Arun directed its attention to the residential school as the primary nexus of Evenk identity and sought to expand course offerings on Evenk cultural practices and Evenk language in the residential school curriculum. As discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, many Evenk intellectuals viewed the residential school as the primary institution for fostering a common sense of Evenk community. The contest over defining Evenk identities was becoming increasingly complex, however, as factions competed for limited natural resources and growing Evenk class divisions threatened to split the collective indigenous interests promoted by the fledgling Association for Peoples of the North. As some Evenk intellectuals attempted to safeguard access to political and economic power for Evenki in the district in 1993, emerging social stratification challenged their call for Evenki to rally around the collective good of their community.
Situating the Project
My interest in the Evenki was sparked in 1988 when I was a student at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in what was then Leningrad. When I arrived to study Russian there for a semester, I already had a keen interest in learning more about the contemporary lives of indigenous Siberians; my studies had recently taken on new meaning when I enrolled in an ethnography class focusing on minority populations in the Soviet Union. I was pleased to learn that I would be studying at this institute that had a long history as the foremost center of higher education for indigenous Siberians.10 Since I did not initially encounter students from the North, I set out to make their acquaintance.
I found the Northern Faculty had been relocated to a branch of the campus on the other side of Leningrad. Climbing the dim stairway to the combined dormitory/classroom building, I was disappointed to find that classes were not in session and no faculty were around; it was the end of the spring term. I was fortunate, however, to meet up with an Evenk man who was at the institute on business. Over a cup of tea and a piece of dried fish he had brought from his home in central Siberia, Vladimir explained to me that he was an admissions officer from Krasnoiarsk who was in charge of helping place Evenk students in educational institutions such as the Herzen Pedagogical Institute. He apologized that he was unable to treat me to a full meal because he himself was just passing through town; he gestured to the several sable pelts hanging over a chair and said these were samples that he would demonstrate at a Leningrad auction house. He urged me to visit his family in central Siberia, north of Krasnoiarsk, so I could see the “real” way indigenous Siberians lived.
The encounter in the Leningrad Northern Faculty spurred me to begin thinking about how native peoples have been influenced by the extensive system of government education and the Soviet period overall as they continue to formulate their identities as indigenous Siberians. In my studies in graduate school, I focused on questions about identity in a multiethnic Soviet Union that by the winter of 1991 came to be called the former Soviet Union. Ultimately, my ethnographic fieldwork stretching throughout the 1990s brought me face-to-face with various indigenous Siberians, but especially Evenki from the Evenk District in central Siberia. Many of the people whom I came to know recounted their own experiences of traversing the educational system in Leningrad and returning home to teach their native languages, become Communist Party leaders, or head up indigenous rights movements. While most people understood that my research would not significantly improve their lives, many were eager to have more information about their contemporary lives made available to a global readership. A stint of fieldwork never went by without someone inquiring if “the book” was published yet.
Many scholars would concur that ethnography is a tightrope walk between recognizing the limits of one’s own analysis and perspectives and seeking to portray elements of lived realities for the community or group under study. As Renato Rosaldo writes, ethnography is strengthened by dispensing the “myth of detachment” that often “conceals the dominant class position” of an author (1992: 204). In debunking a myth of detachment, it is worth remembering that there are many social underpinnings to the inherently subjective act of writing ethnography.
For me, Russia was never just a field site for testing out a hypothesis or an interesting place to spend a few years of my life. My political sympathies were very much rooted in my childhood experiences in communes in New England. In this setting the capitalist system’s underlying principle of financial gain for a limited few was regularly criticized and the idealized North American domestic social organization—a nuclear household—was implicitly suspect. With this background, from an early age I was sympathetic to the ideals of socialism and during the Reagan years looked to the Soviet Union as a society in which resources were perhaps more equitably distributed than in the United States.
As a college student in the mid-1980s, I joined with a friend who had recently immigrated from the Philippines to found a “socialist club.” We set about organizing talks by faculty, including one on the tensions between socialism and feminism; we also formed a student reading group to discuss texts informed by socialist ideals, including more contemporary examples of liberation theology. This was the era of Marcos’s fall and Aquino’s rise to power in the Philippines, as well as the era of the “nuclear-free,” “sanctuary,” and “divestment” movements. We spent our time outside of class at gatherings of Democratic Socialists and at meetings with people working with Salvadoran refugees. On a daily basis in 1985 and 1986, we were drawn into the campus protests of the college’s investments in South Africa; we felt that we were contributing to a movement that would eventually bring about a more just world. This was a time of hope, and it naturally fit with the era of Perestroika (“restructuring,” Soviet style) and Glasnost (“openness”) that Gorbachev ushered in as I was beginning my college studies in 1985. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster was further evidence that the world had to change. From the perspective of many with whom I came into contact, the faltering Cold War reigned over by Reagan and Andropov/Gromyko in the 1980s could be swept aside in a new decade of possibility for citizen movements and social transformation.
In 1988–89, I had the opportunity to study and work in the Soviet Union, just as cultural exchanges were beginning to flourish between the United States and the USSR. In this time of crisis when the policies of Perestroika were taking hold, staples such as soap, butter, and meat were rationed; one day my detergent was swiped while I was waiting for a bus. I learned about living on the margins in urban Russia; I became friends with migrants from outlying towns who were forced to be squatters because they lacked official identity papers and there was a government housing shortage. I also saw how permissible expressions of different types of belonging in Soviet society were emerging in a myriad of ways; I frequented a Hare Krishna café that opened in 1988, attended rock and jazz clubs where young hippies and intelligentsia congregated, and took part (albeit as an observer) in a growing number of opposition political rallies and public forums.
My curiosity about this society undergoing a massive transformation became much more than an avocation, and I sought out a means of understanding what I was experiencing. In particular, I wanted to learn what made people feel Soviet and how this was changing as the very definitions of the society were in flux in a way they had not been since World War II. In the urban setting of Leningrad, I had not