Oegir, Ewnk poet. Paths leading to the Spring: Poems
I was first drawn into the lives of Evenki in the summer of 1992, when I arrived in Tura after a journey of nearly three days by train into central Siberia, from Moscow to Krasnoiarsk, followed by a two-hour flight to Tura. On the flight north, I was fortunate to be accompanied by a local storyteller and teacher who had been introduced to me while she was visiting her sister back in Moscow, four time zones away. As we exited the plane, I followed her instructions to throw a coin into the first body of water we encountered, a stream. This gesture “for the spirits” (dukham) would ensure that I was welcomed in Evenkiia, as people living there commonly refer to the Evenk District. After just a few days in the capital of Tura, I had barely oriented myself when I was whisked off in an entourage of young men and women who were flying by helicopter to the town of Baikit.1 Their folk dance troupe, Osiktakan (“Stars”), was scheduled to perform as the highlight of the biannual Evenk folk festival, Evenkiiskie Zori (Evenkiiskie Dawns).
When we arrived in Baikit and piled out of the massive orange and blue helicopter, the festivities began. There were several reindeer tethered near the makeshift outdoor stage, and children took turns sitting on these. It turned out these reindeer had been flown in from a nearby herding brigade that I was to visit in the coming weeks. Several women set up tables to display and sell their handiwork—an array of sable hats, wolverine slippers, and fine reindeer-skin boots with beadwork edging. The festival was orchestrated by the director of the local House of Culture, an institution that played an important role in the social lives of many Soviet citizens, but especially those living in rural areas. After three days of festivities, we waited at the edge of town for our helicopter home to Tura and listened to Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” blaring from the speakers into the recently outfitted discotheque. On the flight home, the head of the Evenk Department of Culture praised the members of Osiktakan for their part in making the festival a success.
My research in this region coincided with a wide effort to reaffirm Evenk identity and to simultaneously make sense of additional components of identities—Soviet, Siberian, rossiianin [citizen of Russia], Russian, aboriginal and others—for individuals, households, and even folk dance troupes. From my very first days in Evenkiia, I became aware that Evenk identity was not something fixed or understood singularly by the array of people calling themselves Evenki. I also learned that this entity of “Evenk identity” was something very much contested and variously mobilized in the post-Soviet setting. In this chapter I consider broad issues of identity both historically and in the contemporary period in order to explore some of the themes that are invoked as Evenki reimagine what the contours of their community will be in the post-Soviet era. The first section focuses on theoretical reflections on “identity” and “ethnic identity.” In the second section, I consider the origins of the Evenki as a group and their history of migration to what is today the Evenk District. In the final section, I consider some of the ways identities were being reconfigured in the Evenk District in the 1990s as some Evenki sought to guarantee educational opportunity or looked to new or rejuvenated ritual practices.
Identities in Theory and Practice
The complexity of allegiances that any individual or even household could have in Tura in the 1990s is illustrated in the hybridity of cultural practices reflected in the Evenk folk festival in Baikit described in the opening pages of this chapter. Despite these elements of hybridity in contemporary Evenk social practices, indigenous intellectuals often consider identity as something fixed or simply rooted in the past. Considering identity as fluid and in constant negotiation is not a politically strategic stand for groups seeking to lay claim to contested resources or power in various forms. For instance, like Evenk intellectuals, Maya intellectuals are struggling to gain control over the representation of their daily lives and history, and they also invoke an essentialist analytic style in their discourse (Fischer and McKenna Brown 1996: 3). These efforts on the part of indigenous intellectuals are in striking contrast to the predominant contemporary approach among social scientists thinking about issues of identity. Siberian studies has encountered a tension similar to that in Maya studies, where the trend for “foreign” academics has been to avoid essentializing identities, and to instead emphasize multivocality and the various and shifting dynamics of power over time (Anderson 2000; Bloch 2001; Grant 1995a; Rethmann 2001).2
While popular conceptions of identity sometimes homogenize and freeze it as an unchanging element, contemporary social science theories tend to concur that identity is more accurately theorized as ever-changing. In Comaroff and Comaroff’s terms, identity is “both a set of relations and a mode of consciousness” (1992: 54). This concept of identity combines an understanding of how large-scale historical processes of power and situational perspectives mold identities, but it is certainly not the only view of how identity works.
The anthropological research into the formation of identity, and particularly ethnicity, has been widespread since the 1960s (see Eriksen 1993; R. Cohen 1978). Scholars have viewed ethnicity in a range of ways, but there have been two dominant directions of thought: the primordialist and the instrumentalist. Primordialist theorists emphasize the idea of ethnic categories as rooted in a common past or shared heritage and as remaining intact despite cultural contacts (Geertz 1973; Gurvich 1980; Gumilev 1990). While this approach to ethnicity has been sharply criticized by many (see R. Cohen 1978), understanding primordialist concepts of ethnicity can potentially provide important means of understanding consciousness and what one scholar calls the “nature of the stuff on which groups feed” (Eriksen 1993: 55). This is especially the case for indigenous groups worldwide that are increasingly calling upon primordialist theories of identity as they compete with multinational interests over scarce resources (Conklin 1997; Fischer and McKenna Brown 1996).
In contrast to the primordialist approach, the instrumentalist approach, with Abner Cohen (1974) and Fredrik Barth (1969) at the forefront, emphasizes the political aims served by and justifying the maintenance of ethnicity. While Barth focuses on ethnic boundaries and considers them as categorical ascriptions that determine a “most general identity” (1969: 13) and Cohen focuses on ethnic identity as a political tool for securing resources (1974), they both center their analyses on the synchronic nature of ethnic identity. The broader historical and hegemonic processes influencing identity are not central to their discussions.
While thinking of ethnicity as a political tool is particularly useful in situations of “social change” such as the Evenki are experiencing, it is important to understand how and why ethnic identity gets mobilized and reproduced. If one assumes that “ethnicity” is not a primordial category, then how does one explain how it remains salient to a group of people and situationally more or less pertinent in times of social change? As illustrated in the setting of the Evenk folk festival described above, this is a critical question.
Many anthropologists today agree that it is important to avoid an either/or approach to ethnic identity because this disregards important factors potentially influencing the formation of identities (see Bentley 1981). Some research has moved away from an either/or way of thinking about ethnicity and instead looks to situational explanations (see Okamura 1981). By adopting this approach instead of just instrumentalist or primordialist explanations for ethnic identity, research is less restricted by a preconceived model of how ethnicity operates. Adopting a situational perspective can also result, however, in too little attention to the sociostructural aspects of identity. Keyes (1981: 10), for instance, emphasizes the multiple sources for identities and notes that ethnic identity becomes a personal identity only after an individual takes it up from a “public display” or “traffic in symbols.”
A recent trend in scholarship related to ethnicity emphasizes that ethnicity is just one of the factors feeding into the formation of identities. Moving from studying ethnicity to studying identity allows for the examination of the ambiguities of identity; the world is not accurately reflected by attempting to divide fixed groups by the rigid boundaries that are often raised in the study of ethnicity. Several authors instead root their analyses of identity in both the concrete historical
