Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

“Urbanites without a City”: Three Generations of Siberian Yukaghir Women

2010; Routledge; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08003831.2010.527535

1503-111X

Rane Willerslev,

Indigenous Studies and Ecology

Abstract Abstract Female roles as promoted among the Siberian Yukaghirs today, favouring ideals of beauty, autonomy and above all a modern urban lifestyle, are not as clear-cut as they may seem at first glance. Superficially, it appears that there has been a complete reversal of what went before: the Soviet ideal of the strong working-class woman has been thrown out and replaced with Western models of femininity. Dip a little deeper below the surface, however, and we see that things are not so different after all. Many aspects of today's ideal of womanhood are firmly rooted in the traditions of the Soviet period. What is different, however, is the inability of today's Yukaghir women to leave for the urban centres of Siberia. They are stuck in the remote village, although their mindset is truly urban. Keywords: YukaghirSiberiaGenderSoviet and post-Soviet politics Notes My warm thanks to Susanne Dybbroe for organising two conferences on "Arctic Urbanization" at the University of Aarhus, Denmark and to Moesgaard Museum and the Institute for Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics for financially supporting these conferences. 1 For example, in the 1970s and 1980s at least 10% of all Yukaghir women were living outside their indigenous communities as wives, slaves or concubines of Russian Cossacks (Slezkine, 1994 Slezkine, Y. 1994. Arctic Mirrors, Russia and the Small Peoples of the North, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar]: 27). As with the communist authorities, Yuri Slezkine writes, "the Christian Orthodox missionaries had decided that the combination of oppression with a special role as keepers of the hearth and protectors of children made women the ideal candidates for early conversions and successful proselytizing" (1994: 231). 2 There are a few notable exceptions. Piers Vitebsky and Sally Wolfe (2001 Vitebsky, P. and Wolfe, S. 2001. "The separation of the sexes among Siberian reindeer herders". In Sacred Custodians of the Earth? Women, Spirituality and Environment, Edited by: Low, A. and Tremayne, S. 81–94. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. [Google Scholar]) have done pioneering work on the impact of Soviet gender politics among the Eveny. Likewise, books by David Anderson (2000 Anderson, D. G. 2000. Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: The Number One Reindeer Brigade, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]: 171–200), Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (2003: 170–200) and Alexia Bloch (2004 Bloch, A. 2004. Red Ties and Residential Schools: Indigenous Siberians in a Post-Soviet State, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) all include elaborate discussions of the impact of Soviet gender politics among the Evenki. Also, Petra Rethmann's (2001 Rethmann, P. 2001. Tundra Passages: History and Gender in the Russian Far East, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press. [Google Scholar]) book on Koryak women provides a most valuable contribution to the topic of gender roles in Siberia. All of these works have been of great ethnographic value to me in my research and are much cited in this article. 3 It is important to note, however, that these ethno-administrative categories (Rus. Natsional'not') tell us very little about the local population's actual sense of belonging (see Anderson, 2000 Anderson, D. G. 2000. Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: The Number One Reindeer Brigade, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]: 91; Willerslev, 2007 Willerslev, R. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 5–6). 4 I have used synonyms for all the persons described, since some of the information that they kindly shared with me is of an intimate nature. 5 This reality of genderlessness is probably older than the historical accounts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Paradoxically, the Soviet anthropologists Stepanova, Gurvich and Khramova (1964 Stepanova, M. V., Gurvich, I. S. and Khramova, V. V. 1964. "The Yukaghirs". In The Peoples of Siberia, Edited by: Levin, M. G. and Potapov, L. P. 788–798. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]) were the first to realise this, which made them designate the Yukaghirs as a "survival" of the "original matriarchy", theorised by Friedrich Engels (1942 Engels , F. 1942 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State . Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm . [Google Scholar]) in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. 6 The Yukaghirs, who at the time numbered only about 443 people (1927 census), were considered too small an ethnic group to be given their own written language and autonomous area. Instead, they became part of the Magadan Oblast, and later, in the 1960s, they were made part of the Yakut Republic, now called the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). 7 Nelemnoye got its first TV at the beginning of the 1980s. At that time the locals turned it off regularly to "allow the people inside the TV to sleep", as they giddily explained to me. Since the beginning of the 1990s most homes in the village have a TV. 8 The prestige of having many children could, however, also be credited to a much older tradition. Thus, Waldemar Jochelson (1926 Jochelson , W. 1926 The Yukaghir and the Yukaghized Tungus , F. Boas New York : American Museum of Natural History . [Google Scholar]: 106), in his classic work on the Yukaghirs, describes how this was also the case at the end of the nineteenth century.