Within the Russian Federation there are nearly 200 recognized "nationalities," approximately 130 of which could claim to be "indigenous." However, only 45 peoples are officially recognized as "indigenous small-numbered peoples of the Russian Federation" and thereby qualify for the rights, privileges, and state support earmarked for indigenous peoples. This status is conditioned upon a maximum group size of 50,000. While experts insist that this numerical criterion is provisional and without serious political implications, our fieldwork demonstrates that it has become a social fact that cannot be ignored, especially in light of the 2002 All-Russia Census and the release of its results in 2004. This numerical benchmark forces a dichotomization into small-numbered versus non-small-numbered peoples and creates a peculiar type of identity politics based on ethnic-group size. The "indigenous small-numbered" status is also conditioned upon a set of overlapping but often contradictory residency requirements. Using case studies from southern Siberia and the north of European Russia, we document the dynamic interplay between these dimensions of identity and the opportunities for maneuvering in the competition for the benefits that attach to certain categories. However, indigenous peoples who engage in such identity politics run the risk of becoming "incarcerated" within the confines of those categories.

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The article deals with young people's ideas, activities and lifestyles in an Evenki village in Southern Siberia, interprets the differences of the value orders of generations in the narratives and practices in the context of the local, surrounding the society and Russia in general. Through research into youth we can get a more wholesome picture of the community. Furthermore, after the collapse of the Soviet Union the future of a society depends more and more on the new intelligentsia, the members of which have not grown up in the Soviet period. The young people living in the taiga, the edge of the civilized world, share the activities of their parents: that is, they hold on to their roots while the authorities persuade them to leave their village. The responses of the youth in relation to the desires and the possibilities are more openminded, and in these opinions the social expectations of these young people are less conformist. Different generations have different value orders. The events which have not happened in the life of young individuals do not serve as a standing-ground in life, and the activities of everyday life and the ideas are intertwined, and become the lifestyles of different generations.

The authors intend to provide an overview of the diaries, travelogues, and correspondence of Austro-Hungarians who traveled to the Asian peripheries of Russia during the Dual Monarchy. We aim to contribute to ongoing discussions on colonial discourses of otherness, as well as to the historical development of ethnographic scholarship in Europe. Travel writing, orientalism, and colonial encounters with Asian otherness are closely intermingling phenomena in the modern era. We argue that the rich corpus of visual and verbal representations of North-, Central-, and Inner-Asian peoples recorded by the subjects of the Dual Monarchy provides instructive examples of colonial encounters with non-colonizers in 19 th century Asia. Furthermore, we believe that these examples will bring forth a more detailed picture of how the ideas born in the centers of German enlightenment (like Völkerkunde) impregnated the intellectual life of more peripheral regions in Europe. As ethnographic scholarship developed within national research traditions rather than in the frame of a monolithic, European intellectual project, our question is whether or not the Dual Monarchy provided a meaningful frame to bridge national research traditions.