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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.

This paper proceeds from the assumption that the spiritual beliefs of native people of northern Kamchatka (Koryaks, Chukchis, Evens) are not false consciousness, nor "really" about something else. I situate beliefs about vampiric shamans in the larger cultural context of the spiritual world, the human soul, and the afterlife. After this description of d iscourse about shamans, the second half of the paper demonstrates how the way people talk about the spiritual world is interconnected with their social reality.

This paper explores two interrelated themes found in the anthropology of ethnic dance ensembles in Kamchatka, Russia: authenticity and the place of individual in society. I use two elite dance troupes (one professional, the other semi-professional) to analyse local categories of cultural authenticity. People in Kamchatka were vocal about representations of indigenous dance on the stage and critiqued dance performances on the basis of whether or not they lived up to their expectations for a proper representation of traditional forms. These critiques are consistently made with respect to the representations themselves and are wholly detached from ethnic (or other) identities of the performers. They provide insight into the nature of authorised knowledge of cultural traditions in Kamchatka. The second part of the paper explores the role of children's dance ensembles in cultural revival movements in small villages. Performing traditional indigenous Kamchatkan dance is not a case of memorising a set stock of moves and positions but entails finding oneself through an individually creative engagement with a style modelled by elders. In both cases, I argue that a semiotics of dance focuses our attention on what symbols do (as opposed to simply what they mean) within a cultural field.