Since the last Ice Age, the reindeer's extraordinary adaptation to cold has sustained human life over vast tracts of the earth's surface, providing meat, fur, and transport. Images carved into rocks and tattooed on the skin of mummies hint at ancient ideas about the reindeer's magical ability to carry the human soul on flights to the sun. These images pose one of the great mysteries of prehistory: the reindeer revolution, in which Siberian native peoples tamed and saddled a species they had previously hunted.

Drawing on nearly twenty years of field work among the Eveny in northeast Siberia, Piers Vitebsky shows how Eveny social relations are formed through an intense partnership with these extraordinary animals as they migrate over the swamps, ice sheets, and mountain peaks of what in winter is the coldest inhabited region in the world. He reveals how indigenous ways of knowing involve a symbiotic ecology of mood between humans and reindeer, and he opens up an unprecedented understanding of nomadic movement, place, memory, habit, and innovation.

The Soviets' attempts to settle the nomads in villages undermined their self-reliance and mutual support. In an account both harrowing and funny, Vitebsky shows the Eveny's ambivalence toward productivity plans and medals and their subversion of political meetings designed to control them. The narrative gives a detailed and tender picture of how reindeer can act out or transform a person's destiny and of how prophetic dreaming about reindeer fills a gap left by the failed assurances of the state.

Vitebsky explores the Eveny experience of the cruelty of history through the unfolding and intertwining of their personal lives. Theinterplay of domestic life and power politics is both intimate and epic, as the reader follows the diverging fate of three charismatic but very different herding families through dangerous political and economic reforms. The book's gallery of unforgettable personalities includes shamans, psychics, wolves, bears, dogs, Communist Party bosses, daredevil aviators, fire and river spirits, and buried ancestors. The Reindeer People is a vivid and moving testimony to a Siberian native people's endurance and humor at the ecological limits of human existence.

Piers Vitebsky is Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge. His previous books include Shamanism and Dialogues with the Dead: The Discussion of Mortality Among the Sora of Eastern India.

This immersion in the lives of some of the world's toughest and most resilient people is a powerfully lovely book. It is also a kind of triple anthropology--of these ancient people, and of their relations with the Soviet and post-Soviet worlds.

-- Bill McKibben

If you read one book this year... read The Reindeer People. This book will grip and enlighten anyone... Like the reindeer themselves, this book takes wing.

-- Daily Telegraph

A wondrous, complex story...and Vitebsky tells it beautifully...Vitebsky's fascination with his subject and joyful attention to detail are what make this book stand out.

-- Guardian

Vitebsky is both an excellent scholar and a gifted writer, with a feeling for landscape and character and a knack for metaphor and allusion... Like all the finest anthropology, this book entertains readers with descriptions of an alienculture, only to imbue them with a deeper sense of common humanity.

-- The Times

A wild and vividly described journey to Siberia...Vitebsky draws us into a world where people, land, animals, and the seasons are part of a hard but also deeply spiritual existence.

-- New Scientist

A tender and highly personal piece of anthropology.

-- Daily Mail

So intimate, so revealing, and so moving...This book is required reading.

-- Moscow Times

The author captivates the reader with his delicate sense of human relations and sure grasp of the realities of Eveny life at an extraordinary moment in history. The power of the narrative and the exquisite evocation of place make this book a masterpiece of anthropological writing.

-- Professor Jean Briggs, Memorial University of Newfoundland, author of Never in Anger and Inuit Morality Play

"Remarkable."

"As richly detailed and compelling as it is instructive."

"Rewarding...Vitebsky is sensitive to every sight and sound in the Siberian wilderness."

"A warm and lucid tribute to Eveny...gorgeously observed and evocative." --Spectator.

"A wild and vividly described journey to Siberia." — New Scientist

"The work of an acutely observant and unusually dedicated field-worker at the height of his powers...a masterpiece of anthropological writing." --Jean Briggs, author of Inuit Morality Play

Cambridge anthropologist Piers Vitebsky, the first westerner to live with the Eveny of Siberia since the Russian revolution, brings readers an extraordinary case of survival in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. of photos.

In this acclaimed work, the anthropologist Piers Vitebsky offers a unique account of the Eveny, nomads who live in intimate partnership with an extraordinary animal. For centuries reindeer have provided the Eveny with food, fur, transport, and spiritual sustenance, enabling them to survive in the world's coldest inhabited region, the Siberian taiga, where winter ice freezes six feet thick and the temperature drops to ninety-six degrees below zero.

The book presents a gallery of unforgettable personalities, including shamans, psychics, wolves, bears, dogs, Communist Party bosses, daredevil aviators, and the spirits of fires and rivers. Based on nearly two decades of fieldwork, The Reindeer People is an enthralling and moving testimony to a Siberian native people's humor and endurance at the ecological limits of human existence.