Siberia

Abstract

Siberia is a vast and varied region, linked horizontally to the circumpolar Arctic and vertically to Mongolia and Central Asia. Nineteenth-century anthropological fieldwork was important abroad, particularly in America. From the 1920 to 1980s, Siberia was almost totally isolated from outside research and from comparative anthropology. However, Soviet anthropologists conducted lengthy fieldwork, producing a huge corpus of valuable material in Russian. Their questions were specific to their ideological situation, for example placing indigenous peoples in a Marxist evolutionary framework, and during the 1930s, many suffered imprisonment and execution. Topics became more sociological in the 1960s, and when the region opened to foreigners around 1990, a new wave of young researchers conducted long-term fieldwork, producing a flourishing new literature in English and shifting the emphasis from historical reconstruction to current issues. Topics in this new literature include the state, agency, modernization, shamanism, animal spirits, resource development, and empowerment. Throughout all periods, indigenous people themselves have also been involved in research.

Voiced into being: the power of sound and the phenomenon of cursing in Kyzyl, Tuva

“…Soviet ethnography also tended to exoticize shamans while ascribing any form of shamanic practice to cultural facets of ethnic groups in their pre‐revolutionary state (see M.G. Levin & Potapov 1964; Vitebsky & Alekseyev 2015). 7 In the same way, different forms of shamanic sonic performances in Tuva were primarily mentioned as part of wider ethnographic projects focused on documenting pre‐Soviet ethnic groups and their origins (see Diakonowa 1970).…”

1. Introduction

“…This also implied a modified understanding of the research "object", which was no longer limited to indigenous groups alone, but gradually came to include research among other ethnic groups living in Siberia, in urban settings, non-traditional spheres of production (e.g. extractive industries), and leisure-oriented and also occasionally virtual social networks (for an overview of the field, see Vitebsky & Alekseyev 2015).…”

The Anthropology of Ontology in Siberia: A Critical Review

“…Closed to foreign researchers since the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s (with very few exceptions), Siberia was opened again in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Anthropologists from North America, Western Europe, and Japan, most of them young scholars, augmented the ranks of their Russian and East European colleagues, bringing with them their own favored theories and methods (Alymov and Sokolovskiy 2018;Funk 2018;Gray, Vakhtin, and Schweitzer 2003;Vakhtin 2006;Vitebsky and Alekseyev 2015). This occurred just as a number of new trends emerged in the field of anthropology, one of which was the turn to ontology by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola.…”