and became the property of the state, entirely supervised by government-appointed specialists; this contrasted to the former kolkhozy, where there was minimal direction from the state.23 The 1960s resettlement policy, repeated in the 1970s and 1980s in some regions of Siberia, displaced Evenki from traditional areas of herding, hunting, and fishing. It also led to a loss of skilled and administrative positions that Evenki had held in the small enclaves because newcomers occupied many of these jobs in the consolidated towns.24 While in 1932 Evenki comprised 81.9 percent of the Evenk District population, by the late 1990s they comprised just under 15 percent of the population.25 The influx of newcomers into the Evenk District followed a trajectory similar to that in other regions of Siberia (Grant 1995a: 120–30; Bogoslovskaia 1993; Habeck 1997).
Identities, Education, and the Politics of Language
The policies noted above led to radical shifts in Evenk social organization and cultural practices from the 1920s to 1990s. A particularly strong reminder of this legacy is the decreasing number of Evenk language speakers at the onset of the twenty-first century. Many Evenk intellectuals argue that language is critical to the revitalization of Evenk cultural knowledge (Monakhova 1999: 44). Recent statistics indicate, however, that today knowledge of Evenk language is not a primary signifier of Evenk identity. For instance, according to the 1989 Soviet census, of the 29,901 people who recognized themselves as Evenki, only 9,075 said they considered Evenk as their native language (Gos. kom. RSFSR po stat. 1991: 141). In the mid-1990s in Tura, it was extremely rare for Evenki under thirty-five to speak Evenk fluently. As inmigration from outlying villages intensified, however, this situation shifted somewhat in the late 1990s.26 Aside from language, there is a wide range of factors that continues to shape Evenk identities. The line between “Russian” and “Evenk,” for instance, is delineated in part as a strategy for pursuing resources available to members of each group. In everyday life, however, there are myriad ways in which these spheres are fused and intertwined, and language is one of these.
As Humphrey notes in her insightful work on ethnic identity and “chat” among the Buriat (1994b), everyday speech reflects borrowings between spheres; this is certainly the case with Russian and Evenk language usage. The Soviet era especially left its imprint in terms of technical and bureaucratic vocabulary borrowed from Russian. For example, in the Evenk sentence “Sobraniela upakt sagdyl kolkhoznikil eimeicheityn” (“All the adult kolkhoz members came to the meeting” or “Na sobranie prishli vse vzroslye kolkhozniki” in Russian), the word for “kolkhoz members” would be expressed in Evenk using a Russian root kolkhoznik, with an Evenk suffix, -il. There is also borrowing in the other direction, from Evenk into Russian, and this is most common for terms specifically associated with traditional Evenk subsistence practices or clothing. For instance, the Evenk word for tall boots sewn out of reindeer hide and sinew, untal, is used by Russian speakers and supplemented with Russian suffixes to produce, for example, unty.27 These small, but illustrative linguistic examples reflect the widespread cultural hybridity that continues in many forms in the North.
While it did not necessarily preclude affiliation with a range of identities, knowledge of Evenk language was a definite indicator of Evenk identity in the 1990s; it was quite unusual for those without at least one Evenk parent to take an interest in Evenk language.28 While those who knew Evenk were viewed as “true” (nastoiashchie) Evenki, many younger Evenki considered themselves to be Evenki but did not know the language. As discussed in Chapter 2, while some households had a type of primordial perspective on their alliance with either Russian or Evenk spheres of symbolic capital, many had complex kinship and social ties rooting them in both spheres. The Evenki in Tura employed a sort of “prospiospect,” to borrow a phrase from Ward Goodenough (see Wolcott 1989), a stance of shifting identities in the context of multiple influences.29 Each person had a prospiospect that was not just “Evenk” or “Russian” but an amalgamation of a range of experience. Particularly in instances of social mobility, such as education, individuals drew on a sense of identity as fluid and as something that could be transformed for instrumental purposes.
Given that possibilities for pursuing education were expanded if one was considered “indigenous,” in the realm of education identities tended to be especially fluid. In the 1990s entitlements for “indigenous peoples” (korennye narody) seeking higher education continued to exist at a number of levels. While places in Russia’s elite institutions—the Moscow State University, the Peoples’ Friendship University of the Russian Federation, and the Leningrad State University—were the most sought after, there were slots reserved in regional institutions as well.30 Slots were generally reserved for a set number of students from specific administrative areas, including the Evenk District, and were available for students majoring in humanities and increasingly in social sciences and medicine.
In 1993 the elastic nature of identities in the Evenk District was underscored when students in Tura were applying for university. In the first instance, a young woman, usually self-identifying as Russian, was accepted to study at a major university in Moscow at the expense of the Russian government. Given that the Russian government allotted the Evenk District five slots in Moscow universities for “peoples of the North” (that is, indigenous Siberians), this hopeful student successfully emphasized her previously downplayed Evenk heritage—her grandmother was “pure” (chistaia) Evenki and her mother considered herself one-half Evenki. Although neither the student nor her mother spoke Evenk, they mobilized this aspect of their multidimensional identities to secure educational opportunity. In a second instance, a member of one of the few remaining “German” households, in which both parents were of German descent, was admitted to study in a university in Moscow in one of the slots reserved for peoples of the North.
Typically degrees of authentic ethnic identity were not the deciding factor in granting opportunities for higher education. The real focus was on the likelihood that the young people who were given this opportunity would return to these regions that suffered from the loss of highly trained newcomers. Those considered sufficiently local, not newcomers that is, became “peoples of the North” for the purposes of sending students for academic training that could later result in fortifying local professional ranks. Thus regional administrations selecting students for scholarships chose to reinterpret central government affirmative action policies to suit local needs.
In the cases where Evenk families moved out of the district, usually to the southern city of Krasnoiarsk, students would often return to the Evenk District to take qualifying exams for the university. Sometimes the students had never attended elementary or high school in the district but would arrive for the exams in early summer. By taking entrance exams in the Evenk District as “peoples of the North,” students were automatically considered for the reserved slots in the institutions of higher learning. They could take the exams in the southern cities, their primary residences, but then they would not be able to vie for the reserved slots. Only in rare cases did students choose to study in disciplines or institutions in which there were no special allotments for indigenous Siberians.
What it means to be Evenki has transformed significantly over the past fifty years as Evenki have come under the purview of the state and now find themselves in a post-Soviet state with new configurations of power. Evenk identities have not just been defined, however, in a top-down manner; Evenki have also been active participants in negotiating situational identities. In addition to these renegotiations around ethnic identity, in the Soviet and post-Soviet era other aspects of identity have also been significant. As the next section discusses, Soviet identity was “performed” in contexts like the House of Culture. For many, the House of Culture was a site embodying Soviet cultural practice, and in the 1990s it was also the site for government-sponsored cultural revitalization programs and a meeting place for the new religious organizations taking root in Tura.
The House of Culture and Ritual Life Reassessed
State-sponsored “cultural work”
