di Leonardo 1993). These analyses highlight the multiple social forces such as economic position, racial categories, gender, and geography that influence identities, while recognizing the role collective and individual resistance can play in the process of identity formation. Social identities are rarely firmly bounded and more frequently exist in flux, with blurred bounds reflecting hybridity and global cultural transformations (see Bhabha 1994; Appadurai 1996; Ong 1999). From this perspective, identities are not just situational and a matter of “choice” for an individual (see Worsley 1984: 246). Identities are part of larger processes, but they are not just subject to these megaprocesses with humans playing little or no active part.
This approach to thinking about how identities take shape is informed by the important work on post-colonial concepts of nation and power. Much of this work examines how a sense of “nation” is created in contexts in which the frameworks of colonial eras continue to operate in one way or another (see Chatterjee 1993; Mamdani 1996). This work is strongly influenced by “subaltern studies,” a direction in scholarship that has particularly focused on South Asia and sought to write historiography from the perspective of those who have been colonized. Perhaps because of its emphasis on critiquing structural aspects of colonial legacies, this influential school of thought has tended to exclude considerations of the disparate experiences of individuals caught up in nation-building.3 The emphasis on close examinations of groups and a type of sociological homogenizing, with little attention to the interpretations and narratives of individuals who comprise these groups, points to an alternative approach that can be taken to the study of power.
Recent work suggests that how transformations of power are experienced, including during processes of nation-building and “modernity,” depends very much on subject position (Rofel 1999; Lancaster 1988; Abelmann 1997). This subject position is constituted through a range of factors such as ethnicity, generation, class affiliation, profession, and gender, and these factors interweave in various ways to influence how people interpret histories and how they depict their lives. In presenting a discussion of both contemporary designations of identity and the historical roots of Evenk identities, the following sections create frameworks for understanding historical consciousness of individual Evenki who together are reconfiguring what it means to be part of this community.
Local, Newcomer, and Native
Like three-quarters of indigenous Siberians in Russia, the indigenous Siberian population in the Evenk District has been concentrated in rural areas until quite recently (Fondahl 1998: 83; Savoskul 1971). As government support for state sable and fox farms lagged beginning in 1993, the primary means for making a living in this area disappeared. The desperate material circumstances in rural areas resulted in substantial migration to regional centers. Small regional centers such as Tura continued, however, to be populated predominantly by Russians and Ukrainians, as well as a small number of refugees, like those from the civil war in Tadzhikistan.
Figure 2. The Udygir family in an Evenk District village. Photo by the author, 1998.
Over the 1990s, this web of people in the Evenk District made up a population ranging from 20,000 to 26,000 inhabitants in an area more than twice the size of California (see Chapter 2 for a discussion of the drop in population over the 1990s). The population included about 4,000 Evenki and 1,000 other indigenous Siberians such as Sakha, a group with its own neighboring titular district.4 In 1999 the Evenk District capital town of Tura had a population of about 6,000 people, of whom about 900 identified as Evenki. As discussed below, however, this was a rapidly changing population. While Tura was not very large, by the late 1990s it had nearly one-third of the total Evenk District population, with a wide range of designations of identities shaped by migration histories, economic standing, and political affiliations.
Terms referring specifically to indigenous Siberians ranged from “aboriginal” (aborigen) to “native”/“indigenous” (korennoi) to “Tungus” (tungus) to more derogatory terms used by both outsiders and Evenki themselves (in self-deprecating moments), such as “dark/dense” (temnyi). Evenki could be included in other categories as well. Each term carried different types of significance depending on context. For instance, few townspeople used the word “aboriginal” in referring to Evenk collective interests unless they were actively involved in indigenous rights politics; this term tended to mark the speaker as engaged with international discourse and having affiliations reaching beyond the town or region. A more common collective term referring to Evenki was “native” (korennoi); this term was a familiar one for most people because it was widely used in Soviet parlance. In official communication and in popular speech, the terms “aboriginal” and “native” could both be used narrowly to indicate just the Evenk population or more broadly to include the Sakha or Kety, the other indigenous groups concentrated in the area.5 For instance, in reporting the levels of literacy in the community, the number of children entering preschool, or other numerical facts, the given source would invariably distinguish between the population as a whole and the numbers for the native population.
Among the Evenki in Tura, there are distinctions based on geography and social status. In particular the Katanga Evenki are recognized as having roots outside the Evenk District. The Katanga Evenki arrived from the Katanga region, an area bordering the southeastern present-day Evenk District and the Sakha Republic—several hundred kilometers down the Nizhniaia Tunguska River—in order to assist in administering the fledgling Soviet town in the early 1930s. As the result of the Katanga Evenki’s history of sedentarization and colonial contact, which extended at least fifty years earlier than that of the Illimpei Evenki in the region of Tura, in 1917 the Katanga region already had a small cadre of literate Evenki (Sirina 1995). Historical ties of close affiliation between Katanga Evenki and Soviet structures of power resonate in a number of ways throughout this book, but particularly in women’s narratives in Chapters 3 and 4.
There are also distinctions between Baikit and Illimpei Evenki. In the 1920s when Soviet linguists were creating writing systems for a number of indigenous Siberians, they often chose between several dialects of a language to designate which one would become the official dialect for adoption in textbooks and other written materials.6 In creating an alphabet for the Evenki in the Evenk District, linguists chose the Baikit dialect, a dialect of Evenk historically spoken by Evenki from the southern area of the Evenk District, south of the Podkamennaia River in the Baikit region (Boitseva 1971: 146; Nedjalkov 1997). This has had long-lasting effects in terms of social stratification among Evenki in the Evenk District because those with the more southern, Baikit, “Sha-type” dialect were able to study the language in their own dialect, while those with the northern, Illimpei, “Kha-type” dialect could not. In favoring the Baikit dialect, Soviet linguists created an internal hierarchy of dialects among Evenki. In the late 1990s, Evenk intellectuals in Tura frequently discussed the problem of “literary” Evenk being considered more prestigious than the local dialect found in the Illimpei region surrounding Tura (Pikunova 1999).
Throughout the 1990s the term “Russian” (russkii) was used colloquially by both Evenki and others to refer to non-indigenous Siberians—whether Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, or Estonian—who were considered sufficiently European in origin. Furthermore, to be “Russian” indicated that one belonged to a social category associated with patterns of privilege; to be Russian was not to belong to the indigenous community. Within the category of Russian, a number of distinctions were also made, depending on multiple factors. For example, those Russians whose ancestors had lived for several generations in Siberia could also be referred to as “Siberians,” sibiriaki; historically sibiriaki are known for an “attitude of tolerance” (Czaplicka 1926: 490–92). In contrast, the term “newcomers” (priezzhii) was used to refer to those Russians who were induced by high pay and benefits to
