The Koryak People of Siberia

ANTHROPOLOGY AND
HUMANISM
VOLUME 27 NUMBER 2 DECEMBER 2002
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

1902 • celebrating 100 years • 2002
PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIETY FOR HUMANISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

A SECTION OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
ANTHROPOLOGY
VOLUME 27, NUMBER 2
AND HUMANISM
DECEMBER 2002
CONTENTS
Miami Money and the Home Gal
Karen E. Richman 119
“Without Deer There Is No Culture, Nothing”
Alexander D. King 133
Could She Be Dying? Dis-Orders of Reality around Death
in an American Hospital
Helen S. Chapple 165
FICTION
Maquiladora Cousins
Tamar Diana Wilson 185
POEMS
Five Poems in Three Languages
Meditación in and about Mbohapy Ñe’ẽ 192
Pax Nobiscum 193
Muse 194
Pride? 195
Ignoramus 197
Tracy K. Lewis
Slugs 198
Soft Boiled Eggs 199
Brian Swann
Imprecation against Two Cambridge Policemen for
Disturbing Dave Sapir’s Party 203
Dell Hymes
BOOK REVIEWS
“After Genres”: A Biography That Illuminates Ethnography
(In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin M. Turnbull, Roy Richard Grinker)
Christopher Eric Garces 205
Silicon Valley Light (Cultures@Silicon Valley, June Anne English-Lueck)
Jennifer Croissant 207
New Perspectives on Female Circumcision (The Female Circumcision
Controversy: An Anthropological Perspective, Ellen Gruenbaum)
Barry P. Michrina 208
Africa Reclaiming Herself (On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe)
Donald Robotham 209
A Place to Write: The Bartender as Ethnographer (A Place to Stand:
Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar, Julie Lindquist)
Warren Olivo 211
ANNOUNCEMENTS
The Society for Humanistic Anthropology is pleased to announce that
the 2002 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing was won by
Henry Stephen Sharp for his book Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality
in a Northern Dene Community. Honorable Mention awards were won
by Mary Weismantel for her book Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race
and Sex in the Andes, and Catherine Lutz for her book Homefront:
A Military City and the American 20th Century.
Kent Maynard won the 2001 Wick Chapbook Prize for Ohio poets. His
collection, Sunk like God behind the House, was published in the fall of
2002. Several of the poems first appeared in Anthropology and
Humanism.
ON THE COVER
Zoya Petrovna cooking for her relatives in a Koryak reindeer herders’
camp, Kamchatka. Zoya echoed the statement that the reindeer were
the basis for the Koryaks’ entire culture. Photo by Alexander D. King.
“Without Deer There Is No Culture, Nothing”
ALEXANDER D. KING
Department of Anthropology
University of Aberdeen
Old Aberdeen
Scotland AB243QY
United Kingdom
SUMMARY This article presents the pragmatics of reindeer herding by Chukchi and
Koryak people in northern Kamchatka, Russia, to convey a sense of the importance of
herding as a symbolic resource. A detailed description of brief visits to a reindeer herd in
Kamchatka uncovers the power of reindeer as a symbol for indigenous people and
indigenous culture in this area. I use a first-person, subjective ethnography and include
some of the challenges I met in the field and my attempts to overcome them. The title
quotes a reindeer herder impressing upon me the importance of his work for his people.
Reindeer are connected to human beings in a totalizing manner. Reindeer are simultaneously
index, icon, and symbol of human social organization, economic activity, spiritual practice,
material culture—in short, “our culture,” as I was told by many people in Kamchatka.
The Reindeer are a dominant symbol of collective identity in northern Kam-

chatka, Russia. A reindeer head is featured on the official flag of the Koryak
Autonomous Okrug (KAO), even though two-thirds of the population are not
native and the administration is run mostly by Russians and other incomers. My
first impression of this representation was that it was a romantic stereotype,
similar to the generic Indian buffalo hunter used by whites in North America as
school mascots or to sell Jeeps. I had little intention of studying reindeer herders
directly—my focus was political discourse, and I imagined this to take place at
administrative centers—but I discovered that reindeer herding was more than a
romantic symbol of the primitive other. Although very few native people in
Kamchatka are directly engaged in reindeer herding, they frequently refer to
reindeer and to herding activities while talking about themselves and their own
culture. Incomers see reindeer herding as an index of the primitiveness of native
people, a problem needing a solution. Native people talk about reindeer herding
in specific contexts, those of childhood experiences, the lives of relatives and
friends, and religious rituals that are important to them, and as an index of
traditional wealth and independence.
In July 1997 my wife, Christina, and I went to the village of Srednie Pakhachi,
accompanied by our friend and colleague Valentina Dedyk. Christina and I had
met Valentina (Valya) and her family during our first trip to Kamchatka in 1995.
She is the Koryak-language teacher at the Palana Teachers College in the admin-
istrative center (Palana) of the Koryak Autonomous Okrug. Valya had spent two
months in 1996 at our home in Charlottesville, Virginia, helping me with Koryak,
learning English, and conversing about ethnography. After we returned to
Kamchatka in April 1997, Valya invited us to go with her family on their summer
vacation to visit other members of her family and friends in her childhood home
of Srednie Pakhachi. It was an opportunity to visit a village of reindeer herders
where many people still spoke Koryak and where people had owned private deer
through the Soviet era, even though most reindeer had been appropriated in the
Anthropology and Humanism 27(2):133–164. Copyright © 2003, American Anthropological Association.

134 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 27, Number 2
1930s during collectivization. We stayed with Valya’s elder sister, Tanya, and her
family.
The last week of my month in Srednie Pakhachi, I accepted the invitation of
Tanya’s husband Volodya Yatylkut to visit the herd of the village’s privately
owned deer. This first visit with Volodya was short, only three days in all, but it
was a revelation. I discovered that the deer were a root metaphor for Koryak
culture, at least in this village that was traditionally focused on reindeer herding.
If I were going to have any sense of what native people were about, I had to study
what I had earlier disparaged as salvage ethnography. Discourse about reindeer
herding in Palana was either in the context of an economic problem in need of
solving or in the context of cultural survivals of earlier, primitive lifeways (cf.
Grant 1995:8, 128; Slezkine 1994:125, 260, 341). Vladimir Bogoraz (1904–09) and
Vladimir Jochelson (1908) had done an excellent job of documenting reindeer
herding among Chukchi and Koryak people. Soviet ethnographers such as
Bilibin (1932, 1933), Antropova (1971), and Chesnokov (1997) had covered many
of the changes in reindeer herding in the 20th century. However, the meaning of
reindeer herding—the meaning of daily pragmatics in the people’s sense of
themselves, their culture, and their human dignity—was not clear from these
ethnographic accounts. After my first short visit to the privately owned reindeer
herd, I knew that I needed to learn the meanings of representations of reindeer
herding for native people through some old-fashioned participant-observation.1
The structure of my presentation follows Abu-Lughod’s call for “ethnogra-
phies of the particular” (1991:149–152). I agree that a “tactical humanism,” which
aims for representations of other people’s everyday lives and tries to avoid
exoticizing, can be used to overcome tendencies toward essentialism, false coher-
ence, and hierarchy latent in common use of the term culture (Abu-Lughod
1991:159). My style is inspired by Edith Turner’s ethnography of Native Alaskan
healers in The Hands Feel It, in which she concentrates on relating “present-day
culture in action” in an Alaskan village (1996:xxvi). My article has similar goals
as Petra Rethmann’s ethnography of particulars in northeastern Kamchatka,
which uses “analytical and textual strategies that work counter to the exoticizing
techniques of earlier ethnographies” (2001:9).
Through experience and action, not through speaking and listening, I learned
the basic importance of reindeer in these people’s lives.2 Though it has become a
sin for ethnographers to essentialize other people, many Koryaks and Chukchi
in Kamchatka essentialize themselves by insisting on reindeer as the essential
key to ethnographic understanding. A reindeer herd is not just a group of deer
managed by people. It is a holographic entity providing a scale model of the social
life of animate beings in the universe, or a “total social phenomenon” (Mauss
1990:3).3 Deer and people are connected to one another in a vital social universe.
This article has three goals: to provide an ethnography of reindeer herding
practices among Koryak and Chukchi of northern Kamchatka, to discuss the
religion and worldview of these people in the context of reindeer herding, and
to present the context of ethnographic knowledge production and problems of
participant-observation. The following account of Koryak-Chukchi reindeer
herding pragmatics is presented in chronological order, simulating field notes in
places, to evoke a sense of experience. If “the true locus of culture is in the
interactions of specific individuals,” as Sapir says (1949:515), then the locus of
ethnography is in the interactions between ethnographer and people assisting
his project (in other words, “natives”). I include myself as a character in the
narrative to make it plain to the reader the circumstances of the invention of the
culture I call Koryak/Chukchi/Srednie Pakhachi (cf. Wagner 1981:3f.).4 The
King “Without Deer There Is No Culture” 135
conclusion will focus on general problems of deer, people, culture, and ethno-
graphic understanding.
July 1997
“How long are we going for?” I asked Volodya as I swung my pack onto my
back.
“That depends on how long you want,” he answered.
“When it begins to snow, you can return by sled,” his son-in-law, Valeri, joked.
“I have a pair of really fast sled-deer at that herd.”
Volodya’s face and arms were tanned a deep brown. Although he was only in
his midforties, his hair was already graying, attributed by his wife to a close brush
with a grizzly bear. He had an old army pack and wore the drab clothing of
outdoorsmen common across the former Soviet Union. Sometimes I felt like a
cosmonaut with my bright red Gore-Tex raincoat and fancy backpack from a
mountain-climbing shop.
Together with Valya and her family, my wife Christina and I had been fishing
with Tanya and Volodya Yatylkut and their family for the past two weeks, and
they had spent just as much time talking about deer as about fish. Volodya is a
typical resident of Srednie Pakhachi in many respects. First of all, he identifies
himself as Chukchi. Groups of Chukchi moved south into Koryak territory
(Bogoraz 1904–09:15), and now there are several communities in this part of the
region where locals speak a dialect of Koryak, although their primary identity
may be Chukchi or Even. Their spiritual beliefs and material culture are a
combination of Koryak and Chukchi cultures, as described by Jochelson (1908)
and Bogoraz (1904–09), but when compared to “real Chukchi” living on the
Chukotka peninsula, they walk and talk more like Koryaks by their own ac-
count.5
Volodya was born and raised a reindeer herder. He had worked all of his adult
life in the local sovkhoz (government collective farm) until three years ago: “They
don’t pay you, and when you come to town for a rest, they tell you that you owe
them. A month’s pay doesn’t buy groceries [since the 1990s]. At that time I was
making 2000 [rubles] a month [about US$20], and that bought sugar and that’s
all. The bookkeeper keeps track of pay owed and how many groceries you take,
and you end up owing them.” This is a pattern being repeated all over the North,
where the sovkhoz runs a company store operation, enriching the immigrant
sovkhoz directors at the expense of the native population. That is why Volodya
left the sovkhoz.6 They stopped paying herders with money, and he had to learn
to fish for salmon to feed his family and earn cash through caviar production.
This is not a new pattern. People herding deer in Kamchatka and Chukotka have
traditionally fallen back on salmon fishing during hard times when deer herd
populations fall or disappear altogether. It is not easy, however, for a rich
reindeer herder, a chawchu, to take up the lifestyle of a Nymylan, a town-dweller.
Resorting to salmon fishing when reindeer herds decline through disease or war
with neighbors is a pattern that has been documented for centuries (Jochelson
1908:472–474; Krupnik 2000). Subsequent shifts in deer populations also pro-
vided opportunities for settled people to take up herding (Vdovin 1973:217–232),
and a large reindeer herd is the traditional mark of wealth in the area of the
Pakhachi, Achavayam, and Apuka rivers.7
Volodya was eager to take me out to spend time at the herd. He missed his
deer and wanted to check up on them. They could not be far; any day now they
would be crossing the river, and there would be a slaughter. Everyone in town
was pining for meat, tired of fish every day. We set off by river, motoring
downstream in a small aluminum outboard motorboat for about half an hour

and then turning up a tributary. The main river is large and swift, navigable for
even large barges carrying tons of coal or other cargo. Volodya deftly navigated
the shallow tributary until the motor began scraping the bottom. He got out in
his hip waders and towed on foot as I poled from the boat. The water became
deeper and we set about starting the motor, not a simple task with the old,
Soviet-built 25-horse. After a few pulls it was clear the sparkplugs needed one of
their twice-daily cleanings. I would have thrown them away and bought new
ones a long time ago, but here, even if they did have the money for new
sparkplugs, there were not any to be found. They make do.
As Volodya was cleaning off the sparkplugs and adjusting the ignition, we
heard a rifle shot from upstream through the woods. “Hunters?” I asked, mildly
concerned about stray bullets flying through the trees along the stream of this
mixed forest-tundra area.
“Probably poachers,” Volodya affirmed.
Five minutes later a man with a rifle over one shoulder and a lasso coiled over
the other appeared on the bank. “Hello. Where are you going?” he asked.
“To you!” we exclaimed in unison. He was not a poacher but one of the reindeer
herders with the private herd. We had expected to hike for a day and a half,
lugging a tent across the swampy tundra and spending the night alone, without
a rifle, in bear country (all of Kamchatka is bear country). Volodya introduced
me to the young man named Slava, who was in his twenties (see Figure 1). He
led us to the nearby campsite he and another herder, Viktor, were setting up in
advance of the herd. As we drank tea, Volodya asked about the news of the herd.
They were planning to cross the river the next day, and they had already sent a
man into the village to announce the slaughter.
Volodya and I went to go find the herd, farther up the valley. I had to work
hard to keep up with Volodya over the rough terrain. Kamchatka tundra is bog
in summer, punctuated with rugged pine bush-covered hills. Volodya walked
with an unhurried, steady pace that covered ground quickly. As soon as we left
the herders’ camp, I heard him making noises I had never heard before, a breathy
song of whistles and heavy breathing. I was puzzled, and I thought that maybe
breathing like that helped his measured walk, so I tried to imitate his rhythm.
We stopped every five minutes to scan the landscape with binoculars, looking
for the herd. After half an hour, Volodya spied deer on the ridge to our left,
making their way along higher ground. As we got closer I heard a cacophony of
grunts, snorts, and snapping tendons. Although it was a small herd, less than
1,500 head, it was never quiet. Even while resting, the deer seemed to be talking
to each other and rustling about. It was a calm, unhurried kind of rustling,
however. The men constantly whistle as they walk, loud and soft, as a sort of
conversation with the deer, who as a herd are also constantly making noises,
talking among themselves and maybe answering the men’s sounds. While Kam-
chatkan domestic deer are too wild to approach closely and touch (unlike Evenki
deer, for example), they are not so wild that they abhor human company.
Volodya is a field consultant after an anthropologist’s dream. From the first
hour we met, he began explaining things to me in great detail with clear language
and answering all of my questions. When we got to the reindeer herd, however,
he did something he had never done before. He began giving me Koryak
vocabulary. In talking about fishing, Volodya’s explanations were always
straightforward, technical descriptions of how things were made and done,
material culture with little symbolic elaboration. “This is how we weight nets.
We set them this way because of the following reasons,” and so forth. What
mattered were fillets on the drying rack for food and caviar in the bucket for cash.
Figure 1
Slava with the rifle he carved and assembled on the tundra. Photo by Alexander King.
“I am learning, too,” Volodya explained to me, as he had left the Soviet sovkhoz
only two years before. Fishing is loaded with spiritual significance for native
people in Kamchatka. Other people in Srednie Pakhachi could go on all afternoon
about the significance of fish and proper ritual form for cleaning fish so as not to
offend the spirits. Volodya’s spiritual life was not on the river, was not with fish.
It was on the tundra, with the deer.
“In Chukchi, in our own language,” he explained, “we call the deer in front
‘yanothoy.’ ”8 We walked across the front of the herd and up the hill. Volodya’s
whistles were now intermixed with calls and other kinds of grunts. He was
talking to the deer, reassuring them, telling them where he was and where they
should be going. As we went toward the back of the herd, Volodya continued
his vocabulary lesson: “The deer that are always in the back, coming up last, are
called ‘yavalahoy.’ ” Behind these deer we saw the herder, Volokha. Tall and
confident, he was about ten years Volodya’s junior, the younger brother of
Valentina and her sister, Tanya. He was making noises similar to Volodya’s, also
talking to the deer.
I asked, “Who owns the deer?”
“The whole village; each person may have ten to 70 deer.” Individuals own
deer, and Volokha was pointing out yearlings that belonged to Volodya’s daugh-
ter, his wife, and other household members. The herd moves and eats for two
hours, then rests for an hour, and thus it goes around the clock. After half an hour
or so, they were ready for a rest and settled down at the foot of a ridge.
We made tea up on the hill overlooking the deer. Volodya and I got wood as
Volokha collected some final stragglers together with the herd and got water. I
started breaking twigs near a previous campfire, and Volodya told me we had
to move to where we could see the whole herd and the herd could see us. The
deer stay grouped better and are calmer when men are constantly present.
Volodya also pointed out that the smoke from our fire helped ward off flies and
mosquitoes, although it seemed as if this particular campfire was too high up the
ridge for that. Volokha asked me, “Would you like some Korean noodles? It says
on the packet, ‘Ready in three minutes.’ ” Packages of instant ramen noodles in
Styrofoam bowls from South Korea had become ubiquitous since the mid-1990s.
He broke up the noodles into small pieces, adding only enough water to the
Styrofoam bowl to soften them up without broth, so we could eat them on bread.
After we were again on the move, Viktor came to relieve Volokha, and we
headed back to the tent. On the way, Volodya pointed to a pretty area near the
stream and said, “Tanya and I had tea here two years ago when we were
collecting cloud berries.” I was amazed at how he could identify and remember
every bend in every little stream. To me it was wilderness. To him it was where
he lived.9
We had cold fish soup for dinner. I asked Slava, “Who pays you?”
“We work without pay,” he answered. I asked him if it was fun work.
“Yeah, it’s fun work,” he answered sarcastically. Then he continued seriously,
“These last deer are everything. Without deer we are not people.10 Without deer
there is no culture, nothing.”
Herding deer is not only a way of life, it provides the core meaning for
Chawchu existence. I had noticed that many native people living in the regional
capital, Palana, often talked about reindeer and the problems confronting herd-
ers. It seemed to be a much bigger issue than demography or economics would
warrant; these people also derive much meaning for their lives from their
reindeer-herding relatives, even if vicariously. Slava’s remark summed up the
Chukchi and Koryak understanding of reindeer herding as holographic; herding
is a trope not only of identity but of native conceptions of self-respect, their own
humanity.
The next day had been the day of the river crossing and slaughter at the private
herd. I got up just after the others at 6:30. I had my usual cup of instant coffee
and piece of bread for breakfast before going off with Volokha to watch the herd.
We walked along the ridge and found the herd down below, resting. Viktor told
us the night was uneventful.
A strong wind came up with rain varying between drizzle. I went back to camp
and fetched raincoats for myself and Volokha. As the herd began to move, we
went along the ridge and then down the bank. The deer wanted to go around the
ridge and back toward the west, but Volokha kept them going east. He pointed
out different deer and explained the color terms and antler shapes in Koryak, as
Volodya had done the day before. Unfortunately, I could not write anything
down in that wind and rain.
After Volokha and I had finished our midmorning tea break, men from town
began showing up. Volokha slowly moved the herd toward the river. Herding
deer is a subtle business, with more whistling and walking than shouting and
running.11 By the time the herd was in the woods and near the beach, some young
friends of Volokha’s arrived with some spirits, “American Spirit” (the label read
“Made in Tennessee: For human consumption” and “Export Only”). We had
three cups between us, drinking in turns. My black plastic camping mug drew
comments. I ended up leaving it in Volokha’s pack that day, and it became part
of the herders’ dishes. The alcohol was nasty stuff, but I choked down a small
shot to be polite. We followed the deer through the trees. Several dozen men and
families had shown up and were helping to gather the deer on the shore. They
were all experienced herders and owners, so it was calm and matter-of-fact.
The herd ran back and forth on the beach several times. People had cleaned
the driftwood off a section of the river bank so no one would trip and fall, and
the space was confined so the herd never went far in any one direction. Finally,
one man got the deer he wanted to slaughter, and they hauled it off. They
slaughtered the deer as an offering before the crossing so that everything would
be fine. Volodya told me later that afternoon, “It is important to slaughter a deer
before the crossing. Once a sovkhoz herd leaped right into the water and swam
across before they had a chance to slaughter a deer, and a man drowned that day.”
I crossed the river with Volokha and his friends in a rowboat. We had more
shots of spirits in the woods near where the deer swam ashore. After judging the
speed of the current and the width of the river, Volokha could tell exactly where
they would land and was ready for them to arrive. That side of the river was
where Lower Old Pakhachi had been, and there are still some ring mounds
marking the location of long-abandoned, semi-underground houses, and the
treeless track of a former road through the woods. Volokha told me that “shore
Koryaks” (Nymylani) used to live there. I asked what happened to them. “They
mixed with the others. Everyone is all mixed up.”
Indigenous northeast Asians have been highly mobile for a long time. People
move from one place and marry those from another; they have kin and friends
in many villages over a wide area. It is impossible to provide a set of consistent
and rigorous distinctions between Chukchi and Koryaks, as Bogoraz (1904–09)
and Jochelson (1908) point out throughout their work. These ethnic terms refer
to names or identities and not groups. I find the terms problematic for general-
izing about cultural or even linguistic differences between communities. Every
area, village, or even family may have its particular customs or cultural tradi-
tions. While one may want to label particular customs as Chukchi, Koryak, or
Even, one cannot identify bounded groups such as the Koryak or the Chukchi
persisting unchanged in culture or language through time. People like Volokha
and his sister Tanya were aware of this in their comments on their own and
others’ ethnic identity, describing ethnicity in a situational and flexible manner.
The deer ran toward the old town site, and a few were running around and
over the mounds and afterward turned away from the river. Then my wife,
Christina, arrived from town with Volodya, who had gone back to town to fetch
her and his family. We went off with Volodya and Volokha toward the herd.
They had to bring the deer back toward a large flat area where the slaughter
would take place. I thought they would turn them around and send them right
back, but one cannot turn a reindeer herd on a dime. We slowly herded them in
a large circle, over a hill, and then back down to a large meadow just above Old
Srednie Pakhachi, as the cold, Kamchatkan drizzle soaked everyone.
Slaughtering a private reindeer was a process I witnessed many times and

videotaped (at the behest of my hosts).12 Two or three men lasso the deer and
bring it over. People associated with the deer—its owners and others who will
eat it—walk clockwise around the animal and then stand facing east for a
moment. Then a man stabs the deer in the heart with a spear or large homemade
knife. After the deer is dead, the woman in charge of butchering the animal takes
a little blood out of the wound and scatters it in all directions as an offering to
the spirits. She then takes fresh water and ritually washes the wound and the
head of the animal, speaking soothing words to its soul, asking forgiveness and
explaining their need for food. A pillow of freshly cut branches is placed under
the head to show respect to the deer, and then several women start skinning at
each leg and under the chin. Tanya cut off the antlers with a hatchet, and set the
skull aside. Later we ate the brains raw (along with liver and other choice pieces),
and I was surprised at the nice flavor and pleasant texture. They removed the
stomach and emptied the contents about two meters from the head of the deer.
When the deer was completely skinned, they set the carcass on freshly cut
branches. Organs were removed, innards cleaned, and so on. Two legs and some
organs were given away to the women who helped. I was told that they may take
what they want. The legs were separated at the knee, leaving the meaty thigh on
the carcass. Tanya added the gallbladder, the antler skin (too old and dry to eat
in July), and other inedible bits to the pile of stomach contents. The antlers,
connected by a small piece of skull, were carefully set up over this pile. These
actions demonstrate respect for the deer and its spirit, so that it will go to the land
of the dead in a proper manner. In the next world it will be born, live with the
herd of deceased ancestors, die, and be sent back to this world, returning to the
herd and increasing the family holdings of deer in this world.
I went to the campfire to warm up and attempt to dry my socks in the rain. I
thought about the scene I had just witnessed in contrast to the slaughtering of
cows at my parents’ small farm. It was not less gory, but it seemed less gruesome.
Instead of being a cold, mechanical routine, I saw the deer slaughtered with love
and respect. Every deer is connected to an individual owner, and the physical
consumption of reindeer flesh by humans is organized by the spiritual connec-
tions between deer and humans. The relationship is unequal—humans are
superior—but it is symbiotic. Deer rely on people to take care of them, lead them
to good pastures, protect them from predators, and pay proper respect to their
spirits. People rely on the deer for food, for protection from the winter cold, and
to provide meaning in their universe—to be their cultural foundation.
In an hour or less, Tanya came with some meat and put it on the fire to cook.
She mentioned that all the others just put their meat away and took off. “People
are no good anymore,” she commented. There was plenty for all who were
standing in the vicinity. I got a big piece, as did everyone else. They do not boil
it for long, so the meat was tough, but very tasty, not at all like wild game. It was
the freshest meat I have ever had, cooked within a couple of hours after butchering.
Without Deer We Are Not People
When Slava told me, “Without deer we are not people. Without deer there is
no culture, nothing,” I wrote it down right away. People in Kamchatka expect
ethnographers to take notes and make recordings. His choice of words, liudi
(people), not narod (a people, folk), is interesting. Later I heard this statement
echoed by an elder in the village (pictured on the cover of this journal), who also
used the word liudi. Without the reindeer, these Chukchi think of themselves as
something less than people. The deer provide an index of traditional culture, a
direct, physical connection between practices and the meanings of those prac-
tices. Of course, much of the way deer are herded has changed during the 20th
century, and thus the traditions change, associated with elders’ knowledge and
habits. Elders here are an age-grade and not a generation. Undomesticated
animals live in their own societies, separated from humans. Deer are socialized
into the human world like no other nonhuman entity. Every individual deer has
an individual owner, and deer are gathered into herds in a manner parallel to
human social organization in its networks of extended families and other coresi-
dents. Traditionally, when a person or family changed residence, they took their
deer with them to join another herd.
With Soviet collectivization, people were forced to give up most of their deer
(if they did not slaughter them in spite) (Forsyth 1992:297, 337). I had difficulty
learning the history of the private herd from people in Pakhachi: “Some people
just took their deer deeper into the tundra,” I was told (cf. Anderson 2000:47).
Eventually, I learned that most collective farms in Kamchatka allowed each
herder to own a few deer, which ran together with a sovkhoz herd (cf. Klokov
2000; Konstantinov and Vladimirova 2002), except in Srednie Pakhachi and
Achavayam. These two villages organized a separate herd of private deer, which
was limited by sovkhoz administrators but managed by the owners among
themselves. The herd had been very large in the late 1980s, more than 5,000 head
of deer. The sovkhoz director forced them to slaughter more than 2,000 head in
one year, claiming that the private owners were too rich and degrading pastures.
The 1990s has seen the elimination of all subsidies for reindeer herding (espe-
cially well-paying jobs that allowed families to pool cash to provision the people
herding the private herd), a rise in predation, and an increase in poaching. By the
time I arrived for my second stay in Srednie Pakhachi the following spring, the
private herd had declined to fewer than 1,000 head of deer.
April 1998—Spring Corral

I traveled to Koryak villages on the coast that fall and winter. In the early spring
I worked with native intelligentsia in the regional capital, Palana. As April
approached, I made arrangements to return to Srednie Pakhachi. The annual
corrals were starting, and I wanted to see the one for the private herd. Right after
arriving by the weekly helicopter flight, I got out the pictures and the video from
the previous summer and watched with my hosts the videotapes of fishing on
the river and the summer’s slaughter.
Volodya’s friend Dima commented, “When a deer falls on its rear after being
stabbed, that means that someone will die. If it falls on its left side [wound side],
that is not a problem, as long as it is not butt-first.”
Volodya laughed and said, “We try to get them to fall right, but they fall as
they will.”
Tanya elaborated, “When children come home from school or someone comes
from far away, it is proper to slaughter a deer in their honor, so that everything
will be good, but now we have so few deer, it is hard.” Also the herd is usually
a long way from town, where most of the people are.
“Why do you look to the east during the ritual before slaughtering?” I asked.
“To pray,” they answered.
“To whom?”
They were not sure. “The sun?” one person ventured. “We don’t know,” was
the definitive answer with laughter.
While watching my video of people dressing a deer, I asked, “To whom exactly
did that deer you slaughtered first belong?”
“Us,” Dima informed me.

“I understand. Was it a family deer, or was it connected to a person?”
“Our second daughter Natasha is the owner. When the father of Anna [Dima’s
wife] died, his deer were divided among the grandkids, and our second daughter
got most of the deer.” Dima added, “It used to be connected to marriage
prospects. A girl with many deer had an easier time finding a husband.”
Later that evening, Volodya came into my room to look at the computer and
see my work. I explained how I use the notebooks to make notes while people
are talking, like during the video watching, and then type it up later. He
mentioned the praying, saying it was not really praying. “We try to do things
like our ancestors did. Of course, it is nothing like the same, but what we do is
not bad.” Wagner (2001:22) found that the Daribi in New Guinea also could not
explain the meaning of ritual performances when he inquired. The maintaining
of traditional rituals is not remembering their meanings but continuing the
practices. When the ethnographer demands the meaning of such actions, ordi-
nary people feel inadequate, put on the spot. Elders knowledgeable in such
religious esoterica explained to me that the tundra includes a plethora of spirits
and that one needs to be respectful to all of them, including to spirits unknown
or forgotten. The east is connected with the rising sun so “sun” was a logical
guess, but Volodya, Tanya, Dima, and Anna knew that Chukchi and Koryaks are
not sun worshippers. The east’s connection to the rising sun is with birth, life,
and hope for a good future. Addressing the west is connected to death and
misfortune and is done only to converse with the recently deceased and avert a
specific misfortune or with evil intentions, that is, doing someone else harm.
After breakfast the next day Tanya put a double reindeer skin parka over me
for the ride from the village to the corral for the private herd. I was warm on the
sled behind the Soviet-made Buran snowmobile as we traveled on the now frozen
river in −30 degrees Celsius. We turned off the river and found a couple of tents.
Farther up the valley, we found a group of six tents: five in a line and one the
herders had set up out in front. The tent had a square European design with a
peaked roof, making it easier to transport and set up than the traditional round
yayanaga.13 The floor was covered with birch branches. The door was to the south,
a wood stove to the west of the door, a window opposite the stove to the east.
The sleeping area was in back, but people also spread skins out along the sides.
Branches went up vertically to support the roof between the side beam and the
peak beam. The walls were sewn reindeer skin.
I visited a couple of tents, talking more about Alaska and Indians than about
Koryaks and Chukchi. People often asked me if there are Chukchi in Alaska,
because they know that the two areas used to be one. A tractor arrived soon after
we did, pulling a ten-meter-long steel sledge with two heavy fur tents and about
twenty people. In nine tents there were almost one hundred people, some visiting
from other villages. I went to the herder’s tent and Volokha was sleeping. When
I had seen him earlier that day, he was drunk. He seemed happy to see me, but
he also wanted to continue drinking. He woke up and introduced me to his new
wife, Rita, also drunk. She was his second wife and worked at the private herd,
too. He wanted to go to town with me to get more vodka, but I insisted that I did
not want to “kvasat’ ” (get pickled). Valeri (Tanya and Volodya’s son-in-law)
laughed, “Correctly said.”
On the first day of the corral activities, we got up at first light, before the sun
was over the hill. People sleep fully clothed. They have a change of clothing, and
they put on warm fur socks, boots, parka, a whole reindeer-fur suit. They sleep
on winter deer skins. Some also cover themselves with blankets. In the morning
they change into the second set of fur clothes and let the others dry out during
the day.
That day they brought the castrated bucks and sled deer near the camp. A few
castrates were lassoed for slaughter, and about a dozen women began dressing
the deer. Volokha pointed at the tethered sled deer and said to me, “We are
nothing. It is for them, for the children. I work so that there will be at least a few
left for the children.”
“Do you want a slug?” he asked, proffering his bottle.
“No.”
He got up and walked off. Heavy drinking is common across the north.
Especially at festive occasions, people shared a few bottles of vodka and I usually
joined in, even if I knew I would suffer the next day. Volokha was a typical
reindeer herder in this respect. After months in the tundra with the herd, he was
notorious for carousing in the village for several days or weeks, then heading
back to the herd for several more months of hard work.14
The second day of the corral saw the first of three deer-sled races. This one was
sponsored by Sergei Kerguvye in honor of his daughter Yulia’s first birthday.
Before the race, his household conducted a ritual offering (enelwit) to the fire and
other spirits, so that “everything will be fine.” A fire was set up on the level above
the tents where the corral area was. Blood soup was scattered in all directions by
several women and racers. Then a knot of dried intestine was “speared” and cut
up and distributed to be eaten, as a substitute for a live deer. People ate the rest
of the soup, and enelwit was fed to the fire. One grandmother said some words
quietly in Koryak while others looked on. Later, one of the grandmothers
explained, “All of our life comes from the fire.” Enelwit is food for the spirits, a
mixture of rabbit fur and reindeer fat. Koryak and Chukchi cosmology is similar
to other Siberian peoples’ cosmologies: the fire is a doorway to worlds above and
below the middle plane that we live on. It is used to send offerings to spirits and
send the deceased into the next world, and shamans and other powerful nonhu-
man persons can use the fire as a gateway to the other worlds.15
First prize in the races was an otter skin; second, a seal skin plus fishing gear;
and third place won a collection of store items (gloves, earrings, etc.). Elders
participated (see Figure 2), but younger men were the ones who placed. Later I
learned that the winner did not keep his prize but was obligated to give it to
someone who asked for it based on kinship claims. A man visiting from Khailino
village to the north won, and Volokha came in second.
After lunch they moved the herd back to where the corral was set up, and
Tanya and the other women of our tent took a shovel-full of fire over to the area
for the enelwit. It was the same enelwit as the race offering. I ate the bit of intestine
offered me. There was more soup to eat, but I did not ask for any, and none was
offered.16 Immediately after that, when they were ready to move the herd into
the corral, a big wind started up and blew the cloth “fence” around. It was useless.
The wind was going to knock it down, so they took it down and postponed the
corral till the next day. Everyone was very disappointed.
I sat in our tent listening to several women talk. Like everyone else here, they
wondered if there were Chukchi left in Alaska. I was surprised at this recurrent
theme and said no, just Eskimos and Indians, as Kolya Evnito came in and sat
down. He was surprised, “At one time Alaska and Chukotka were together and
our ancestors lived together.” I answered that that time was about 12,000 years
ago. This did not seem to be relevant information. They joked again about
relatives in Alaska. Kolya said, “My daughter is metis.”
“How is that?” I asked.
Figure 2
Srednie Pakhachi elders prepare for the first race of the spring corral. Photo by
Alexander King.
“My wife is Eskimo and I am Chukchi. She probably has relatives in Alaska.
We should take our daughter to Alaska to marry an Eskimo there, so we would
have Alaskan relatives to visit.” Laughter all around. The Russian word metis in
Kamchatka can refer to anyone of mixed parentage, and it echoes Volokha’s
comments the summer before about everyone being “all mixed up.” People are
familiar with the academic ethnographic labels for people and ethnic groups, but
they see that these categories are rarely actualized in peoples’ lives as simplisti-
cally as they are described in ethnographic writings.
As another woman came in and sat down, Kolya said, “She is my father’s sister.
The last of our kulako,” using the Koryak plural on the Russian word kulak. A
kulak (literally “fist”) designated a rich peasant and member of the exploiting
class under the Soviets, who applied the category to wealthy reindeer herders,
shamans, and even heads of households. Anna commented that only now are
they finding out about what the Soviets really did: “They took everyone’s things,
burned yarango [large round skin tents], killed people. Those people weren’t
kulaks. It is from their own hard work that they were rich.”
The topic of Americans came up. A woman remembered her father talking
about fairs. “The Americans would come with all this great stuff: teapots, beads,
cooking pots, rifles. Everyone would get ready for the fair, preparing skins and
other things to trade. We even have a flour sack from America. Of course, it is
empty now [laughter]. The old people always had good words for Americans.”
Anna said, “One day when I was a girl in school, the teacher was going on
about evil Americans, imperialists, capitalists, and so on. I said that on the
contrary the old people have only good words for Americans. She put me in the
corner [facing the wall].” She laughed.
I asked about the term Chavchuven, “What people [narod] is it?”
“It is not a people at all. It is what Koryaks call Chukchi, ‘rich, rich in reindeer.’ ”
All present agreed on this, but others elaborated that it could refer to any kind
of wealthy person: “They could be rich in cars. It just happens that deer are our
wealth.” This throw-away statement may contradict Slava’s assertion (and my
argument) about the importance of reindeer. This contradiction, however, is
situated in a different context: the classification of indigenous people into ethnic
groups by Russian ethnographers, and the consequent valuations of communi-
ties and individuals as falling short of being “real Chukchi” or “real Koryaks,”
based on the disjuncture between people’s lives and the dictates of the classifi-
cation system.17
As I wrote notes, Volodya’s brother repaired a broken riding switch. He held
a small stick next to his knife blade to form a plane and shaved long strips off the
long branch to make a five-foot, flexible switch, on the end of which he tied a
carved walrus tooth, an effective goad when driving a sledge. Chukchi and
Koryaks never ride on a deer or burden it with a pack. That is a sin, they say,
because it is both physically grueling and morally offensive to the deer.18
Most of the third day was spent in the corral. Inside it consisted of a small oval
space, about twenty feet long, defined by several panels of board lashed together.
A narrow opening at one end led to a larger oval space about one hundred yards
long defined by a fence of burlap suspended from poles. As long as the deer could
not see the open space behind the fence, they thought it was impermeable and
did not challenge its physical integrity. The back of the burlap fence was open,
and several men quietly herded the deer toward us. I was sitting with several
men in a line along one side of the lowered burlap fence. There were many
herders along the back of the herd to keep the deer from breaking formation and
running off in the wrong direction. An elder told me, “Sometimes it’s quick.
Other times it takes a long time; the herd runs away.” The men in the rear slowly
advanced and the herd moved into the corral, albeit anxiously. I noticed that the
rear part of the herd started churning counterclockwise.
When the herd was inside, we jumped up with the cloth wall and closed off
the opening. Men set up poles and anchored lines. The herd panicked. With huge
eyes, the whole mass started to turn counterclockwise as the deer ran in a circle.
A herder told me, “They always go that way.”
Another said, “Once a month [i.e., rarely] they turn clockwise.”
“They are closing off the heart side.”
We stood and watched for fifteen minutes or so, letting them calm down.
About four hundred deer were churning like a typhoon around Volokha who
stood in the center of this storm, looking for the deer his sister Tanya wanted to
slaughter (see Figure 3). Most of the meat is eaten or shared by the household
that owns the deer, although some portions of meat are sold or traded for goods.
Then, groups of eight to 15 deer were herded into the small pen of board
fencing for counting. Inside, ear tags were placed or replaced. Deer have ear
notches and tags, but the tags fall out. There were three or four occasions when
the ownership of a deer was in question. Ears were closely examined for mark-
ings, and the coloration was also discussed. Each family notches the ears in a
particular manner (analogous to a cattle brand), but sometimes careful inspection
is required to be sure of the form (cf. Jochelson 1908:492). At this time young
bucks were castrated using a small knife. When done properly there is no
bleeding, but it is difficult, and few people can master it.19
All deer were tallied on a master sheet and on owners’ sticks. A man carves a
square peg with a round head on one end, thus resembling the anthropomorphic
sacred fireboards used to start a fire with a fire drill. Notches are made along each
corner for the different classes of deer: bucks/sled-deer, does, fawns, steers.
There were kids and grandmas inside the corral, sitting and standing inside the
fence. With a dozen reindeer with antlers moving in the tight space, it got chaotic
Figure 3
Volokha looking for his sister’s deer. Photo by Alexander King.
at times, especially with several deer on the ground being tagged or castrated.
Men would form a line and close in, and then the deer would run in front of them
in a panic. It seemed hazardous to me, but no one got hurt, and people rarely do.
At the end of the day there were about twenty deer left, and they decided it would
be faster to lasso deer individually in the large area. At first they tried one or two
at a time, then lassos were flying everywhere in all directions. Elders were
swearing at younger men casting long shots. Ropes got tangled. Deer scampered
as lassos sailed across one another. A deer running toward me was lassoed and
stopped just four feet away. A grandmother was working on a deer with her son,
tagging an ear. Just as they were about to release him, a lasso came flying out and
hit her, cinching around the end of her scarf. She was there sitting on the ground
in the middle, scolding the careless young man as deer were running panicked
all around her.
The second race was sponsored by Georgi Panteleievich on the third day. It
was a race for young deer, two year olds. This made it exciting because they are
not fully trained. At the last stretch, which went across the front of the encamp-
ment, two sleds veered off into wild directions at the last minute, as the deer
decided on their own to go a different way. Volokha came in first, and the prize
was a fishing net and skin. The other prizes included a small seal skin, store-
bought work gloves, fishhooks, and fishing line. When I asked Georgi why he
sponsored the race, he said, “Just because,” adding that there must be races every
year at the corral. Jochelson (1908:87) compares reindeer races among Koryaks
to ancient Greek games, with all of the religious and political implications.
I asked Volodya’s friend Dima about motives for sponsoring a race. He
explained, “People have many different motives for setting up a race. The first
otter I caught, I announced that I would put it up as a prize for a race. The same
thing with the first wolverine I caught, so that I would have success in the future.
People sponsor a race so that they will have good fortune,” he concluded. People
in Kamchatka use the Russian word udacha, usually translated as “luck,” to
express a concept that has little to do with chance. One has good fortune in the
future because of proper actions in the past; first hunts are significant and require
special recognition. Hunts succeed, the herd and people prosper because the
spiritual world is in order. This order rests on humans paying the proper respect
to different spiritual powers and personae.
Native people’s concern about reindeer made a lot more sense after four days
at the corral. In Palana many people bring up the problem of the shrinking herds
in conversation, in public meetings, and in the press. Now I understood that the
people’s concern was not about the cash value of reindeer meat in stores, nor
even subsistence. It was about the spiritual relationships that organized their
universe and their personal and cultural identities, their sense of value as human
beings. Koryaks who work in the Russian bureaucracy know that they are still
Koryak because there are deer at the herd that belong to them. They may see the
herd less than once a year, but they are secure in the knowledge that they
participate in the traditional relationship of deer and owner, if only vicariously.
When native culture is the topic of conversation, they use personal pronouns and
make specific references to their childhood. Natives who do not have these “deer
in the bank,” so to speak, talk about native culture more abstractly, even quoting
Bogoraz or Soviet ethnographers. Still, they often invoke “elders” or “herders”
out “in the tundra” or “in the north” (north of Palana) as loci of their traditional
culture, which is their spiritual home, if not always physical.
I still had many questions about the details of the relationship between people,
deer, and spirits. After five days of working and writing in town, I went back to
the private herd for a couple of weeks to observe and participate in the herders’
life and work in the tundra.
Spring Work at the Private Herd

To reach the private herd we traveled by reindeer sled. I rode on Rita’s sled
(see Figure 4), and it was exhilarating, with the soft sounds of hooves and runners
over snow—such a contrast to the loud, smelly snowmobile ride to the corral a
week before. We stopped for a break at a sacred rock on the river. My companions
laid several broken cigarettes on the ice, and I laid down some gum as an offering.
They actually suggested this as I was pulling it out, and did not seem to think it
Figure 4
Traveling to the private herd on the back of Rita’s sled. Photo by Alexander King.
was funny as Valeri did the previous summer when I threw a couple of pieces
into the river as we motored by in the boat. We stopped for supper about two
hours later. Volokha asked if Slava had any offering, and he gave him a little
plastic bag. I asked what it was, and Volokha told me it was enelwit as he handed
it to me. I opened the bag and fed the fire with the mixture of rabbit fur and deer
fat. Slava said, “Whoa, that’s a lot.”
Volokha answered, “It’s fine. Now give some to the earth.” I tossed a little bit
onto the snow nearby. He scolded, “You shouldn’t throw it, but scrape the snow
away and lay it on the earth.” I did that, and he explained, “We throw only to
dogs. You don’t want the spirits to take offense.”
I had brought four packets of Korean instant noodles. We read the ingredients
as we waited for the water to boil. The last one said, “Artificial meat from its own
protein.” Volokha pointed this out.
I said, “So here we are in the tundra, reindeer herders eating artificial meat.”
Slava laughed and said, “You can write that in National Geographic when you
get home.”
We continued traveling after dinner, but the left deer of our sled eventually
stopped pulling. He ignored the switch, and we lagged behind. The others waited
for us, and Slava traded places with Rita. He said, “The deer is not tired, he is just
quitting on us. They do that, the bad ones do. Just wait till he lies down, then
we’ll really be fucked (Russian poebalis’).”20 Around 9:00 p.m. he sat down in the
twilight. Slava got ready to tie him to one of the lumps that form in the tundra
and leave him behind, but the deer stood up at the last minute. Slava put on my
snowshoes, which I had ordered out of the Cabela’s catalog. The aluminum
tubing, plastic tops, and ice-gripping spikes had engendered debate about manu-
factured Canadian snowshoes versus Koryak wood and sealskin ones, and Slava
was eager to test out the Canadian ones. He walked and I rode with the rifle that
he had been carrying over his shoulder. The deer sat periodically, eventually
every ten meters. A couple of times Slava was ready to tie the deer up for the
night. It was really dark and snowing—white with black shadows here and there.
Once he stopped to examine a tall, dark shape on the ridge with his binoculars.
“Goddammit! In a month we’ll have to worry about fucking bears,” he muttered
as he replaced the binoculars.
After an hour or so, Slava took the switch, and every time the deer sat, he
whipped him until he stood back up. “You have to be careful not to hit the
kidneys.”21 This scene was often repeated. Sometimes a prod from the snow-
shoes’ spikes got him up, or a couple of times the first taps from the switch.
Although it was totally dark, Slava knew exactly where we were. We reached the
tent about 2:00 a.m. When Valeri came in the next afternoon, he asked about my
trip. I answered, “We arrived at 2:00 a.m. I never knew that deer can break down,”
using the Russian verb usually reserved for machine breakdowns. He chuckled
as he nodded in agreement.
As I wrote notes in the afternoon of April 21, Slava was using an axe to rough
out a birch log into a rifle stock. He had carved one last fall but broke it just behind
the trigger when he smacked a dog attacking a deer during the corral. “The dog
is still whole, but the rifle broke,” he said. He cut a four-foot log about six inches
in diameter with a saw, and all the other work was with an axe and knife, finished
with a rounded chisel. He had it done in about a week, working on it during free
time in camp (see Figure 1).
During lunch I asked Slava about moving camp: “We do it less in winter, more
in warmer times. It depends on the speed of the herd. In winter the herd moves
slowly, digging in the snow, hunting for food. Sometimes they are in one spot
for a month; in spring more often. Summer every day, everything is green, and
they are constantly on the move.” When there is snow, they can hitch deer to a
sled and ride to the herd to relieve the man on watch, so they need to move the
large, heavy reindeer-skin tent less often. Soon they were going to switch to the
canvas tent, which is easier to transport.
In the morning they had to round up sled deer. I tried to help keep the deer in
place while they were lassoing several others to tie up. Four ran down a draw
below the tent. After they had lassoed all they needed, I asked Volokha if the deer
in the draw would come back by themselves.
“What’s down there?”
“Four,” I said.
“Need to go get them,” he said, walking my way. I volunteered, and he said
fine. I walked down there, and the deer moved up the draw. Melting ice kept
them from crossing the stream, although there was only an inch of water over
very thick ice. Finally, they crossed and went up the other side and back toward
the other sled deer. I was working hard to walk through the deep snow. I came
back to the tent with my jacket off and shirt open. “Hot, Alex?” Volokha asked.
I felt like a wimp, beat after that little walk.
Slava returned from watch at the herd at 11:30. “I fell asleep as the sun came
out. I sat to boil tea and fell asleep. A wolf went by right before dawn, but I
couldn’t see it well enough to shoot. Need Terminator eyes and then there would
be no problem.” After lunch I went with Slava as he returned to the herd to check
on calving does.
With the deer of my sled hitched to the back of Slava’s sled, we traveled along
a tractor road from the tent to the herd. We came up to the rearmost deer, stopped,
and got off the sleds. We slowly drove the deer east, up the valley and across a
stream into new pasture. We were along the south side of a river. I asked how
often they let the tundra rest to let the reindeer moss grow back. “It takes 20 years
for reindeer moss to grow. It varies, sometimes two, four, or five years. We travel
over some areas every year. The other side of the valley doesn’t have yagel
[Russian for “reindeer moss”] because it is a corridor for the third and fifth
sovkhoz herds.” Two years ago they traveled over the area we were in now.
“Land is scarce,” Slava said.
Four calves were born that morning and several more during the day. Alto-
gether, Slava cut the ears of 12 deer. The following morning Volokha cut four
more. Spring means a lot of work for the herders. They need to keep a close watch
on pregnant does, and they help if need be. The day a calf is born they have to
catch it and notch the ears according to the owner, following the pattern on the
doe’s ears. The herders know every pattern and its owner.
During tea before we left to return to camp, I asked Volokha about spirits. He
was finishing off the last chunk of moose meat and said, “We throw away only
moose and bear bones. Deer bones must be burned or put into the water.”
“Why?”
“To honor the spirits.”
“Does each deer have its own soul, or is there just one in general?”
“Deer have a soul like people.”
“What happens after death?”
“They go to the upper world, just like people. The upper world is exactly the
same as this one. When a person dies, some of his deer are slaughtered so that
he will have them in the next world. If the deer slaughtered at his funeral are not
his, then he will be poor. Likewise, if he is cremated with someone else’s clothing,
then in the next world he will walk naked.”
At the corral I was told about what happens when one slaughters deer in the
name of a recently deceased person but not belonging to that person. The antlers
are set up, and if they fall before a year has passed, then the deer belonged to
someone else and did not go to the intended person. Examples included the
antlers of the deer of a certain person’s father, which had stood for five years
already. Another said that the antlers of her mother’s deer had stood for six years.
Later I learned that the antlers are often knocked over by bears or other animals.
This is not considered to be a random event but a directed attack on the theft of
another person’s deer, which is offensive to the spirit world, which acts through
the bear in this world.
One day several people arrived at the herd. One man, Teriocha (Sergei), came
back from visiting the first sovkhoz brigade. Valeri returned with Oksana (Tanya
and Volodya’s oldest daughter) and their one-year-old son, Yurik. An elder,
Vitya, stopped for the night on his way out fishing upstream. Oleg went to watch
the herd, and the tent had eight adults and a baby in it. The weather had quieted
down around 8:00 p.m. The day before it had hailed again, and we had a little
rain mixed with snow. We prepared for the first phase of moving camp. With the
move, we switched to a cloth tent, which was lighter and smaller.
As I wrote notes late in the afternoon of April 25, I was on watch at the herd
with Teriocha. Teriocha had come up from camp at about 1:00 p.m., and we had
tea, brought up the laggards, and moved to the new spot where we now were,
closer to the herd. He put at least three kilos of meat into the pot for us to eat. He
had run out of cigarettes and was using newspaper to roll tobacco from leftover
butts while the meat cooked.
Yesterday I drove a sled for the first time. Slava and I were up for watch, and
Valeri got two of his best deer for me and showed me how to harness them. I got
the ropes confused a couple of times and dropped or almost dropped a rope
connected to a deer. Valeri chided, “Don’t let go of that or you’ll be walking.”
This was repeated several times. “If you fuck up, the deer will take off without
you. Now watch Slava and do what he does.” Fortunately, my deer were very
well trained and tolerant of my ineptness. We walked the deer down the hill and
then got ready to go at the bottom. Valeri was beside me giving me instructions,
“Don’t put the left rein between the two deer right away because they will think
it’s time to go and they’ll take off without you. Wait until you are on the sled.”
We set off without incident, and I was having a blast. They were good deer and
followed Slava’s sled in an orderly manner. I was nearly high, thinking, “This is
why I’m an anthropologist. No other way would I have experienced this! I even
look like Santa Claus with my red Gore-Tex coat.” We did not let the deer do
much running because Slava was training a juvenile. I followed behind him and
dumped the sled over only once. We met up with Volokha, Rita, and Teriocha,
who were packing up sleds of freshly slaughtered meat for the return to camp.
They gave us some meat and told Slava where to find the herd.
After Slava told me we had arrived, I could not find the herd in the twilight
until he pointed it out to me, right below us, on the next hump of hill. We made
a fire and cooked some of the meat and had tea. We discussed life in America,
music, family. His favorite band is Kino, because he enjoys Viktor Tsoi’s words.
His wife is six years his junior, although their marriage is not legally registered,
but established from the native point of view. He took her off to the herd when
she was 17. They have a three-year-old daughter and a seven-month-old son.
Slava enjoyed high school and his foreign travel during his army service. He
told me about serving in Czechoslovakia in a tank and about traveling with
Volokha to Apuka on the sea coast by sled last winter. It took three days. When
I asked him if he had relatives there, he responded with a gesture that he had
them up to his neck. He was born and raised in Apuka and moved to Srednie
Pakhachi around 1980 with his parents. Slava has relatives over a wide area,
except in one town, where he has only a few. He commented how they lost their
private herd in Apuka. Like others, he blamed them for eating all their deer
themselves and not looking after them properly. Koryaks and Chukchi have
known bad times with deer, and people have lost entire herds during times of
famine. The best people, however, find ways to preserve a viable herd. These are
reindeer people, not like the Nymylans, who live along the sea shore; and a good
person is, by definition, one with many deer.22
Mishap
On April 26 I wrote my notes sitting on a sled in the wind. It was cold. There
was a deer head, with skin, liver, two legs, and a two-day-old calf carcass lying
in front of me. As people had been leaving for their various tasks the morning
before, I asked Volokha what I should do. He said, “Rest, write, sleep, chop
wood.” I figured the last one was the best idea and set off with a sled. I found a
spot with standing deadwood and picked out the driest. I chopped a branch that
was sticking up in my way. Then I chopped down two dead trees and put them
on the sled. I noticed another, really dry one a little farther in. I turned to my right
and stepped onto soft snow, falling forward onto the small branch I had cut
earlier. As I was falling, I saw it was going to hit my side and I pictured a
punctured lung and dying right there in a pool of frothy blood on the snow as I
had seen a deer die when the spear missed the heart and hit the lung. However,
this weak, flabby anthropologist was built more sturdily than he expected. It hit
a rib, and it hurt like hell, but it did not feel broken at first. After a couple minutes
I got my wind back and felt OK. I cut the tree and loaded the sled. Suddenly, I
had no strength at all. My chest and side hurt a lot. I could not breathe and
hobbled to the tent. I lay down in great pain, telling Slava what had happened. I
had a hard time breathing because of the pain, then I could not get enough
oxygen. I panicked or was just in general shock. I was panting hoarsely. Slava,
Oksana, and Rita looked at me worriedly but could do nothing, while I just stared
back at them and tried to breathe. Slava set out a couple of skins in the corner for
me. I could not move all day for the pain in my side and chest.
Volokha came back from watch that evening and commented, “What? Are you
injured? Have to send you back to town. You’ll die in the tundra.” Later I
explained to him what happened. He did not comment.
The next day I still felt very sore. I arose with everyone else but did not do
anything when Valeri and Oleg left to visit the fifth sovkhoz herd. My whole
torso ached and hurt only when I moved. Lying, walking, and sitting did not hurt
me much, but picking something up or moving my upper body was very painful.
I slowly walked to the top of the hill next to the tent and looked around a bit. I
found a spot sheltered from the wind and sat there a while to be alone. My
relationship with the herders was at a nadir. They had rejected me as I was
incapacitated. I did not want sympathy, just some decent company. They were
not telling me stories or volunteering explanations, as they had before I broke
my rib. I felt depressed and unmotivated to work at all.
I came back to the tent and slept for a time. The pain became easier. Slava came
back around noon and told us that a wolf killed two deer and the herd trampled
ten calves. We had tea, and I left with Slava to salvage meat from the kills. I was
thankful he asked for my help, and I took the opportunity to demonstrate my
ability to be a real human being.23 We each controlled a single deer pulling a sled
across the bare tundra as we walked up the ridge. Teriocha was waiting for us
high on the ridge next to one of the carcasses, where he and Slava shared a smoke.
Slava went farther up the hill to fetch the deer he had buried under snow away
from the ravens, while I sat next to the carcass Teriocha had kept from the
scavengers. I was chilled from waiting by the time Slava returned with the
carcass. He set about dressing what was left of the carcass I had guarded from
the ravens. He had ruined his knife blade hacking the antlers off the head of the
deer he had buried, so he asked me for mine. I was not happy about having my
own knife dinged by the hard antlers of the second deer, but I gave it to him.
Since it was dull, the blade was not dented on the antlers. Slava commented on
that later during dinner, and Volokha answered that it was a good knife, despite
Slava’s disparaging remarks earlier. We loaded my sled with the second wolf kill
and went down the hill, avoiding snow so as not to slide into the deer pulling
the sleds. On a snowy patch, I got into trouble with the sled pointing sideways
and downhill from the deer. Slava simply waited at the bottom without offering
help. Men do not ask or offer help when a man is having difficulties but is not in
serious trouble. They let him take care of it himself, which I managed this time.
I moved the sled around and guided it and the deer to the bottom. Slava joked
about getting a nap but did not disparage my ineptness.
We had pea soup for dinner, which was the last of our groceries, aside from
meat, tea, and salt. Volokha and Rita arrived about the same time as Oleg and
Valeri. Volokha and Rita had been taking down the skin tent and packing it up
for transport back to town. Volokha asked if I had healed. I said, “More or less.”
Valeri and Oleg had seen several wolves on their trip to visit the fifth sovkhoz
brigade, who had also run out of groceries. No luck getting any food or tobacco
from them. During dinner Volokha commented about going hungry. I said that
Slava and I went hungry on the ridge all day (for about ten hours). Volokha and
Oleg said that is common. “You go hungry all the time in the tundra. You look
thinner. Many people don’t hold up.”
The day after I arrived I had said that I planned to stay two weeks. Rita’s
response was, “If you hold up.” Now I was not sure if I would hold up since the
combination of difficult conditions, monotonous diet, injury, and less friendly
attitudes from my associates was dispiriting. The exertion on the ridge with Slava
made my torso ache severely the day afterward, and I felt physically and
psychologically beaten up. Briggs (1970) also describes the torture of being
shunned for improper behavior among a small group of Inuit living on the
tundra. I tried to avoid her mistakes by pooling all my food with the group and
avoiding outbursts. People had described to me how elders shunned children
who were behaving improperly instead of scolding them as Russians do. Speak-
ing Russian with an accent and Koryak barely at all, I seemed childlike, and my
constant ineptness must have been more annoying than amusing, but they never
gave up on me completely. One evening Valeri and Slava invited me to eat raw
bone marrow. Although I prefer it cooked, I ate the buttery meat. Valeri handed
me a cleaned leg bone to crack open by smacking it with the back of my knife. I
was not very good at it, and twice he said, “It’s very simple, just do it like this.”
Whenever I had difficulty mastering some local skill, people in Kamchatka got
impatient with my ineptness and insisted that it was simple.24
Teriocha and Valeri arrived on foot near dark, about 9:00 p.m. We had dinner.
I had already eaten before they arrived, so I just had a cup of tea. I guess I was
staring. I was so exhausted, I could do little more than sit and stare in front of
myself. I was just sitting there. Volokha asked, “Is it interesting how we eat?” I
did not understand; I thought he was joking. A moment later he pointed out the
door of the tent, at the herd, and said, “Look out there, Alex, at the herd. Watch
the herd. It is not polite to watch a person.” I felt horrible, alienated. I was
definitely other. They were tired of me, and I was tired of them. I looked at the
ground, went outside and stood around, then collected my stuff that I had set
out to dry. I went to sleep early before the others.
Volokha arose at first light the next day and started the fire. I got up before he
roused the others, worried about appearing lazy. The men spent all morning
catching sled deer to take the skin tent back to town. At breakfast I asked if they
(Teriocha and Oleg) could take me with them to town today. “I need to see the
doctor. My side still hurts. I’m worried that it’s broken.”
Rita sneered, “Let him go on foot.”
Volokha calmly replied, “No problem, no problem.” But they could not take
me in addition to the heavy load. This was probably for the better, since it kept
me from leaving when relations seemed the most strained. The night that
Teriocha and Oleg left for Srednie, I held watch with Slava. When I told Valeri
that I was going to hold watch he perked up, as if I was doing a good thing. Lying
around useless had gotten me into trouble with my hosts, but my side hurt very
much. When your bones are broken, you just want to lie around and let them
heal, but there is no such rest possible for reindeer herders. They have to take it
in stride and go on with work as best they can. Slava and I went across the flat
tundra to a hill about 20 minutes’ walk away.
The herd had looped around the other side of the ridge, turned down the hill,
gone right past the tent, and was then about a kilometer away. Apparently the
fifth sovkhoz brigade had closed off the way by passing across our route, so the
private herd had to turn toward the sea two weeks earlier than originally
planned. We looked for some dead pine and set up a fire. A cold wind was
blowing out of the west, and the sky was clear. A crescent moon was setting in
the western sky as the twilight eclipsed. As we boiled tea and roasted liver, lungs,
and udder, taken from the wolf kills, the stars came out. I noticed that the Big
Dipper was straight up and that Polaris was also high in the sky at this northern
latitude. Although the clear sky made for a colder night, a truly starry sky is
something I rarely see in my relatively urban life.
The next day was the first of May. I had been living with the herders for only
12 days, but it seemed like a month. After being relieved from watch and eating
breakfast, Slava and I went to go fishing on a sleigh ride from hell. Volokha told
us to take his deer, the ones with which he had won the second race at the corral.
Slava said he would tie my deer to his sled, and I was disappointed. It would be
a boring ride with nothing to do but sit on the sled behind and hold the left rein,
as I had done several times before. I realized my misapprehension when I could
not even get the deer untied. I had the rope wrapped around my right, mittened
hand, and was trying to untie the knot, when they decided to run off. I was
knocked over and dragged over dried pine bushes. My left hand got badly
scraped and, picturing broken fingers, a shredded coat, the rest of me scraped
and cut, and my rib puncturing an organ, I let go. After all, the deer were still
tied to the bush. Slava came up to help me. It was really cold out (I guess about
−10 degrees Celsius), making it difficult to untie the knots. He got them down to
the sled and scolded me for letting go, saying I must hang on even if it hurt. I kept
silent and agreed. It was tricky getting those two jittery two year olds hitched up.
Slava jumped on (I was already on), and we took off like a shot across the flat
field. Slava’s deer were also young three year olds, and they decided to make
two large circles at top speed before he got them pointed the right direction. I felt
Phaeton’s terror as he rode in his father’s chariot, even though I had an experi-
enced hand guiding my team. We flew along the tractor road toward the trees.
We stopped to let the deer urinate and then continued through the woods at top
speed. The stream had some places of open water, which the deer leaped over
and the sleds splashed through. The deer slipped and scrambled on the ice but
did not slow down. They were so excited to run that my deer were pulling at the
tether on Slava’s sled. Instead of Slava leading my team, they were desperately
trying to pass him!
We charged up a hill, and the sled careened back and forth. We followed some
ruts and I dumped my sled. I bailed off at the right time so as not to land on my
head, and I was thankful my rib was not any worse for the fall. We finally got to
the fishing spot on the river. We tied the deer to tundra humps. Sprouts of some
kind of plant the deer like were coming up, so they were happy to eat them. Slava
set up metal fish lures I had brought from the States with a rubber squiggly on a
hook. We each caught two trout as we snoozed on our sleds over the holes in the
ice. The ride home was calmer but still frightening.
When we arrived back at camp, Slava mentioned that we had gotten a glimpse
of a sacred rock, which was several miles away. Volokha asked, “Did you pray?”
“No, we were kind of far away.”
“You must pray, doesn’t matter if you are far away.” When you look at a
person, whether human or not, you must address him or her.25 Just to look is
impolite. It started snowing around 10:00 p.m., just as Valeri arrived. The elders
he had visited had given him five arctic char, a pack of cigarettes, a little sugar,
and some rice for helping them set up their yayanaga. The news was that a
villager died in Tilichiki hospital.
The next morning I cut some firewood for the woodpile next to the stove and
brought up the subject of Christian Koryaks with Slava and Valeri, who were
sitting nearby. They both insisted that Christian Koryaks are not real Koryaks
anymore: “They are something else entirely. If you change your religion, then
you have to change your whole culture and traditions, take on the way of life of
Christians, Russians.” Volokha, Slava, and Rita left to visit the fifth brigade to
ask them to change their route and open the way for us. Volokha asked me to
watch the herd that afternoon. I would have preferred to visit the sovkhoz
herders, but understanding that was not an option, I did not ask.
I was left alone at the tent as everyone departed on their short trips to talk to
other people, while I was supposed to watch the deer. I felt ditched, frustrated
in my goal to talk to people about herding. Valeri came back from watch and said
a wolf killed a deer and the herd trampled some calves. When I told him I was
going to watch the herd, he said that he and Oksana would come out later (see
Figure 5). He asked me to set up a camp fire with wood and a tripod.
I walked out and found the herd about three kilometers away. They were really
spread out, but I did not know what to do. I found a spot and got firewood, but
I did not have any matches with me, so I could not light a fire. The sun was out,
and it was warm when sheltered from the wind. The herd moved west, so my
pile of firewood and the tripod I had cut from a young tree were now too far
away from the herd. I gathered up the tripod and the driest pieces of wood and
lugged them across the open tundra, which was grassy and easy walking. The
wood was heavy, however, and my ribs smarted from the exertion. I dropped
the heaviest piece of wood and continued west with the herd. Pretty soon, I was
dropping firewood every 100 meters. After less than a kilometer, I caught up to
the herd and set down the tripod and the two pieces of remaining firewood. I felt
silly, carrying firewood around the tundra, when herders just make a fire where
the wood is. I had to collect more firewood from snow-encrusted pine bushes.
When Oksana and Valeri arrived, a warm fire was going in no time, and we had
tea with frybread Oksana had made with flour from the elder whom Valeri had
visited the day before.
Valeri asked me, “Did any deer go over the ridge over there?”
“Only a few, but they are just on the other side, eating.”
Figure 5
Valeri (left) with his wife Oksana and son Yurik. Photo by Alexander King.
“Hmmm. The herd looks kind of small. I will go check to see who all is over
there. I should bring them back.” Oksana and I chatted while Valeri patrolled the
herd. After about a half hour, deer started coming back over the ridge. First there
were just a few, then more and more. I had nearly lost half of the herd and had
not noticed! Valeri came over the hill last and told us that, while he was walking,
he saw a wolf and tried to shoot at it, but the melkashka (.22 rifle) did not have its
firing pin. “Damn! There is a 2,000 ruble (US$333) bounty on wolves paid by a
hunting organization in Tilichiki.”
We had more tea. We wondered if the delegation to the sovkhoz herd had
returned. I walked back to the tent, where Volokha and the others had just
arrived. “We got some meat and smokes from the fifth herd, but they are just as
poor as we are.” They agreed to alter the route, allowing the private herd to
continue west before turning toward the sea. During Soviet times, the routes were
more strictly planned and managed, but now the private herders and the few
remaining sovkhoz brigades agree on the routes among themselves. They have
to balance pasture management with access to fishing streams, base camps set
up in the tundra, and periodic proximity to the village. I gave them the rifle, and
they set about filing down a nail for a replacement firing pin (that was what the
old one was made from). I changed into warmer clothes and left with Slava to go
on watch for the night. Slava could sleep lying in the snow with his reindeer-fur
clothing, but since I did not have that, I needed a skin mat for insulation.
Slava had brought udder and lungs to roast, which were spongier than when
they were boiled and therefore strange to me. We dozed maybe an hour before
Slava awoke me. In the predawn a wolf spooked the herd. Slava told me to make
tea while he checked out what was happening. When he returned, he drank the
whole pot. I was still full of tea from supper. I have never seen anyone drink as
much tea as reindeer herders, even when they are in town. Hot tea adds heat to
a body at rest.26
Meanwhile, Teriocha and Oleg were in Srednie, and they told Volodya that I
wanted to return to town. Dima volunteered to fetch me with his dog team, and
the following day he came out to the herd. As I took my leave of the group, I gave
my large knife to Volokha, and he was happy to receive it. I gave my snowshoes
to Slava, and he was equally glad for those. I had already given Valeri my
headlamp at the corral. We left at 7:30 a.m. and made good time, reaching
abandoned Upper Pakhachi around 9:30. We had tea outside a house used by
sovkhoz haymakers in the summer. As Dima offered the enelwit to the fire, he
commented, “I used to think only we did that, make an offering to the fire. Then
I learned that it’s common all over the world. Indians, Africans, people in South
America, in short, every nation of the world practices it, honoring the fire.” As I
talked to more people, I found that many considered enelwit to be an offering to
the fire itself, which was an important person as well as a gateway—“the source
of all life, heat, light,” as one elder said.
We left Upper Pakhachi around 10:30 and went along a snowmobile trail near
the left bank of the river, which was thawing, and we passed open holes on either
side of us, but the ice was still thick for the most part. At one point the dogs were
not paying close enough attention to Dima’s commands, and they towed us
across a hole. When the sled got stuck, I tried to push with my feet as Dima heaved
the sled to the right and yelled at the dogs to pull it out before it went any further.
At another place, the dogs ran across some thin ice in the middle of the river, and
it was cracking as we raced across it. He shouted at them to keep them at top
speed.
We stopped along the last tributary just outside of town to talk to a man
walking in the road. He was a herder returning to the third sovkhoz herd. When
Dima told him I was an American (in Koryak), he immediately turned to me and
said (in Russian), “If we had our own land, our own republic here [drawing
circles with his hand]. . . . ”
“A Chukotskii Republic?” I suggested.
“Yes. If we were separate from Russia, we would declare war on the United
States and then surrender the next day, so that the Americans would come and
occupy our country. We get nothing from Russia but misery. The boss lives well
and that’s it. He has everything, is well, and doesn’t think about other people,
about how we’re living with nothing.”27
Volodya came out to meet us just as we were tying up Dima’s dogs. We walked
to Volodya and Tanya’s house where I was staying and had tea. I joked about
nearly losing half of the herd. My hosts were enchanted with the stories about
driving a sled, keeping watch over the herd, and my breaking a rib. The doctor
told me there was nothing that could be done for it, just let it heal.
Conclusion
My sojourn with the private herd was short, just two weeks plus five days at
the spring corral a week earlier, but my friends in town thought it was a long
time. Native people in the village now took me more seriously, as I had demon-
strated a serious desire to learn their lifeways personally. I understood better
people’s discourses on traditions and their priorities, and I could ask more
interesting questions. People volunteered explanations and demonstrations that
I would not have received otherwise, such as a dog sacrifice after a funeral, beliefs
and practices surrounding childbirth and menstruation, and family rituals of
remembrance for the ancestors and giving honor to the deer in the spring.
This article aims to go beyond “conventional representations of sudden

baptisms into native society or other stories of the rapport . . . achieved in
fieldwork” (Fox 1991:6). My trials in the tundra certainly gave me symbolic
capital with the natives; I had demonstrated an empathy with their lives by
participating in the activity dearest to their hearts. More important, it was the
only way to gain information on herding practices, religion, and the person,
without which I would not have been able to understand the key points elders
wanted to make in subsequent discussions. Knowing these local pragmatics
was necessary to understand the indigenous signs belonging to reindeer
herding, which contrasted with the orientalist images of reindeer herding
found in administrative brochures, magazine articles, and politicians’
speeches.
Whereas Russians and other incomers in Kamchatka essentialize native people
through a stereotype of the primitive, I found that my Chukchi and Koryak
consultants had a sophisticated, praxis-centered theory of culture implicit in their
discourse about deer and people. When Chukchi and Koryaks talk about their
culture in town, their culture resides in the past and in the tundra, certainly not
in the here and now. They negatively judge themselves as having “lost” tradi-
tions, and they judge current practices as a debilitated shadow of what their
parents and grandparents used to do. At the reindeer herd and in the tundra,
which is not a “wild” (dikoe) place as it is for local Russians and foreign anthro-
pologists, native people express a sense of culture that is rooted in the here and
now (King 2002). This is why they all but forced me to experience reindeer
herding myself firsthand.
Reindeer are implicated in all aspects of social life. For example, the sovk-
hoz is the institution where deer mediate a history and continuing ambiguous
relationship between people and the state. Privately owned deer are literally
tied to humans in the sacred household bundles (gichgiyu—ritual fireboards,
wooden charms, carvings, and other talismans tied together with sinew),
which are the material manifestations of ancestors, living humans, deer, and
other nonhuman persons. Important sacred fires are started with a bow and
drill set into a hole of the household’s fireboard. These boards have a round
head with a simply carved face on one end, and the body is a rectangle covered
with holes for the fire drill. When a board is worn out, a new one is made, but
the old one is left tied to the bundle of charms, or at least the head is sawed
off and retained in the bundle. Each individual element in the bundle is fed
with fat at all important household rituals, which are conducted to remember
the recently deceased, honor the deer herd, and pay respect to other spirits,
all through the same act. Over the years, fat, soot, and dirt work to give the
boards and other charms a deep black sheen. The fireboard is at once master
of the hearth and master of the herd; household and herd are one and the
same.28
Ingold argues that deer are incorporated into human social organization
analogous to “jural minors, subject to the authority of their human master”
(2000:72). The domination of animals by humans, however, is not mutually
exclusive of trust; it is not a denial of the autonomy of the deer-persons any
more than employing poor men as herders in pre-Soviet times denied their
autonomy. Ingold’s (2000:73ff.) metaphor of slavery for pastoralism, taken
from classical Indo-European texts, obscures indigenous Kamchatkan ideas
of person and human–animal relations more than it elucidates. Just as poor
herdsmen were highly mobile, seeking the most prosperous and generous
employer (Bilibin 1933), reindeer will leave a disrespectful human master. The
richest reindeer herders were not the most powerful, not those who dominated
mostoverdeerandotherpersonsthroughsuperiorforce(physicalorotherwise);
they were the hardest working, the most attentive to the physical needs of the
deer, and the most respectful of the deer as nonhuman persons.29
The reindeer were and continue to be the source of their wealth. Herders
believe (correctly, according to my estimation) that before collectivization in the
1930s, wealth was both greater and more equitably distributed. They reject the
ethnonym chavchuven attributed to them by Soviet ethnographers. They do not
call themselves chavchuven and consider it a mere economic label. They said it
is like the word bogatye (rich ones), referring to a group of people in a Russian
city who had a lot of money or cars and lived in one neighborhood. However,
claims that they “just happen” to be rich in deer and not by means of some other
marker are disingenuous. Indeed, the number of individuals and organizations
rich in deer in all of Kamchatka can be counted on two hands, and by pre-Soviet
standards, none of those would have been truly rich. Nowadays, rich Koryaks
and Chukchi control the same sort of European wealth that rich Russians do: cash
(often in hard currency), secure employment, real estate, durable goods. “Deer”
continue to equal “native,” or rather “native” equals “having deer.” Deer are such
a powerful symbol of native life that they have been extended to represent
“Koryakness” or “nativeness” even among communities that never practiced
reindeer herding or did so tangentially at best. The Chukchis and Koryaks with
whom I lived in Srednie Pakhachi can talk about these similarities and differ-
ences, and use labels such as “Chukchi,” “Koryak,” and even “real Chukchi”
(referring to Chukchi people living in Chukotka) without reifying these distinc-
tions into bounded groups that are discrete and autonomous. They are names
deployed as symbols whose meaning is dependent on the immediate context.
People move about, populations change, “everyone is all mixed up [ethnically].”
The people represented in this article often subvert such identities in the same
sentence in which they are used.
The symbolic power of reindeer to represent “The Koryak” and “The Koryak
Autonomous Okrug” (Chukchi are nearly invisible politically in Kamchatka
since they supposedly belong in Chukotka) stems from Soviet analogs of Western
orientalism as identified by Edward Said (1978). Incomers deploy reindeer as an
icon of native culture: people’s lives are represented by an animal reflecting an
ideology that places Koryaks and Chukchi closer to animals than are the Russian
administrators, making the natives savages (Ingold 2000:62f.; King 2002). I have
tried to avoid exotic essentialisms while simultaneously conveying the deep and
heartfelt importance of domestic reindeer for many Koryak and Chukchi people.
Such concepts, however, certainly do not explain what Slava meant when he told
me that “without deer there is no culture, nothing,” which I also heard in two
other conversations with elders in the village, including the grandmother pic-
tured on the cover. The pragmatics of herding reindeer are intertwined with
spiritual awareness, self-worth, and value as a human being. Thus, it is not
surprising to see that a general social despair, anomie, has accompanied the
drastic reduction in reindeer herds. Such a loss implicates the people in their own
eyes as bad herders, either careless or disrespectful. There are certainly many
people in Kamchatka (and across Siberia) who do doubt their own value as
human beings (Vitebsky 2002). Labeling the situation post-Soviet or postmodern
seems to miss this pain.
Postmodern ethnography, with all of its slashes and dashes, seems more
fun to write than to read. A humanist approach to ethnography—writing
about other people’s lives—is one that is readable, interesting, and engaged
without being ironic or romantic.30 In many of the debates and angst over
representations, power, inscription, and the like over the past two decades, the
main goal of anthropology—learning something new about people, humanity—

gets lost. Getting on with anthropology does not mean ignoring the valid
critiques of the textual strategies of authorizing texts and masking power rela-
tions (Metcalf 2002). While I have great power in Kamchatka, especially indefati-
gable good health, adequate clothing and equipment, and tremendous mobility,
I was also at the mercy of “the natives.” My ethnographic portrayals are not
strategies of having the last word but attempts at fulfilling promises I have made
to many people at their insistence: the promise to get it right and represent their
lives as lived—their real humanity—to the broader world. In the end, I would
like to see anthropology move more toward a future where the description “one
needs a Ph.D. in anthropology to read this” becomes a clear recommendation for
the author to rewrite it for people in general.
Epilogue
Christina and I returned to Srednie Pakhachi in September 2001. We gave
people copies of pictures we had taken and collected more information on those
photos, and I followed up on various questions relating to myth, ritual, and
religion. One afternoon during tea, we watched part of a videotape I had made
at the corral. As we watched herders lasso their deer on TV, Tanya commented,
“That’s history now, Alex. We don’t have our own deer like we used to. The herd
got so small, they had to unite with the private herd of Achavayam. We hope
that they will be able to build it up, but it’s doubtful.” It seems that I was doing
salvage ethnography after all. Slava had left herding to better feed his young
family through hunting and fishing. Volokha and Rita had gone with the last
Pakhachi deer to join the Achavayam herd. Oksana had developed tuberculosis
and was in the hospital in the district center of Tilichiki. The general mood of the
town had only become grimmer, and I did not have the heart to ask about
identity, herding, and religion. I could not think of a way to bring up Slava’s great
line without making it seem as if I were rubbing his nose in the loss. Certainly
they were still people after all, but they seemed more desperate than when I left
in 1998.
I woke up on September 12 to Russian television news reports of the falling
towers and possibly tens of thousands of casualties. I was surprised at the
reaction of Volodya, Tanya, and other people in Pakhachi. They were con-
cerned; they felt that the attack on New York was also an attack on them, on
the whole world. Several people expressed fear of going anywhere, flying in
Russia or Kamchatka. “If they could do that to you (Americans), then no one
is safe.” The terrorists truly had struck at the navel of the world, and it was
deeply felt at the extremity of Kamchatka. Tanya wrote us a letter in January
2002, telling us that Oksana had died of tuberculosis. Valeri had lost himself
in a bottle, and now Tanya and Volodya’s two young grandchildren, Yurik
and Yulia, call their grandparents “Mama” and “Papa.” With such swift and
dramatic changes, it is impossible to write about Kamchatka in the ethno-
graphic present, especially since my first intention is to remain honest to the
memory of these people. If reindeer no longer provide an index of Koryak
culture, then it is doubtful if it will be such a frequent icon of Koryak people
or the region. However, I am confident that future Koryaks, Chukchis, Evens,
Itelmens, and Kamchadals will be able to symbolize their humanity with the
same dignity as their ancestors.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Research has been supported by grants from the International Re-
search and Exchange Board (IREX), Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Security Educa-
tion Program, National Endowment for the Humanities, and California State University,
Chico. Logistic and intellectual aid was rendered in Kamchatka by Viktoria Petrasheva,
Valentina Dedyk, Raisa Avak, Sergei Kutinkavav, Albina Yailgina, and the Yatylkut
family. Many people have helped me in reading and discussing this material, especially
Dell Hymes, Roy Wagner, Claire Farrer, Marjorie M. Balzer, Hugh Beach, John Ziker, and
Christina Kincaid. Without Edie Turner’s encouragement this article would never have
happened. Please blame me for enduring faults in the text.
1. Privileging indigenous meanings and agendas is by no means new (e.g., Landes 1938;
Radin 1963[1920]) and is important to many anthropologists working in Siberia (e.g.,
Anderson 2000; Balzer 1995, 1999; Humphrey 1996; Kerttula 2000; Rethmann 2001), in
Russia (e.g., Pesmen 2000; Ries 1997), and around the world. I have no pretensions to push
the boundaries of anthropological theory, but I hope that many others will be as interested
as I am, to “get on with anthropology” (Metcalf 2002:11).
2. Evenki in Taimyr imposed similar requirements on David Anderson (2000), as did
Yukaghir people in northwest Sakha on Rane Willerslev (2002).
3. My thinking on symbols and use of the terms pragmatics and holography have been
shaped through talking with and reading Roy Wagner (1986a, 1986b, 2001).
4. My reading of Wagner (1981) is that this invention is an interactive process; thus,
including the ethnographer is simply an attempt at honesty and not self-reflexive indul-
gence (cf. Metcalf 2002).
5. When Chukchi in Srednie Pakhachi talked about their ethnic identity, they sometimes
described themselves as “Koryakized” as compared with “real Chukchi in Chukotka.”
Such comments were in the context of language. The people of Srednie Pakhachi speak a
variant of Chavchuven Koryak, significantly different in phonology and grammar from
variants of Chukchi spoken in Chukotka. In terms of religion, material culture, and social
organization, the difference between reindeer-herding Koryaks and reindeer-herding
Chukchi is very slight. Although some Evens have assimilated to Koryaks linguistically
and even culturally, the Even language is completely unrelated to Koryak and Chukchi,
and Even traditions are markedly different. My generalizations about reindeer-herding
practices and beliefs are thus confined to Koryaks and Chukchi living in Oliutor County
of the Koryak Autonomous Okrug. Bogoraz (1904–09:71–97) describes Chukchi and
Koryak reindeer herding together, as does Jochelson (1908:469–501), who contrasts rein-
deer herding of “the Koryak—Chukchee type” with Even and Sakha styles of herding (p.
498). See Schindler (1997) for a good introduction to and summary of Soviet theories of
ethnicity and how they have played out on the ground in northeast Asia.
6. The term sovkhoz is an invented word from two Russian words—soviet and khoziastvo
(enterprise)—and refers to a state-owned collective farm. Caroline Humphrey (1998)
provides the most thorough description of a Siberian collective farm, both before and after
the demise of the Soviet Union. David Anderson’s (2000) account of a reindeer brigade in
the sovkhoz based in Khantaiskoe Ozero, Taimyr, resonates with experiences of reindeer
herders in Kamchatka. Kerttula (2000:91) points out that reindeer herders were not only
very well paid under the Soviets, they had special access to hard-to-find goods. Thus, the
post-Soviet sovkhoz company store operation is experienced as an especially bitter
betrayal.
7. Chawchu is the source of the Russian word Chavchuven, which is used to refer to
reindeer-herding Koryaks and their language. Bogoraz (1904–09:11) provides this as the
origin of the name Chukchi while admitting that reindeer Koryaks also call themselves
by this term. Chawchu was never connected to Chukchi in this way by people in Kam-
chatka in the 1990s. The people in the villages of Achavayam and Srednie Pakhachi are
culturally and linguistically very similar (Lebedev and Simchenko 1983). Chukchi in both
villages are famous for their chauvinism, which can be organized by the analogies
Chukchi = reindeer herder = rich, whereas Koryak = maritime = poor. This ideology was
directly stated to Kerttula when she was in Achavayam: “Real Chukchi don’t live on the
coast” (2000:23). This sums up the ideology I encountered in Srednie Pakhachi where the
phrase “real Chukchi” (in Russian) was synonymous with “good herder” and highlighting
another person’s Koryak ethnicity was most often part of a discursive strategy to cast
doubt on his or her skills or knowledge of reindeer herding (“Nymylans don’t know
reindeer”). This hierarchy is absent among maritime and reindeer Koryaks living along
the Sea of Okhotsk and the nearby interior, and among urban Chukchi in Anadyr (Patty
Gray, personal communication, 2002).
8. [t] is aspirated. The [h] is a separate sound, varying between a glottal stop and a
pharyngeal (a heavy “h” sound far back, with a tightly constricted throat).
9. Kerttula records this same understanding of the tundra as home throughout her
book, but most dramatically in an account of a young Chukchi woman wearing house
slippers in the tundra (2000:22). I develop the idea of tundra as a Chukchi and Koryak
space, as opposed to the Russian/European space of the village in King (2002).
10. He used the word liudi in Russian, for “people.”
11. Chukchi and Koryaks in Oliutor County do not use herd dogs, although Koryaks
to the northwest in Penzhina County told me it was inconceivable to herd without the aid
of trained dogs.
12. On my first trip to Kamchatka in 1995, everyone asked why I did not have a video
camera. How could I be an ethnographer without one? When I returned in 1997, I brought
one and found it useful not only for focusing my attention and recording activities but
also in soliciting commentary on those activities when I showed the footage to people and
gave them copies of my tapes.
13. The sound represented by “y” varies greatly from one village to another. In Srednie
Pakhachi it is a lightly voiced fricative, [dj] or [ds]. The sound represented by “ng” is a
velar nasal as in singer.
14. Pika (1999) discusses alcoholism and other social problems in Siberia. Ziker (2002)
also has a chapter on alcohol and violent death in Taimyr, which are similarly linked in
Kamchatka.
15. Bogoraz (1904–09, 1910) and Jochelson (1908) provide an excellent description of
rituals, myths, cosmology, and other aspects of Chukchi and Koryak religious life similar
to what I saw in 1998.
16. Later I figured out that people assumed I would not enjoy such native dishes as
blood soup, seal meat in oil, or deer stomach fermented in blood, so I began to ask to try
it. People were surprised and pleased, especially when they saw that I enjoyed the food.
17. See Note 7.
18. Jochelson (1908:475) also describes this attitude. The English sin is the best transla-
tion of the Russian grekh in this case because it refers to an immoral act with spiritual
consequences. Human souls and deer souls are connected, and one causing the other to
suffer needlessly is a sin. Bogoraz (1904–09:84–92) and Jochelson (1908:484–488) provide
a good description of the lassos, goads, and sledges still used in Srednie Pakhachi in the
1990s, where people were simultaneously using snowmobiles, large tanklike ATVs
(vezdekhod), and helicopters (when available).
19. Bogoraz (1904–09:84) reports that Chukchi at the turn of the 20th century castrated
bucks by biting through the spermatic ducts or tying off the scrotum, which then
atrophied and fell off. I was told that rubber bands were also used for castration, but they
were hard to obtain in the 1990s.
20. Contemporary herding camps and brigades are mostly men, and they sprinkle their
language with stylistically creative variants of ebat’ (fuck) and khui (cock)—but vulgar,
like motherfucker in American usage. These habits are picked up during obligatory military
service. Reindeer herders swear like Russian sailors, but drink less. Vitebsky and Wolfe
(2001) describe the gender imbalances of contemporary reindeer herding due to Soviet
policy for Evenks in Sakha. A similar situation obtains in Kamchatka.
21. Remember, there is a walrus tooth on the end.
22. See Note 7.
23. The ethnonym for Chukchi sometimes preferred by the Soviets, Luoravetlan, can be
translated from Chukchi as “real person.”
24. David Anderson (2000:33–35) describes Taimyr Evenk pedagogy in a similar man-
ner.
25. Sacred sites can have gender, often because they are a male or female person or
animal that has become a rock, mountain, or lake, as explained in the legend about that
place. Some of these sites are more highly gendered in that they help men hunt success-
fully or aid women’s fertility.
26. Jochelson (1908:569) comments on the large amount of water Koryaks drink year-
round.
27. “The boss” (nachal’nik) could refer to anyone, from the Pakhachi sovkhoz director
to Yeltsin and everyone in between, most likely to all. I heard this joke more than once,
but I could not find out if it came from the Peter Sellers movie The Mouse That Roared or
another source. There are similar jokes about the shame of America being too poor in the
19th century to buy Kamchatka along with Alaska and even some serious speculation on
a future purchase of the Russian Far East (Tsiurupa 2000). The ideological basis for such
ideas is that the United States is rich, Alaskan natives live well, and Russia has betrayed
all of the Soviet promises (cf. Grant 1995).
28. Jochelson (1908:33) gives gichgei (plural is gichgeyu) as the Koryak word for “fire-
board,” but Pakhachi people with whom I talked use the word for both “fireboard” and
as a general term for the bundle (also called idoli, “idols,” or khraniteli, “the guardians,”
in Russian), of which the fireboard is the main item. Valentina Dedyk pointed out to me
(personal communication, 2002) that the fireboard is called tEmilgEntung (E = schwa),
based on the root milgEn, “fire.” The root qaya- (deer) can be prefixed to the word to
produce qayatEmilgEntung when one wants to highlight the connections to deer. Thus, the
terms for these things tie people, deer, and spirits to one another as they are represented
materially and cosmologically.
29. Killing and eating deer is not necessarily disrespectful. The manner in which this
is done is indicative of the honor and respect people pay to deer. As among other northern
peoples (e.g., Cree; cf. Brightman 1993), humans are also prey in cycles of interspecies
predation. The nonhuman kalaw who kill and eat humans are not necessarily evil but
simply a dangerous aspect of the world. Cannibalism, eating one’s own, is truly evil and
abhorrent among Koryaks and Chukchi of Kamchatka (King 1999).
30. This does not preclude ethnography from being a scientific enterprise as well, but
that is another discussion.
References Cited
Abu-Lughod, Lila
1991 Writing against Culture. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present.
Richard G. Fox, ed. Pp. 137–162. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Anderson, David
2000 Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: The Number One Reindeer Brigade.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Antropova, Valentina V.
1971 Kul’tura i byt koriakov. Leningrad: Nauka.
Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam, ed.
1995 Culture Incarnate: Native Anthropology from Russia. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam
1999 The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Bilibin, N. N.
1932 Sredi koriakov. Sovetskii Sever 3:91–97.
1933 Batratskii trud v kochevom khoziaistve koriakov. Sovetskii Sever 1:36–46.
Bogoraz, Vladimir
1904–09 The Chukchee. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, vol.
11, pts. 1–3. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Briggs, Jean L.
1970 Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Brightman, Robert
1993 Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Chesnokov, Yuri
1997 Olen’ v kul’ture severo-vostochnykh Paleoaziatov (Nekotorye aspekty). In Kul’tura
Narodov Sibiri: Materialy Tret’ikh Sibirskikh Chteniy. Chuner M. Taksami, Iulia A.
Kupina, Elena G. Fedorova, eds. Pp. 74–82. St. Petersburg: MAE RAN.
Forsyth, James
1992 A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony 1581–1990.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fox, Richard G.
1991 Introduction: Working in the Present. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in
the Present. Richard G. Fox, ed. Pp. 1–16. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Grant, Bruce
1995 In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Humphrey, Caroline
1998 Marx Went Away but Karl Stayed Behind. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Humphrey, Caroline, with Urgunge Onon
1996 Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Duar Mon-
gols. Oxford: Clarendon.
Ingold, Tim
2000 From Trust to Domination: An Alternative History of Human-Animal Relations.
In The Perceptions of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill.
Pp. 61–76. London: Routledge.
Jochelson, Waldemar (Vladimir Ilyich)
1908 The Koryak. American Museum of Natural History Memoirs, vol. 10, pts. 1–2.
The Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Kerttula, Anna M.
2000 Antler on the Sea: The Yup’ik and Chukchi of the Russian Far East. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
King, Alexander D.
1999 Soul Suckers: Vampiric Shamans in Northern Kamchatka, Russia. Anthropology
of Consciousness 10(4):74–85.
2002 Reindeer Herders’ Culturescapes in the Koryak Autonomous Okrug. In People
and the Land: Pathways to Reform in Post-Soviet Siberia. Erich Kasten, ed. Pp. 63–80.
Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
Klokov, Konstantin B.
2000 Nenets Reindeer Herders on the Lower Yenisei River: Traditional Economy
under Current Conditions and Responses to Economic Change. Polar Research
19(1):39–47.
Konstantinov, Yulian, and Vladislava Vladimirova
2002 Ambiguous Transition: Agrarian Reforms, Management, and Coping Practices
in Murmansk Region Reindeer Herding. Working Papers, 35. Halle an der Saale: Max
Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.
Krupnik, Igor
2000 Reindeer Pastoralism in Modern Siberia: Research and Survival during the Time
of Crash. Polar Research 19(1):49–56.
Landes, Ruth
1938 The Ojibwa Woman. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lebedev, Vladimir Vladimirovich, and Yuri Borisovich Simchenko
1983 Achaivaiamskaia vesna. Moscow: Mysl’.
Mauss, Marcel
1990 The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. W. D. Halls,
trans. New York: Norton.
Metcalf, Peter
2002 They Lie, We Lie: Getting on with Anthropology. London: Routledge.
Pesmen, Dale
2000 Russian and Soul: An Exploration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Pika, Aleksandr, ed.

1999 Neotraditionalism in the Russian North: Indigenous Peoples and the Legacy of
Perestroika. Bruce Grant, ed. Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute.
Radin, Paul
1932 The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian. New York: Dover Publications.
Rethmann, Petra
2001 Tundra Passages: Gender and History in the Russian Far East. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Ries, Nancy
1997 Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Said, Edward W.
1978 Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Sapir, Edward
1949 Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Society. Berkeley: California Univer-
sity Press.
Schindler, Debra L.
1997 Redefining Tradition and Renegotiating Ethnicity in Native Russia. Arctic An-
thropology 34(1):194–211.
Slezkine, Yuri
1994 Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Tsiurupa, A. I.
2000 Alaska, Kamchatka, and Siberia in the Geopolitical Area. Anthropology and
Archeology of Eurasia 38(3):24–37.
Turner, Edith
1996 The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence among a Northern Alaskan
People. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
Vdovin, Innokentii Stepanovich
1973 Ocherki etnicheskoi istorii koriakov. Leningrad: Nauka.
Vitebsky, Piers
2002 Withdrawing from the Land: Social and Spiritual Crisis in the Indigenous Russian
Arctic. In Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. C. M. Hann, ed.
Pp. 180–195. London: Routledge.
Vitebsky, Piers, and Sally Wolfe
2001 The Separation of the Sexes among Siberian Reindeer Herders. In Sacred Custo-
dians of the Earth? Women, Spirituality, and the Environment. Alaine M. Low and
Soraya Tremayne, eds. Pp. 81–94. New York: Berghahn.
Wagner, Roy
1981 The Invention of Culture. Rev. edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1986a Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image, and Social Power among the Usen Barok of New
Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
1986b Symbols That Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2001 The Anthropology of the Subject: Holographic Worldview in New Guinea and
Its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Willerslev, Rane
2002 Spiritual Knowledge and Dreaming among the Upper Kolyma Yukaghirs: A
Phenomenological Analysis. Presentation at the conference “Siberia, Land and Peo-
ples: Destruction or Survival?”, University of Leeds, September 6–8.
Ziker, John P.
2002 Peoples of the Tundra: Northern Siberians in the Post-Communist Transition.
Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.

The Koryak People of Siberia

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

The Koryak People of Siberia

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

ANTHROPOLOGY AND

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIETY FOR HUMANISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY

The Reindeer are a dominant symbol of collective identity in northern Kam-

Anthropology and Humanism 27(2):133–164. Copyright © 2003, American Anthropological Association.

downstream in a small aluminum outboard motorboat for about half an hour

Slaughtering a private reindeer was a process I witnessed many times and

Without Deer We Are Not People

April 1998—Spring Corral

“Us,” Dima informed me.

Spring Work at the Private Herd

This article aims to go beyond “conventional representations of sudden

main goal of anthropology—learning something new about people, humanity—

Pika, Aleksandr, ed.

Вам также может понравиться