or seventeen years old in Tura. Women were overwhelmingly responsible for childcare, caring for the sick, hauling household water, and shopping for food. The divergence in life courses was not missed by even young girls, who upon first meeting me would invariably ask why I was not married and why I did not have any children.
Like Jean Briggs, who found herself in a daughter role in her fieldwork among the Inuit (1970), as a young woman I was expected by older men and women to conduct myself with what they viewed as proper comportment. The idea of “proper” included both a “feminine” physical appearance—that is, dresses or skirts and make-up—and behaving in culturally appropriate gendered ways, including graciously accepting when men opened doors or insisted on carrying parcels. Moreover, as a young woman with little status from a gendered perspective, my interactions with high status segments of the population, both Evenki and Russians, were less than comfortable because they sometimes demanded what seemed to me to be inordinate amounts of deference. This certainly influenced my decision to interact more with middle and lower status people. In this way practice and theory merged in influencing the direction of my research.
In sharp contrast to the suspicion I sometimes encountered from Communists with firm convictions, most Turintsy welcomed me and were eager to assist me in carrying out my project. As a foreigner I was also assisted by a range of kind Turintsy who worried about my welfare and especially food supplies. I was rarely left without fresh fish or reindeer meat and was regularly invited to social functions. People thoughtfully invited me to their homes for meals and for bathing in their saunas. These occasions were invariably followed by tea with varen’e, jam made from local berries, and lively conversation. I was also asked to teach English courses for several hours a week at the residential school. By the end of my fieldwork, I could comfortably shift between interviewing and visiting bureaucrats to interviewing and visiting with the relatively marginalized segments of the population. While this type of role juggling was not always easy, once I established my identity as an ethnographer, someone interested in learning about everyday life, I was able to shift between being the “American representative”—when my presence was requested at official events such as the banquet dinner celebrating the 63rd anniversary of the founding of the Evenk District—and being a less marked member of the community, as when I would join in the residential school outings or help a neighbor pick berries.
Methods in Process
For the first two months of my fieldwork, I observed as many aspects of Tura society as possible while also collecting some basic statistical data. Although I had official letters of introduction from the Russian Academy of Sciences and several key contacts in the town, I felt awkward going through overly official channels each time I wanted to “observe” in a given setting. First of all, in a town such as Tura that exists largely as a bureaucratic center, I was worried that my presence might become too closely allied with official personalities and thereby endanger the trust of “common” people. Second, I was hesitant to impose myself on people merely because their superiors had approved the interaction. Therefore I established my entrée by introducing myself to the immediate superior in a given setting, such as to the head doctor in the pediatric division of the hospital or the head administrator in the orphanage. Occasionally she or he requested to see my letters of introduction, but more often than not, after our brief discussion, he or she simply approved my request to observe on an informal basis. Thereafter, I made individual arrangements to meet with specific people in the organization.
During the early months of my research, I visited day care centers, became acquainted with the schools and divisions of the hospital, shopped and waited in line in small stores and kiosks, attended the first Russian Orthodox church services ever held in Tura,10 bathed in the public bath house, toured the oil exploration headquarters, attended birthday parties and funerals, dined with new friends, and regularly attended festivals and concerts at the House of Culture (dom kul’tury), the Soviet version of a community center. Gradually I began spending increasing amounts of time in the residential school, orphanage, and pediatric/obstetric division of the hospital as I narrowed the focus of my research.
As my research progressed, it centered around informal and structured interviews with people invested in the relationship of the Evenk community to the Soviet and post-Soviet state. I found “casual chat” to be an invaluable research method permitting the speaker to be in more control, for as Humphrey has written, in this way the interviewee “evokes her own attitudes and draws her interlocutor into relationship with them” (1994b: 77). I conducted extensive interviews with activists and local administrators, but the more compelling material that forms the crux of this book was gathered in conversations with ordinary people drawing on and thinking about the place of government structures in their everyday lives. In an attempt to meet a range of people who were interested in thinking about identity and socialization, including ideas about motherhood, family, and schooling, I visited the orphanage, residential school, and pediatric/obstetric division twice a week. In each domain, I engaged in informal conversations, observation, and interviews with parents, staff, and administrators. The residential school and clinic were especially key as places where I was able to meet Evenki from various segments of the population. Evenki from different regions of the Evenk District and, more importantly, Evenki belonging to both high-status and more marginalized social strata frequented these institutions.
In the residential school, I became familiar with the daily routines, the interactions between teachers and students, and the broader place of the institution within the town. The residential school also provided me with an initial identity as a teacher that was comprehensible for the community at large. Most people quickly grasped the purpose of my research in Tura as a social science study. They could not fathom, however, what a young woman without a research team was doing in their town. Although ethnography and sociology are disciplines well understood by the broad public in Russia, the standard conception is that such studies focus on “traditional” culture, like shamanism or reindeer herding, take a few months at most, and are done in teams of researchers.11 This was the pattern followed by Soviet ethnographers. Although I taught only two English classes a week for a total of one and one-half hours, people in Tura came to think of me as the American who teaches in the residential school.
While the school provided me with a locally meaningful identity, the pediatric clinic was important for expanding my contacts. The clinic was a point of entrée for contacting parents, and predominantly young women, who had attended the residential school recently (in the past ten years or the early 1980s). These parents often had children who were currently attending the school as well. Twenty out of twenty-four women approached agreed to be interviewed in the privacy of a room provided by the clinic, and a few invited me to their homes. The initial structured interviews were conducted in the clinic, on occasion with a tape recorder, but generally women asked that this not be used. In the subsequent open-ended life histories with the six women who chose to take part, they all felt comfortable with the tape-recorder. For these more extensive interviews, we met regularly in each woman’s apartment. Usually we met alone, but on occasion the women were joined by family members or friends.
Attending public meetings and social gatherings provided a broader sense of the place of Soviet cultural practice and a sense of the collective in Evenk lives. Through the contacts developed at these gatherings, I was able to collect life histories of older Evenk women. I collected eight extensive life histories of Evenk women aged 65–75. All of them attended residential schools in the Evenk District from the late 1930s to 1940s. Ultimately, these narratives about lives lived over decades of radical change in central Siberia gripped my imagination and propelled me toward writing this book.
Locating the Project in Theoretical Frameworks
Throughout the early and mid-twentieth century, the creation of socialist societies brought about radically new ways of life for populations across the world. In establishing revolutionary governments, socialist nations also radically altered the shape of every day life and the sense of belonging for each and every person. In the case of the Soviet Union, the country was configured out of vastly different regions and the government sought
