Sibirica

Vilhjalmur Stefansson was an Arctic explorer and anthropologist. The article analyzes two of his books, The Northward Course of Empire and The Adventure of Wrangel Island, in the context of the “universal revolution” including World War I and the Russian Revolution at a time when Siberia, especially its Arctic region, was widely seen as separate from the rest of the former Russian Empire. Stefansson moved through the English-speaking world of Canada, the US, and Great Britain, while acting as an advocate of the colonization of the Arctic region. Later, Stefansson’s connections with the Soviet Union put him under suspicion of un-American activities, but a retrospective assessment of his career shows him to be a sometimes mistaken but often farsighted advocate of Arctic development.

This article deals with the eminent Russian explorer, ethnographer, naturalist, and geographer Vladimir Arsenyev. He devoted thirty years to researching the Russian Far East, in particular the Ussuri taiga, and to documenting the lives and customs of the region’s inhabitants and their surroundings. The article focuses on the linguistic activities of Arsenyev, who simultaneously studied the local Tungus-Manchu (Udeghe and Oroch) languages and left behind unique materials. Its goal is to move beyond a consideration of Arsenyev’s novel Dersu Uzala to consider Arsenyev’s writing in his expedition journals, and demonstrate the differences between the actual Dersu Uzala and the literary character.

Young Evenkis grow up in the middle of powerful colonial representations of their culture, community, and history. These are constructed in and disseminated through popular oral culture, education, museums, and shape both Russian ideas of Evenkis and the self-identity of the indigenous youth. This article discusses how the Evenki adolescents construct their personal identities and negotiate with dominant representations of Evenkiness within educational settings in Russia. When the indigenous culture is represented as locked in the past, the adolescents, while identifying themselves as indigenous, view themselves outside the culture. Fieldwork results show how the local approach to understanding “tradition” and “modernity” leads to the marginalization of indigenous culture and to assimilation among Evenki adolescents in Buriatiia, Russia.

This article discusses the contribution of the chronotope as an analytic category in studies of Christian conversion, applying it to postsocialist religious changes in the Russian Arctic. Looking through basic categories of human experience—space and time—the article focuses on the comparative analysis of the two missionary movements working in northwestern Siberia—neo-Pentecostalism and Baptism. The article examines postsocialist Evangelical missionary movement among the Nenets people who live in the Polar Ural tundra. The Nenets tried out multiple faiths on the emerging religious spectrum, choosing in the end fundamentalist Baptism. The article elaborates on possible conditions that made Christian fundamentalism appealing in this part of the Arctic. I suggest that Nenets historical experience as a colonized periphery of the Russian state, particularly the Soviet experiments with space and time, have bridged Nenets social expectations and a radical form of Evangelical Christianity.