Sibirica

This article describes in detail a mortuary ritual among the Chukchi of Northern Kamchatka and points to its remarkable affinity with an ideal-typical reindeer sacrifice. We argue that this connection between human cremation and sacrifice plays a key role in the people’s attempt to maintain and ensure continuation of their particular kind of life in a cosmos that is replete with numerous other, mostly hostile, life forms. The article describes all stages of the ritual and contextualizes the ritual in the literature on sacrifice. We argue that seeing Chukchi mortuary rituals as a way of transforming any death into a blood sacrifice calls into question well-established understandings of sacrifice as a means of diverting human violence. We suggest that ritual blood sacrifice may instead be seen as a way of protecting the sacrificial victim against violent forces and in doing so, securing the well-being of the community as a whole.

This article deals with the relationships between identity, language, and “clan organization” among Ilimpii Evenki, and how these relationships formed and changed over the course of the twentieth century under the influence of Soviet nationalities policy, administrative reform, and local discursive practices. It is based on the author’s field materials collected in the period 2007 to 2012 in the Evenki Municipal District (Evenkia) of Krasnoiarskii Krai, as well as on unpublished sources stored in the archives of Tura (Evenkia), Krasnoiarsk, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. The central question under investigation deals with why the names of the former administrative clans of contemporary Ilimpii Evenki were used to label language communities; the results suggest that the main reasons were the specifics of the Soviet nationalities policy of the 1920s—which shaped the establishment of national regions on the basis of Evenki “clan” organization—as well the emergence of a new literary Evenki language and resettlement campaigns in the mid-twentieth century.

Although the European North of Russia is a multicultural region, it is often referred to as a single cultural region. For many centuries there have been common names for this region. Of particular importance were Pomor’e and Russian North. The former term is historical, and the latter is related to a cultural project that emerged in the late nineteenth century. In the 1920s both terms ceased to be widely used, appearing only in academic literature. However, in the early 1990s the term Pomor’e regained some of its earlier prominence and acquired both cultural and political meanings. The revival of the term has led to processes of re-identification, because the long forgotten Pomor identity also started to reemerge. However, the regional authorities considered the revival of Pomor identity and the Pomor movement as a striving for separatism, and a fight with and oppression of the Pomor movement followed. One symbolic element of the struggle was an attempt to counterpose the terms Pomor’e and Russian North and to add a political meaning to the latter.