Description
Book SynopsisThe Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia is one of the few remaining places on earth where a nomadic people retain a traditional culture. Here in the tundra, the Nenets—one of the few indigenous minorities of the Russian North—follow a lifestyle...
Trade ReviewCompelling... A deceptively short, well-illustrated, and suberbly edited book.
* Alternatives Journal *
Andrei V. Golovnev and Gail Osherenko... seek to understand the Nenets and 'their phenomenal capacity to keep their... culture, language and lifestyle' after four centuries of Russian Rule. Behind this, generally encouraging, story lurks the problem of local sources of natural gas and oil, the exploration and extraction of which (begun in the 1960's) threatens to destroy the fragile tundra and the Nenets' way of life... The authors' presentation of the options is stark: can the Nenets' way of life survive in competition with the State's thirst for oil extraction under Soviet-mafia management, with its traditional disregard for 'small peoples' and the natural environment?
* Times Literary Supplement *
This volume's strengths mirror the specializations of its authors, namely, very strong ethnohistorical scholarship and astute appraisal of various political policy scenarios... It is well illustrated with color photographs and would serve as a nice textbook for any course in these subjects.
* Slavic and East European Journal *
Based on extensive fieldwork and hitherto unavailable Russian archival sources, this masterful study is a deep ethnographic and ethnohistorical account that demonstrates how flexibility enabled the Nenets to avoid cultural disintegration despite severe outside pressures. The authors' eloquent and carefully reasoned argument... has far-reaching implications for other arctic peoples and indigenous societies throughout the world... Essential for all circumpolar arctic collections.
* Choice *
Myths that rank in beauty and simplicity with those of Homer and tales of heroism and perserverance that attest to the ongoing resilience of the local population in the face of centuries of attempted colonization.... Golovnev and Osherenko... have given us a valuable and conscientious study, graced by a plethora of color photographs of life on Yamal,... their love for this inhospitable peninsula of sand, clay and mosquitos is sincere and infectious.
* The Moscow Times *
Siberian Survival takes us through an unusually intelligent reading of leadership and gender, ecological development, native epistemologies, and twentieth-century rebellions. The book's innovative organizational centerpiece is the legend of the 'Five Iaptiks,' a mini-thriller in the lore of people becoming gods and gods becoming people... In the best sense, 'Five Iaptiks' and the book's other narrative strategies work as performative gestures to help us imagine how the Nenets navigate the world around them... This slim volume accomplishes a great deal in a short space. Lucid prose and beautiful photographs make its overall argument for understanding recent environmental politics through the lens of an enduring Nenets worldview all the more persuasive. This book should be well appreciated by readers in anthropology, colonial history, ecology, religion, gender politics, and northern studies.
* Slavic Review *
