Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny

By Olga Ulturgasheva

The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian indigenous peoples, it presents the young people’s narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study brings a new perspective to the anthropology of childhood and uncovers a quite unexpected dynamic in narrating and foreshadowing the future while relating it to cultural patterns of prediction and fulfillment in nomadic cosmology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780857457677

Olga Ulturgasheva

Olga Ulturgasheva is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny (Berghahn Books 2012) and co-editor of Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn Books 2012).

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Narrating the Future in Siberia

Narrating the Future in Siberia

Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among Young Eveny

Olga Ulturgasheva

Berghahn Books

First Published in 2012 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2012 Olga Ulturgasheva

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN 978-0-85745-766-0 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-85745-767-7 (ebook)

To my parents, Vasily Bargachan and Alexandra Davydovna Keymetinova

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Characters

Introduction

Narrating the future

My own return

The Eveny and the village of Topolinoye

Previous literature on the Eveny and other indigenous communities of Siberia

Summary of the book

Chapter 1. Future Autobiographies and Their Spaces

Research in the field: introducing case studies

Contact for case studies and sampling

Gender and kinship

Age cohorts

Oral and written

Narrative and ‘future autobiography’

Chapter 2. Eveny Childhood and Adolescence

Djuluchen: the composition of child and adolescent personhood

Childhood and narrative

Coming of age

Chapter 3. Forest and Village

Forest and village in local cosmologies of movement

The social world of the forest

The village: social context today

Complexities of engagement with antagonistic spaces

Chapter 4. Three Future Autobiographies

The story of Tonya, a forest girl

The stories of village adolescents: Vera and Grisha

Chapter 5. Reindeer and Child in the Forest Chronotope

Reindeer as a non-human component of child personhood

Reindeer as child: Tonya on learning and teaching

The forest chronotope in narrative

Chapter 6. The Village as Domain of Unhappiness: Broken Families and the Curse of the GULAG

Wandering spirits of the dead and the curse of the GULAG

Unhappy families: children’s futures and parents’ pasts

Chapter 7. Cosmologies of the Future in the Shadow of Djuluchen

Personhood: hero and shaman

Time: cycles with and without destination

‘Future autobiography’ as an activator of djuluchen

Conclusion

References

Index

Acknowledgements

I am hugely indebted and grateful to all my young informants and their parents who generously shared with me their valuable time and precious insights. Their warm hospitality and incredible patience will always remain in my heart. I hope this book does justice to them.

I extend my heartfelt gratitude to my mentor Piers Vitebsky, who has been a great source of knowledge, helpful advice and an inspiration all the way through. There are several anthropologists and senior colleagues to whom I owe a special debt. In Cambridge I am particularly thankful to Marilyn Strathern, Barbara Bodenhorn and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov for their generosity, intellectual guidance and support of my work. Julie Cruikshank, Heather Montgomery and Elizabeth Tonkin read separate chapters of the manuscript and helpfully commented upon them with precious advice and kind encouragement.

I have gained valuable insights and much inspiration from the audience of various seminars and conferences, particularly those given at the University of Manchester, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, Brunel University, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Aarhus University, University of Greenland (Ilisimatusarfik), the University of Tartu and Tsaritsyno Museum in Moscow.

Over the years in Cambridge I have been immeasurably fortunate to have wonderful friends and colleagues who have always been an invaluable source of moral support and camaraderie – Madeleine Reeves, Katie Swancutt, Marc Brightman, Vanessa-Elisa Grotti, Rane Willerslev, Tim Bayliss-Smith, Inga-Maria Mulk, Carole Pegg, Elena Khlinovskaya Rockhill, Emma Wilson, Otto Habbeck, Marcel Chabot, Elana Wilson-Rowe, Kathleen Richardson, Janne Flora, Laur Vallikivi, Hatice Tuncer, El’vis Beytullaev and Eleanor Peers. I also wish to impart to Sally Wolfe, Yarjung and his family my profound thanks for being my extended family in the UK.

In Topolinoye, north-east Siberia, I am most grateful to Sergei Golikov, Anatoly and Vera Neustroevy, Timofey Neustroyev, Leonid Prokopiev, Valery and Marusia Golikovy, Nikolai Neustroev (Kangalas), Stepan and Viktoria Lebedevy, Zhanna and Vasily Sleptsovy, Alexander and Margarita Vinokurovy, Tatiana Zakharova, Maria Nikolaievna Neustroeva, Nadezhda Sleptsova, Anna Osenina, Petr Dmitrievich Olesov, Anna Lebedeva, Rimma and Andrey Zamiatiny, Elena Vasilievna Efimova-Baisheva, Evdokia Vasilievna Semenova, Semen and Dora Zabolotsky, Baldan and Antonina Demidovy, Evdokia Diagileva and Sargylana Efimova.

In Khandyga, my special thanks go to the families of Efimovy and Delaboska for their cordial hospitality. They provided me with accommodation, everyday necessities and safety during my research trips and made me comfortable at their warm and welcoming places.

I wish to extend my sincere gratitude to Ekaterina Nikolaevna Mestnikova, Tamara Spiridonovna Imeneva, Innokenty Evseievich Imenev, Natasha and Vera Imenevy, Elena Petrovna Ulturgasheva, Petr Petrovich Petoukhov, Ekaterina Petrovna Andreyeva, Elena Innokentievna and Yura Starostiny for their kindness and help in dealing with my numerous requests and various needs.

I express my deepest and immense gratitude for my parents, Vasily Spiridinovich and Alexandra Davydovna Keimetinovy, who have always been an endless source of help and unquestioning support despite being far away; and to my own family, my husband Sayan and my daughter Anastasia Ulturgashevy, for their unconditional love and care.

I owe special thanks for generous research awards from Cambridge Oversees Trust, BB Roberts Fund and Lundgren Fund. I want specifically to mention that the final stages of the research would not have been possible without financial support from the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs (ARC-00756211). I would like to express my special gratefulness to my colleagues from the international project ‘Collaborative Research: IPY: Negotiating Pathways to Adulthood: Social Change and Indigenous Culture in Four Circumpolar Communities’ Stacy Rasmus, Lisa Wexler and, particularly, Anna M. Kerttula de Echave for their enormous support and productive collaboration. Last but not least I sincerely thank Marion Berghahn, Ann Przyzycki DeVita and Charlotte Mosedale at Berghahn Books for their dedication, patience, amazing professionalism and superb work in guiding me through the process of book production.

List of Characters*

(in alphabetical order)

Aida, a girl, 17, village childhood. See Chapter 1

Anya, a girl, 17, forest childhood. See Chapter 3

Diana, a girl, 15, village childhood. See Chapter 6

Galya, a girl, 11, village childhood. See Chapter 6

Grisha, a boy, 15, village childhood. See Chapter 4

Ilona, a girl, 10, forest childhood. See Chapter 5

Ira, a girl, 12, forest childhood. See Chapter 1

Ivan, a boy, 15, village childhood. See Chapter 1

Karina, a girl, 11, village childhood. See Chapter 6

Kira, a girl, 13, forest childhood. See Chapter 5

Kirill, a boy, 17, forest childhood. See Chapter 5

Kostia, a boy, 15, village childhood. See Chapter 1

Oktia, a girl, 11, forest childhood. See Chapter 1

Olya, a girl, 14, forest childhood. See Chapter 1

Petya, a boy, 10, village childhood. See Chapter 1

Sveta, a girl, 10, forest childhood. See Chapter 1

Tamara, 14, forest childhood. See Chapter 3

Taras, a boy, 12, village childhood. See Chapter 6

Tonya, a girl, 16, forest childhood. See Chapter 4 and Chapter 5

Vera, a girl, 17, village childhood. See Chapter 4

Vitalik, a boy, 16, village childhood. See Chapter 1

Vitia, a boy, 10, forest childhood. See Chapter 5

Volodia, a boy, 15, forest childhood. See Chapter 1

* All real names have been changed for the purpose of anonymity and protection of subjects.

INTRODUCTION

Narrating the future

In 2003–2004 I conducted twelve months’ fieldwork studying ideas of their own future among young Eveny in the village of Topolinoye, in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) in north-east Siberia (Figure 1), a village which has a population of seven hundred. While interviewing local children and adolescents on the matter of their future lives, I was particularly interested in how children’s and adolescents’ ideas about the future were shaped, what attitudes and expectations were generated under the conditions and situations contemporary children and adolescents had to face, and what choices they were likely to make in the future and why. The starting point for my research was the local discourse of ‘futurelessness’ throughout this region (Vitebsky 2002). The term vymiraiushiy narod – a people who are dying out – has become a rhetorical tool used by representatives of the intelligentsia from Northern indigenous minorities on the political level in the 1990s. I wished to explore how far this claim became an integral part of young people’s identity, what social resources they were drawing on and what strategies they might be devising for dealing with this discourse.

When I was asking my child and adolescent informants to talk about their own future lives, I was not aiming at literal forecasting or any sort of diagnostics of their life-trajectories. My inquiry was aiming at eliciting young Eveny representations of their everyday lives through the medium of the story about one’s own future life. I was observing how their narratives about imagined futures may reflect their perceptions of themselves, family histories and how their narratives could unfold the connection between their imagined futures and the community’s present and its past. All of this was done in order to look at the ways Eveny children and adolescents reflected the situation of social and economic instability that has emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and what impact this situation exerted on their plans for the future.

I returned for follow-up study six years later in summer 2010. During my first visit in 2003 I was not aware that the stories of their future lives which were shared with me particularly by my adolescent informants were part of a much broader process that was beyond simply the perceptions of themselves as products of the recent drastic social changes. When I revisited the research area in 2010, the most surprising thing for me was that those young authors who narrated their future autobiographies have already fulfilled the next imagined stage of their future life scenarios. Though the rest of their stories are yet to be fulfilled, the present outcomes of their lives indicate that the futures they were narrating emerged as a strikingly predictive blueprint for their possible actions in the future. This made me realize that they were narrating their future lives as if they knew what would happen to them and they envisioned themselves in the future as if they had already become the persons they were talking about. Figuratively speaking, they were narrating the past disguised as their future. This aspect of the future in this ethnographic material reminds me of an episode from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, in which Alice is astonished and puzzled after she learns from the White Queen that memory can work both ways:

‘ … one’s memory works both ways.’

‘I’m sure mine only works one way,’ Alice remarked. ‘I can’t remember things before they happen.’

‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked.

‘What sort of things do you remember best?’ Alice ventured to ask.

‘Oh, things that happened the week after next,’ the Queen replied in a careless tone … (1974: 177)

Just as in the White Queen’s time dimension, the sequence in which young Eveny narrate their own future lives and their fulfilment six years after is directed backwards, and contradicts the usual order of memory production in which the knowledge or memory of an event is generated only after the event has happened. Since I was the one who devised such a type of inquiry I also played a certain role in shaping the children’s and adolescents’ futures. But I was not to know what I had done until six years later. Only now do I realize that my research question inverted the order of things, as the events unfolded as if in a reversed mirror image that corresponded to the time sequence in Lewis Carroll’s looking-glass world. That is to say, the standard narratological sequence in which it is the experience (event) that comes first, and the later oral or written report of the lived experience (narrative) that follows, goes around in a circle or backwards, i.e., the future event is narrated in the first instance and the actual experience happens after (cf. Shuman 1986).

Since the usual narratological sequence is inverted, the respective connection between the narrative and the event confronts us with a distinct set of questions. What is the role of the narrative in forging or shaping young Eveny’s life-trajectory? What has been so powerful in the young Eveny’s narratives about their future lives that made them almost fulfilled? What ideologies and practices activate such connection between the narrative and experience? What ontological framework underlies the Eveny concept of destiny and personal agency? What category of person or personhood is involved in such a conception of the future? What constitutes Eveny childhood and adolescence? And how are social experiences of Eveny children and adolescents manifested in their own narratives about the future? What practices of socialization and what processes of learning contribute to the process of growing up and becoming a person in this society?

The material that I shall present in this work will allow us to examine how, borrowing from Karin Barber, ‘personhood, webbed and precipitated out of social relationships, is mediated through the text’ (2007: 107). The sequence in which the events will unfold will also question analytical perception of the narrative as secondary or complementary to some primary reality from which it is alienated (Kristeva 1980; Barthes 1984 [1977]). In the course of the discussion we shall see that the primacy of the narrative about one’s own future will yield surprising insights into the notion of time, space and destiny.

Furthermore, in their stories Eveny children and adolescents were not simply negotiating particular versions of their own selves, as might be interpreted in some narrative studies (Bakhtin 1981; Linde 1993), but in fact they were sharing and presenting me with an actual glimpse of their lives in the future. Besides my ethnographic observations as well as interactions and conversations with them six years earlier, my young informants have given me a rare opportunity to capture what Raymond Williams would call ‘structures of feeling’. They are, as he puts it:

a set of relations defined as a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics … They are often more recognizable at a later stage, when they have been (as often happens) formalized, classified … But that time the case is different; a new structure of feeling will usually already have begun to form, in the true social present. (1977: 132)

These visions of the future are in a sense ‘structures of feeling’ which serve as emergent or pre-emergent articulations of living process that have not yet been defined, classified or rationalized ‘before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action’ (1977: 132).

Hence, this work is both an exploration of the process of emergence during which Eveny children and adolescents are envisioning their own future lives and an analysis of what happened later, i.e., how their actual lives unfolded in the course of the following six years. Processually, I caught my main informants narrating their future lives at the stage when they were just about to step into their adult lives and made them speak about their future experience. Then, they moved on to turn that narrated future into the present.

My discussion of Eveny personhood, specifically the element of djuluchen, will show that the narrative has the capacity to set the event horizon that a young narrator cannot escape, as he or she will be drawn into the event horizon, actualizing what has been envisaged and narrated in the story. The case studies I shall present in this work will show that the future-oriented narrative may also work as a constitutive element and mediator of a narrator’s personhood which implicates and forges fulfilment and actualization of the events in the future that was envisioned in a young person’s future autobiography.

My own return

I myself grew up in this village and left for education in the city in 1991 at the age of sixteen, so this fieldwork has been a return to my roots in order to understand the place in which I myself was young. Given that doing anthropological ‘study at home’ has become a legitimate undertaking over the last several decades (Jackson 1987; Peirano 1998), I view my study in the community where I grew up as a particular kind of enterprise which involved a specific type of Batesonian ‘culture contact’ (2000 [1972]: 64). It was a ‘culture contact’ across time (my twenty years time-travel back to the community) and space (being away from the community for twenty years) which was shaped by experience of personal displacement. I view my own journey from the remote Siberian village which I left at the age of sixteen to attend a university in Western Europe as formative in moulding my anthropological viewpoint. It was also an intellectual journey during which I was experiencing profoundly different communities with distinct languages and cultures and observing what constitutes homogeneity (unity) and heterogeneity (differentiation and divergence) in various groups. In the process of such a journey one may lose the sense of territorialized identity but acquire analytically valuable critical distance. In this sense the return to my native community after twenty years of absence should be viewed as a return of both insider and outsider, native and non-native. In addition, those who are engaged in anthropological research among children and adolescents, regardless of whether the community is native or non-native, cannot be considered ‘native’ by virtue of belonging to a different category of population and being inherently located outside of a child’s subjectivity which constitutes what might be referred to as a ‘native’s point of view’.

Furthermore, I view my own return to the community of my origin as a valuable ethnographic source for understanding children’s and adolescents’ ideas about their own future lives, since it also helps me to contextualize the ontological framework of a local category of person, specifically the Eveny concept of return. In order to embark on this issue I should like to show how my own return was understood, and later on, in my final discussion, I shall place this within a broader discussion of a local cosmology of spaces and people’s movements between them.

On my way to the village of Topolinoye I stayed in the city of Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), to spend some time with my family. People from Topolinoye visited my family place in Yakutsk occasionally. Among them was a young couple with their two children, Zina and Fedor. From them I learned the latest village news: who died, who got married, who divorced, who had a new son or a daughter, who was currently in the city or in the village, who entered the university and who failed. I also learned that the roads to Topolinoye are getting worse from year to year. Very few cars travel in the direction of the village, and that is why there is always a risk of getting stuck in Khandyga, a central town of Tomponsky district.

During those days in Yakutsk I met the Topolinoye school principal, who told me about their need for a person who knew how to deal with computers and teach computer literacy at school. According to her, there were no people who would agree to work in Topolinoye. When she heard that I was planning to be in Topolinoye soon, she insisted on my taking this job. After a minute of hesitation I accepted her offer, although I still doubted what I had to teach, having a limited knowledge about computing.

When I first arrived in September, I was unaware of the gossip that was being spread about me. I was quite surprised when people kept asking me if everything was fine with me in the city. They were very curious as to what reasons or situation had made me travel all the way through Europe and Russia back to the village. As far as I understood from a few conversations with elderly ladies, people viewed my return to the village in a quite negative perspective. They thought that what made me return was my total failure to stay in England. First, they believed, I had been expelled from the university where I studied. Then, my husband had left me and I was divorced, so my personal life was a mess. My financial situation would not allow me to stay in England – that is why I came back to Yakutsk. But I could not even afford to stay in Yakutsk, and that is why I had to come back to the village to get employed at the school as a teacher of computer literacy.

Twelve years had passed since I had left the village in 1991 and entered an undergraduate course in the Faculty of Languages and Philology at Yakutsk State University. Over this lengthy period of time village people would hear occasional news about me, usually from people who would stay at my family place during their trips to the city. My return after years of absence from the village scene was expected and unexpected at the same time. Perhaps people expected my return in a different way. They saw me as a very successful person who should have no necessity to be employed in the school as an ordinary teacher. In their eyes I should be able to do more than just teaching at school, and should have been employed at least at the village administration, especially after years of training outside the community, in the city and abroad.

The meeting at the village house of culture klub attended by twenty people on an October evening did not help me to clarify my purpose in staying in the community. In my introduction to the audience I was as honest as possible in explaining why I was there and what I had to do during that year. After this meeting, organized by personnel of the local house of culture, I hoped that my message would be accepted and understood. However, I felt my explanation was not plausible enough for the audience since they could not see the point and their own version was still much more weighty than the truth. Finally, I gave up and decided to take their understanding as it was.

These circumstances also helped me to realize that my return ruined that glorious image of myself constructed by people in the village after years of my mysterious absence from the community. My return in the capacity of a schoolteacher could be understood only as a failure and an apparently inglorious return. I pay special attention to the local concept of return in Chapter 7, where I provide a conceptual set of possible returns, which allows one to see the distinction, but also the relationships, between the frustrated return of a person from the village and the glorious return of a hero or shaman.

The Eveny and the village of Topolinoye

The Eveny, or Lamut, are one of the Tungus-speaking group¹ in the Russian North. Eveny economy relies mostly on the subsistence activities of reindeer herding and hunting. These economic activities, which involve close engagement with and dependence on the surrounding environment, contribute to and still play a crucial role in the Eveny worldview, cosmology, rituals and oral tradition. By virtue of their reindeer herding activity and nomadic mode of living, the Eveny expanded and occupied an enormous area of the mountain/taiga zone of north-east Asia.

About half of the Eveny population is scattered around Arctic districts of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia),² while the remaining Eveny live in western Chukotsky and Koryaksky Avtonomny Okrug, Kamchatka, and in the Magadanskaya Oblast’ and the northern part of Khabarovskiy Krai. In the pre-Soviet ethnographic literature, Tungus groups were referred to in accordance with their geographical location, i.e., either as Northern Tungus (Eveny) or Western Tungus (Evenki).³ At the end of the nineteenth century Jokhelson (1926) emphasized that most of the Eveny in the Kolyma river basin were greatly influenced by the Yukagir, and owing to the long history of intermingling and intermarriages both Eveny and Yukagir would not make a strong ethnic distinction among themselves. Another Eveny scholar and, subsequently, a political exile, Mainov (1927), distinguished two groups of Tungus: one is the Northern Tungus (the Eveny or Lamut), a group populating north-east Siberia with strong relations with the Yukagir population; the other is the Southern Tungus (the Evenki), a group which has been occupying the areas closer to Lake Baykal.

Participants of the first Russian expedition under the leadership of Kopylov-Moskvitin on 28 July 1638 recorded the first contact of Eveny with Russians (Stepanov 1943). In 1639 when Russian kosaks established their fortress – Zashiversky ostrog – in the area of the Indigirka River all the indigenous population including the Eveny was coercively subjected to an obligatory fur tribute called yasak (Fisher 1943: 52). In the archives of Zashiversky ostrog there are notes made by Russian kosaks Mikhail Stadukhin and Vtor Gavrilov in 1642 about several clans of the Eveny, including the clans of Maemael, Godninkan and Paraiatkan, who would nomadize with their herds of reindeer at the mouth of the Rivers Tompo and Khandyga in the eastern part of the Verkhoyansky mountains. Much later, in 1926, the Soviets used the names of these clans to map the territories of three districts: Miamalsky, Godninkansky and Tukulan-Barainsky (Tugolukov 1997: 31). So at present, the putative descendants of these clans and other local Eveny clans occupy the territory of the former three districts and are officially referred to as Eveny of Tompo, after the River Tompo, i.e., Tomponskye Eveny.

The era of socialist construction brought many changes, beginning with ‘sedentarization’ and acculturation, which went hand in hand with the whole process of modernization and technical development on the Far North. It was a seventy-year period during which the Eveny, like other indigenous peoples throughout the Russian Arctic, were educated in modern Soviet schools, treated at local hospitals by qualified doctors, and hired as hunters and reindeer herders by Soviet collective or state farms. The introduction of the boarding school or internat for indigenous children was meant to be a part of the Soviet civilizing mission. The main purpose of introducing internat into the life of the Eveny was the perceived need to educate previously nomadic children at school, and to give them an opportunity to become full members of Soviet society. The internat, or boarding school, was an educational institution to be found in every reindeer herders’ village, including Topolinoye. According to Pika (1999: 23), ‘modernization’ predominated from the 1930s through to the 1970s. It was