Siberian Historical Research

6-7

Authors: Funk D.A.

General info about new politics of the journal and some issues of contemporary situation in Russian anthropology.

15-38

Authors: Balzer Mandelstam M.

Diverse levels and dynamics of indigenous politics in Siberia are examined, ranging from examples of community devastation to impressive cultural revitalization. Anthropological concepts of “indigenous cosmopolitans” and urban-based activism are stressed. I argue that the most effective urban indigenous leaders are those whose lives are deeply intertwined with their original forest, tundra and river bank homelands. Conclusions analyze sociopolitical conditions that make some groups more successful than others in defending their social, ecological and cultural interests. Recent legal constraints on the definition of indigeneity in Russia are reviewed, before discussing specific cases. I feature several accounts from diverse regions that show a pattern of how and why indigenous people have been driven to urban environments, for “push” (forced migration) as well as “pull” (urban attraction) reasons. The Sakha Republic (Yakutia) in the Far East, where I have worked periodically since 1986, is featured as a relatively positive case with still serious problems. Strains of urbanization, ethnic interaction and contestation created by development are explored. Implications for civil society in Russia’s nominal “federation” are discussed.

60-82

Authors: Maslov D.V.

The issue that inspired this paper lies in the specifics of social life of indigenous people shaped by laws. The specificities of the legal status of indigenous people not only influence the creation and keeping of ethnic identity but also directly impact the sense of solidarity of indigenous people. These people readily set up non-commercial organizations – institutions capable of influencing the life of indigenous people on a par with more “traditional” ones, e.g. kinship and/or local groups. The place of such non-commercial organizations among the tools used to maintain solidarity among indigenous people, as it seems, may be of greater significance in urban environments against the backdrop of the erosion of social ties that had been established as a result of the non-urban way of life mainly led by indigenous people. However, the real situation differs from what is expected. Legal rights of indigenous people, through law enforcement and law enforcers, create a specific area of social relations in which an active part is played by the executive and the judicial power. This produces not only a special context in which non-commercial organizations operate, but an isolated semantic field. Such organizations gain social importance, participating in the system of bureaucratic relations, whereas solidarity within groups of indigenous people is maintained thanks to less formal institutions. The main material for the paper was collected by the author during the field research in 2010 in the city of Gorno-Altaisk of Altai Republic.

95-125

Authors: Mamontova N.A.

The Internet has become an inevitable part of social life. Some researchers even prefer to use a term “online habitat” referring to everyday people’s activity on the web. Over the last decade, in Russia there has been a significant growth in the number of ethnicallyoriented online communities of the indigenous peoples of the North as a result of the Internet penetration into the most remote settlements (though the most active members of them are still constituted mainly by urban population). Their participants discuss a wide range of questions concerning their culture and language. The author believes that such online communities make it possible for their members to construct more effectively new forms of cultural authenticity and, therefore, relatively quickly spread them among the wide audience. This article is devoted to one of those communities, a group named “The Evenks” on VKontakte. It considers how the group’s participants represent the contemporary Evenk culture by using information technologies. However, the main problem is that an idea of the use of the Internet as a means of promotion of the Evenk culture comes into contradiction with the widely-spread view on technologies as a threat to “traditionality”, traditional way of life, and even maintenance of the Evenk language. Discussions of the community’s members surrounding this problem, their attempts to find the way out of it, as well as their thoughts on the Evenk culture’s future constitute the main focus of the article. The material was collected by the author though participant observation, interview, questionnaire survey and content-analysis during her “fieldwork” in the online community in 2013-2014.

134-137

Authors: Funk D.A.

Rreview of a book by Safonova T. and I. Santha.