contacts, and still others provided me with important newspaper clippings, statistics, and citations.
My thinking about this project has benefited from discussions with colleagues, students, family, and friends. In particular, Nina Diamond, Jackie Siapno, and Mrinalini Saran applied their expertise to improve the arguments and readability of the manuscript. Samya Burney provided me with much-needed perspective at a time when the project was faltering, and Yael Lavi and Gideon Shelach prompted me early on to keep a broad readership for my work in mind. Julie Cruikshank’s moral support was important in the final stages. Sheryl Clark contributed her enthusiasm for anthropological inquiry as she assisted with the preparation of the index.
Milind Kandlikar has been an intellectual and spiritual anchor over the years that this project has been part of our lives. His multiple readings of the text moved the project along at several critical junctures, and in the final weeks of the manuscript’s preparation he made sure that Mira’s early months of life were not overwhelmed by the project. Milind’s joie de vive and commitment to nurturing ties with friends and family have been a sustaining force. My parents, John Bloch and Rebecca Sheppard, live their lives deeply engaged with issues of social justice and education—the seeds they planted early on were responsible for this book in no small measure. I am also grateful to Rebecca for proofreading the manuscript in its very final stages. The adventurous spirit of my mother, Sue Dwelle, possessed me to take on this project, while the years we shared living in a Vermont commune instilled in me an interest in alternative social systems.
It is hard to imagine that this project could have come to its completion without the generous support of the many people named above. As the author of these pages, however, I carry the sole responsibility for the ultimate form and content of the book.
Figure 1. Russian Federation with Evenk Autonomous District inset. Created by Bridget Thomas, Department of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History.
Introduction
Fieldwork, Socialism in Crisis, and Identities in the Making
For years political concerns covered up the real history of the people of our country. While it was proclaimed that the history of the USSR was the same as the history of the people, in fact this official history did not represent the people’s history. Numerically small ethnic groups especially suffered in this respect. It is not surprising that we do not know our history; customs and traditions are being forgotten, and knowledge of material and spiritual culture is disappearing. Our children are losing a sense of ethnic identity; they do not know the real value of their heritage and culture.
—From the preface to Evenk Ethnography Program (Shchapeva 1994: 3)
I arrived to carry out long-term research in the town of Tura in fall 1993, several days following President Yeltsin’s decree to disband the Russian Parliament. Following my flights from North America to Moscow and then to Krasnoiarsk, the central Siberian city about 300 miles south of Tura, I sat with friends and watched the live CNN broadcast of the armed crisis back in Moscow. The predominantly Communist members of Parliament refused to abide by the unconstitutional decree to disband Parliament, and in the confrontation that ensued Yeltsin’s forces eventually took the building by siege (Khronika smutnogo vremeni 1993). At the time I did not fully appreciate how the political standoff, which continued to unfold and be televised nationwide in the days following as I began my fieldwork, affected my project. In part, President Clinton’s support for Yeltsin’s violent actions jeopardized my research because Communists in Tura were already seething about U.S. “interventionist” tactics when I arrived in the town. When I accepted a gracious offer to stay in the temporarily vacant apartment belonging to the representative from the Evenk District, I did not realize how much this man was disliked by many anti-Communists and reformers. Only after living in this apartment for nearly a month did I learn that this representative to the People’s Congress of the Russian Federation was one of the 100 representatives who barricaded themselves inside the Parliament building for days as Yeltsin’s anti-Communist supporters bombarded the building with gunfire.
My fieldwork seemed to be off to an uneasy start, but then this fit with the expected initial phase of ethnographic projects, reified in accounts of fieldwork as a time for “gaining rapport.” As many authors have described, anthropological fieldwork is practically defined by a requisite period of gaining the trust of consultants (Kligman 1988: 20; Scheper-Hughes 1979: 11). Nita Kumar has written, “Fieldwork is by its very nature an ambitious, optimistic, very personal effort to woo over indifferent strangers” (1992: 2). Such descriptions of the process of “gaining rapport” appear as a common thread in fieldwork accounts, and ethnographers are increasingly dedicating a portion of their work to considering how their presence in communities intersects with shifting balances of power, heightened social inequalities, and allegiances to be made and, sometimes, lost.
I initiated my research in Tura with a keen interest in the role of education, particularly residential schooling, in defining relationships between indigenous people and the Soviet state. This topic soon came to articulate with broader issues of identity because a major preoccupation of the community revolved around competing ideas about Evenk identities and the future relationship of the state to “small peoples of the North” (malochislennye narody Severa). This Soviet government designation encompassed those indigenous groups considered to be numerically “small,” with the implied comparison being to the “large” ethnic groups of Russians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, and others living in the former Soviet Union.1 Community members frequently discussed the future of government affirmative action policies toward “small peoples of the North.” An equally prevalent topic of debate among Evenki revolved around ways to ensure their rights, including access to land for subsistence practices, native language education, and benefits from the privatization of natural resources in the region. The contemporary contest over Evenk identities was tightly related to the rapidly shifting political-economic context in the community. Overall, my research focus on Evenk identities resonated with those with whom I spent hours in conversation, and for those who ultimately had control over my access to archives, statistics, and travel.
As a citizen of the United States, or Amerikanka as I was usually referred to, I was not quickly absorbed into the everyday life of Tura. These were the early days of satellite broadcasts of U.S. media, and this incessantly reminded my consultants of the relative wealth and opportunity from which I had only temporarily disengaged. As Roger Lancaster reflects in his work on Nicaragua (1988: 6), given the legacy of anthropology as a discipline often historically allied with government surveillance, it is not surprising that those who become its subjects of study find the projects to be suspect. Furthermore, given my origins as a citizen of the country in most direct opposition to the Soviet Union in the tug-of-war known as the Cold War, it was inevitable that I was perceived as closely related to this global power struggle.
Images of the “West” and Dreams of Consumption
“Gaining rapport” as a North American doing research in a central Siberian town in the 1990s was complicated by the fresh history of the Cold War, which invoked a binary view of geopolitics, with Soviet culture posed in opposition to all things viewed as “Western.”2 After more than sixty years of official open antagonism toward the “West” (zapad) and its “decadent bourgeois culture,” by the late 1980s, U.S. popular culture was being widely rebroadcast and reimagined throughout Russia.3 In the 1990s in the Evenk District capital of Tura, youth were especially smitten with Western media images and market glitz, but people of all ages and backgrounds eagerly anticipated weekly television shows such as Santa Barbara, MTV, and Dallas, as well as a Mexican serial The Rich Also Cry, depicting the tribulations of contemporary Mexican aristocrats. Turintsy, residents of Tura, often spoke in terms of the relative poverty surrounding them in comparison to what they perceived
