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Peoples of the Tundra
On ethnographic grounds alone, Zikers book is a unique and valuable contribution. Despite increased fieldwork opportunities for foreigners in the former Soviet Union in recent years, much of Russia and Siberia remains terra incognita to Western scholars, except for specialists who know the Russian literature. Zikers account of the Dolgan and Nganasan peoples of the Ust Avam community is a fascinating analysis of how people adapt their hunting, fishing, and herding not only to the demanding Arctic environment but also to enormous economic and political adversities created in the wake of the Soviet Unions collapse. In this sense, the book fills a gap in the ethnographic literature on Siberia for Western students and, at the same time, serves as a microcosm of the devastating changes affecting rural communities and indigenous peoples generally in a disintegrating former superpower: that is, increasing isolation and a shift to nonmarket survival economies.
The Epic World
Reconceptualizing the epic genre and opening it up to a world of storytelling, The Epic World makes a timely and bold intervention toward understanding the human propensity to aestheticize and normalize mass deployments of power and violence. The collection broadly considers three kinds of epic literature: conventional celebratory tales of conquest that glorify heroism, especially male heroism; anti-epics or stories of conquest from the perspectives of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the despised, and the murdered; and heroic stories utilized for imperialist or nationalist purposes. The Epic World illustrates global patterns of epic storytelling, such as the durability of stories tied to re...
About the Hearth
Due to changing climates and demographics, questions of policy in the circumpolar north have focused attention on the very structures that people call home. Dwellings lie at the heart of many forms of negotiation. Based on years of in-depth research, this book presents and analyzes how the people of the circumpolar regions conceive, build, memorialize, and live in their dwellings. This book seeks to set a new standard for interdisciplinary work within the humanities and social sciences and includes anthropological work on vernacular architecture, environmental anthropology, household archaeology and demographics.
The Postsocialist Agrarian Question
This is an age of neo-liberalism, in which the advantages and virtues of private property are often taken for granted. Post-socialist governments have privatized and broken up state farms and socialist cooperatives. However, economic outcomes and the social insecurity now experienced by many rural inhabitants highlight the need for a broader anthropological analysis of property relations, which go beyond changes of legal form. A century after Kautsky addressed "The Agrarian Question" in Germany, it is necessary to address a post-socialist Agrarian Question throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and China. The studies collected here derive from the first cycle of projects carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. They are prefaced by a substantial introduction by Chris Hann. Chris Hann is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/ Saale.
Indigenous Peoples and Demography
When researchers want to study indigenous populations they are dependent upon the highly variable way in which states or territories enumerate, categorise and differentiate indigenous people. In this volume, anthropologists, historians, demographers and sociologists have come together for the first time to examine the historical and contemporary construct of indigenous people in a number of fascinating geographical contexts around the world, including Canada, the United States, Colombia, Russia, Scandinavia, the Balkans and Australia. Using historical and demographical evidence, the contributors explore the creation and validity of categories for enumerating indigenous populations, the use and misuse of ethnic markers, micro-demographic investigations, and demographic databases, and thereby show how the situation varies substantially between countries.
Trust, Property and Social Change in a Southern Slovakian Village
Slovakia is a young and little studied country of the former socialist bloc. As in all post-socialist Eurasia, continuing transformations of everyday practices are still inadequately understood. This study combines anthropological and historical methods to search for alternative ways of "reading post-socialism" in the rural community. More specifically, it applies the notions of trust and property to map the outcomes of over a hundred years of turbulent social change, but not in the way that mainstream economists and political scientists have used these concepts. Trust and property acquire analytic significance only when contextualised into the practices and ideologies of the actors. This al...
Nomadic Peoples
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What it Means to be a Herdsman
In this book, author Joachim Otto Habeck takes the reader to the tundra in the Far North of the Russian Federation, describing and interpreting the practice of reindeer herding on the land. His vivid account of the everyday life of Komi reindeer herders and their family members as they interact with their bosses, the town, the market and oil companies, reveals both the reach of their agency and its limitations. Through a meticulous analysis of each of these domains, Habeck shows how public discourse about reindeer husbandry as a traditional life-style derives from outside the Komi reindeer-herding communities, yet it has powerful effects on the local actors' ability to frame their own existence. He argues that the concept of tradition, despite its many positive connotations, places Komi reindeer herders in a "golden cage" which leaves no space for acknowledging their drive to innovation and flexibility.
Studying Peoples in the People's Democracies
Under socialism the anthropological sciences developed under conflicting pressures: on the one hand Soviet influences, Marxist ideology and institutional changes, on the other the continued influence of national traditions and of the distinction between Volkskunde and Volkerkunde. The chapters bring out striking differences between the countries considered: the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. They also draw attention to variation within countries, and between sub-branches of the discipline. Coverage extends from the Stalinist years to the end of the socialist era, and the topics range from folklore studies at home to fieldwork expeditions abroad.
