Red Ties and Residential Schools. Alexia Bloch

      Introduction

      Fieldwork, Socialism in Crisis, and Identities in the Making

      For years political concerns covered up the real history of the people of our country. While it was proclaimed that the history of the USSR was the same as the history of the people, in fact this official history did not represent the people’s history. Numerically small ethnic groups especially suffered in this respect. It is not surprising that we do not know our history; customs and traditions are being forgotten, and knowledge of material and spiritual culture is disappearing. Our children are losing a sense of ethnic identity; they do not know the real value of their heritage and culture.

      —From the preface to Evenk Ethnography Program (Shchapeva 1994: 3)

      I arrived to carry out long-term research in the town of Tura in fall 1993, several days following President Yeltsin’s decree to disband the Russian Parliament. Following my flights from North America to Moscow and then to Krasnoiarsk, the central Siberian city about 300 miles south of Tura, I sat with friends and watched the live CNN broadcast of the armed crisis back in Moscow. The predominantly Communist members of Parliament refused to abide by the unconstitutional decree to disband Parliament, and in the confrontation that ensued Yeltsin’s forces eventually took the building by siege (Khronika smutnogo vremeni 1993). At the time I did not fully appreciate how the political standoff, which continued to unfold and be televised nationwide in the days following as I began my fieldwork, affected my project. In part, President Clinton’s support for Yeltsin’s violent actions jeopardized my research because Communists in Tura were already seething about U.S. “interventionist” tactics when I arrived in the town. When I accepted a gracious offer to stay in the temporarily vacant apartment belonging to the representative from the Evenk District, I did not realize how much this man was disliked by many anti-Communists and reformers. Only after living in this apartment for nearly a month did I learn that this representative to the People’s Congress of the Russian Federation was one of the 100 representatives who barricaded themselves inside the Parliament building for days as Yeltsin’s anti-Communist supporters bombarded the building with gunfire.

      My fieldwork seemed to be off to an uneasy start, but then this fit with the expected initial phase of ethnographic projects, reified in accounts of fieldwork as a time for “gaining rapport.” As many authors have described, anthropological fieldwork is practically defined by a requisite period of gaining the trust of consultants (Kligman 1988: 20; Scheper-Hughes 1979: 11). Nita Kumar has written, “Fieldwork is by its very nature an ambitious, optimistic, very personal effort to woo over indifferent strangers” (1992: 2). Such descriptions of the process of “gaining rapport” appear as a common thread in fieldwork accounts, and ethnographers are increasingly dedicating a portion of their work to considering how their presence in communities intersects with shifting balances of power, heightened social inequalities, and allegiances to be made and, sometimes, lost.

      I initiated my research in Tura with a keen interest in the role of education, particularly residential schooling, in defining relationships between indigenous people and the Soviet state. This topic soon came to articulate with broader issues of identity because a major preoccupation of the community revolved around competing ideas about Evenk identities and the future relationship of the state to “small peoples of the North” (malochislennye narody Severa). This Soviet government designation encompassed those indigenous groups considered to be numerically “small,” with the implied comparison being to the “large” ethnic groups of Russians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, and others living in the former Soviet Union.¹ Community members frequently discussed the future of government affirmative action policies toward “small peoples of the North.” An equally prevalent topic of debate among Evenki revolved around ways to ensure their rights, including access to land for subsistence practices, native language education, and benefits from the privatization of natural resources in the region. The contemporary contest over Evenk identities was tightly related to the rapidly shifting political-economic context in the community. Overall, my research focus on Evenk identities resonated with those with whom I spent hours in conversation, and for those who ultimately had control over my access to archives, statistics, and travel.

      As a citizen of the United States, or Amerikanka as I was usually referred to, I was not quickly absorbed into the everyday life of Tura. These were the early days of satellite broadcasts of U.S. media, and this incessantly reminded my consultants of the relative wealth and opportunity from which I had only temporarily disengaged. As Roger Lancaster reflects in his work on Nicaragua (1988: 6), given the legacy of anthropology as a discipline often historically allied with government surveillance, it is not surprising that those who become its subjects of study find the projects to be suspect. Furthermore, given my origins as a citizen of the country in most direct opposition to the Soviet Union in the tug-of-war known as the Cold War, it was inevitable that I was perceived as closely related to this global power struggle.

      Images of the “West” and Dreams of Consumption

      “Gaining rapport” as a North American doing research in a central Siberian town in the 1990s was complicated by the fresh history of the Cold War, which invoked a binary view of geopolitics, with Soviet culture posed in opposition to all things viewed as “Western.”² After more than sixty years of official open antagonism toward the “West” (zapad) and its “decadent bourgeois culture,” by the late 1980s, U.S. popular culture was being widely rebroadcast and reimagined throughout Russia.³ In the 1990s in the Evenk District capital of Tura, youth were especially smitten with Western media images and market glitz, but people of all ages and backgrounds eagerly anticipated weekly television shows such as Santa Barbara, MTV, and Dallas, as well as a Mexican serial The Rich Also Cry, depicting the tribulations of contemporary Mexican aristocrats. Turintsy, residents of Tura, often spoke in terms of the relative poverty surrounding them in comparison to what they perceived as the wealth of the West.

      One reflection of the fascination with the West was an active appreciation for the bright colors and appealing design features of Western packaging. In 1992–93 many apartments in Tura had a shelf displaying boxes or containers with the English labels facing out; some displayed empty cookie boxes, others perfume bottles or candy wrappers. Rural central Siberians were not, however, the only ones smitten with Western products and bright packaging in the early 1990s. In the apartment in Moscow where I briefly stayed, the owners had arranged a wide array of Western packaging, including Folgers coffee cans, Stridex facial wipes, and soap wrappers in a prominent glass-fronted cupboard in the center of the apartment. While the impact of market forces in Moscow and outlying regions differed in degree at this time, irrespective of geography or political affiliation there was a widespread fascination with commodities and the new material possibilities suggested by an expanding consumer culture in Russia.

      The array of packaging could be viewed as embodying the aspirations to consume that were burgeoning in the early 1990s in Russia (Humphrey 1995). The packaging was also part of how Turintsy were imagining their new lives in a different political order with open borders; they were able to envision global connections to geographically distant others through foreign consumer goods unavailable in Russia until the early 1990s (see Appadurai 1996). Consumer goods linked a wide range of people to the modernity that many believed had eluded Russia in the late Soviet period. Frequently images of “civilization,” kul’tura, were invoked in contrast to what was commonly termed as the “backward,” ner-azvitaia or ostalaia, life in Russia and in the town of Tura in particular.⁴ It was not uncommon for people to display pages torn from Western, English-language magazines on their walls. Among the popular images displayed were advertisements for home furnishings and bath fixtures. In one case an advertisement for Finnish bath fixtures was hung opposite the chamber pot in a water closet that, like most of those in town, lacked running water. The squeaky clean, blond Finnish