Red Ties and Residential Schools. Alexia Bloch
from a range of social strata, to consider the way relations of power are being reconfigured in this post-Soviet Siberian town.
Waning Socialism, Recent Ethnography, and Gendered Lives
The experience of the Evenki, one of the largest indigenous Siberian groups in the Russian Federation today, in many ways exemplifies how the Soviet Union as a socialist state sought to promote its own distinct path of “modernization,” including in regard to indigenous peoples.12 As I argue throughout this book, a focus on one Evenk community in the town of Tura provides insight into the unique ways in which a specific group experienced the Soviet era and continues to understand its identity as a distinct indigenous Siberian group. Set in the post-Soviet era, this book is about consciousness in flux and about the place of indigenous Siberians in broader social movements, both within the Russian Federation and beyond. As Kay Warren has noted, “revitalization” or “ethnic revindication,” is an important trend to turn our attention to throughout the world (1991: 103). Warren has cautioned that studies of such new social movements have often short-changed their subjects; they have tended to overlook the internal dynamics of the movements, de-emphasize the remaking of culture through activism, overly celebrate “choice” and individuals, and in general gloss over the complexities of people as having multiple identities and allegiances (1991: 103–4). Following Warren, I seek to reflect the internal dynamics and multiple levels of identities in one central Siberian community, while rooting this in a broad sociopolitical context.
It seems impossible to reflect on any group of people within Russia without considering the place of socialist practices in their lives. Purely socialist governments have decreased in number with the fall of the Soviet Union, and some—like Russia, China and Vietnam—have begun to incorporate aspects of market economies. Socialist cultural practices and ideals of egalitarianism (even if not realized in many ways) are recognizable, however, across cultural expanses and continue to play a role in contemporary societies.13 In the context of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, recent scholarship has addressed a wide range of issues related to these ideals of egalitarianism. First, scholars have focused on negotiations around land reform, primarily in Eastern Europe (Hann 1996; Kaneff 1996; Pine 1996; Lampland 1995; Verdery 1999). Second, scholars have examined gender ideologies under socialism and post-socialism, emphasizing the ways in which women have been marginalized in both eras (Einhorn 1993; Kligman 1998; Gal and Kligman 2000). Most significantly, scholars have indicated that the demise of socialism clears the way for societies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to move on to establish alternative civic entities (Verdery 1996).
Some scholarship on the former Soviet Union is less eager to point out the inherent flaws of socialist culture as a whole and instead focuses on the ways in which people are interpreting their historical experiences. In Russia, much of this research has been conducted in cities (mostly Moscow and St. Petersburg). It has focused on ethnic identity (Starovoitova 1987), youth culture (Markowitz 2000; Pilkington 1996; Cushman 1995), structures of education (Lempert 1996), and queer culture (Essig 1999). Ries’s work (1997) on Muscovite discourses centering around suffering, poverty, and gender politics especially points to widespread contours of cultural practice in the former Soviet Union. Urban Russian intellectual circles have certainly defined a large part of what it means to be Soviet, or now post-Soviet, in a social system that has a tradition of highly centralized media, scholarship, and educational curricula.
Social practices in outlying regions, or the vast majority of Russia that stretches over eleven time zones and is not predominantly urban, have received less attention from Western scholars until recently. Perhaps one of the most important works that has served as a benchmark for studies in dispersed, outlying, or “peripheral” regions has been Humphrey’s Karl Marx Collective (1983) about a Buriat collective farm. Humphrey’s updated and expanded work (1999a) further explores the tensions created by the intersection of an individually oriented market economy and the collectively rooted Buriat society in southern Siberia. Several scholars have also examined the historical development of the intricate historical webs of Russian and Soviet political-economic development projects among indigenous Siberians (Golovnev and Osherenko 1999; Grant 1995a; Slezkine 1994; Vakhtin 1994). In general, this work has tended toward policy and structural analysis, with less emphasis on local experience.
Increasingly scholars are engaging in nuanced ethnographic work in Siberia that reflects the experiential nature of cultural expression in a specific time and place (Rethmann 2001; Kerttula 2000; Anderson 2000; Ssorin-Chaikov 1998). In these works, individual lives take center stage to varying degrees. They remind us that broad-ranging debates in anthropology—regarding tradition, gender roles, emotion, knowledge systems, and relations between periphery and center—are most compelling when they are illustrated not by the policy initiatives of governments but through the practices of people. In a similar manner, in this book I seek to dislodge an image of monolithic Soviet power. My argument revolves around the idea that Soviet power was differentially experienced, depending on the ways in which people were engaging with the state, as people who were urban or rural, men or women, indigenous or Russian. As explored in the narratives at the center of analysis in the book (and particularly in Chapters 2, 3, and 4), the residential school is a setting in which the Soviet structures of power—and the ambivalences around it, the resistances to it, and the accommodations of it—can be vividly examined.
This book integrates perspectives on schooling, Evenk intellectuals, life histories, and the place of material culture and museums in the definition of Evenk identities. Throughout I engage in what Rethmann aptly calls “positioned storytelling” (2000: 2), in an attempt to allow the individual lives of those often overlooked in social science writing on the Russian Federation—women, children, and rural communities, among others—to become central. “Positioned storytelling” is a discursive practice frequently employed by anthropologists (for example, Abu-Lughod 1993; Constable 1997; Wolf 1992); as Rethmann explains, it “disrupts the possibility of reading for certainty and fixed meanings” (2001: 177). Applying this approach to ethnographic writing on post-Soviet contexts is one powerful way of countering a prevalent policy-oriented body of literature that tends to homogenize local experience, leaving out the divergence of views and the ways that people negotiate daily lives.
Contemporary ethnography on Siberia is increasingly turning its attention to gendered experience (Kerttula 2000; Balzer 1993; Chaussonnet 1988). Only Rethmann (2001), however, has made this the crux of her work. As in anthropological writing more broadly, the tendency in writing on Siberia has been toward homogenizing experience as if members of a community or ethnic group share perspectives and social roles irrespective of gender.14 I aim to demonstrate in different ways throughout this book how Evenk men and women encountered the Soviet state in distinctly gendered ways. Furthermore, I examine gendered experience as it was cross-cut by regional, educational, generational, and emerging class differences in the 1990s.
Here I seek to highlight the ways in which Soviet cultural practice continues as a signpost for many, and perhaps especially for Evenk women, who were both the particular focus of Soviet efforts to transform indigenous social practices, and in some ways the most significant beneficiaries of the social supports offered by the Soviet system. As explored throughout the following chapters, Evenk women’s experience of Soviet power structures was distinct from that of men; social mobility within Soviet structures was facilitated for indigenous women through affirmative action and emphasis on women’s labor within Soviet systems of knowledge. In contrast, Evenk men easily found employment herding and working close to the land, and while they were not discouraged from avenues of social mobility beginning with higher education, they tended to avoid these.
The following chapters seek to reflect on the differential ties indigenous Siberians had and continue to have to Soviet structures of power such as residential schooling. In this endeavor, however, this book aims to avoid homogenizing “Soviet power,” “the Evenki,” “the Russians,” or “indigenous Siberians.” For decades Evenk men’s and women’s lives were subject to an institution that was quintessentially Soviet and based on ideals of creating an egalitarian society, albeit