect the state’s reorganization of herding that was established in the Soviet period edged women out of the taiga.
Much of the literature on the anthropology of education focuses on the school contexts and glosses over community, and particularly family interactions with schools. As Reed-Danahay (1996: 37) writes, school ethnography tends to “[work] either exclusively within the school or [look] from the school outward.” This book seeks to depict men and women’s relationship to schooling as an instrument of the state. In the context of post-Soviet Siberia, the reach of the state is not viewed in the same way, however, that it is in Reed-Danahay’s analysis set in rural France. In the 1990s, more often the state was chastised for its lack of involvement than for its overinvolvement in Evenk lives. A simple equation of power and resistance to it, even in Foucault’s “mobile and transitory” forms (1990: 96) cannot describe the relationship when, as discussed further in Chapter 5, there is a prevalent sense of the state abdicating responsibility, including for funding schooling.
The following chapters seek to provide a portrait of power dynamics in a Siberian community in the 1990s and the myriad ways that people were renegotiating relationships with the state and within their communities with the transformation of the former Soviet Union. Drawing on these sources, I do not seek to create an exact representation of an enclosed community but instead to provide a dynamic portrait of a community with internal contradictions, individuals with a range of allegiances, and alliances in transformation. Evenki themselves have recently written their own versions of contemporary life and local history (Amosov 1998; Monakhova 1999; Shchapeva 1994), and prominent Evenk author Alitet Nemtushkin has depicted Evenk lives in literature for decades.18 While I have chosen to write about identities in flux, this is just one of many ethnographies that could have been written based on the complex and vibrant lives of central Siberian Evenki in the 1990s.
Chapter 1 carries the reader through analyses of “identity” as a concept and the ways Evenk identities have taken shape historically. Chapter 2 moves to an overview of Tura as a central Siberian town crosscut by a range of social divisions, particularly illustrated through the portraits of five households. Evenk women’s narratives on residential schooling form the crux of Chapter 3, laying the foundation for understanding the way in which Soviet collective culture has informed Evenk identities and resulted in distinct understandings of power among women. In this chapter, I also examine dynamics of power and resistance through the prism of residential schooling accounts. Chapter 4 builds around the narratives of young Evenk women who recently completed their education in the residential school. This chapter considers how generational differences are significant in discussing relationships to the residential school and how the context of emerging market relations influences the place of residential schooling in women’s lives. Chapters 5 and 6 shift to the residential school itself, with Chapter 5 focusing on daily life in the school and Chapter 6 shifting to Evenk intellectuals’ efforts to transform the institution. Chapter 7 looks toward another important institution in the landscape of Soviet and post-Soviet social life, the museum, to reflect on intergenerational tensions around the way material culture is invoked to represent Evenk identities. The last and concluding chapter revisits ideas about Soviet and post-Soviet collective identities and about shifting hierarchies of power in this central Siberian town.
Chapter 1
Central Peripheries and Peripheral Centers: Evenki Crafting Identities over Time
| Rossiia | Russia |
| … | … |
| Κ grudi ty nas, Rossiia, prizhimala, | Russia, you held us tight to your breast, |
| Kogda zloi dukh vsiu zemliu szhech’ khotel. | When an evil spirit wanted to scorch the land, |
| I ot bedy soboiu prikryvala. | You shielded us yourself. |
| Takov uzh, vidno, materi udel. | Such was the motherland’s destiny. |
| Zemlia moia! | My homeland! |
| Prizhmus’ k tebe shchekoiu. | I press my cheek to yours. |
| Ia zdravitsu tebe provozglashu. | I call you my friend. |
| Ia—rossiianin! | I—am a rossiianin! |
| Zvanie takoe, | A title that |
| Kak vse ν Rossii, gordo ia noshu. | Like all in Russia, I proudly answer to. |
