Synopses & Reviews
Current cultural theory makes much of the role of the imagination of the “primitive” and the “indigenous” in the making of modern empires. In this study of Russian and Soviet governance of the Evenki hunters and reindeer herders of Northern Siberia, the author explores the reverse side of this social imaginary, exploring what he calls “cultures of statehood” among the very people whom the state consistently rendered stateless. He examines the political uses of state institutions and the practices of identification with the state by indigenous Siberians who are traditionally described as stateless kin-based peoples whose cultures are determined by long-term adaptation to the harsh northern environment and for whom the proximity of state institutions is solely a cause of suffering. Ssorin-Chaikov's goal is not merely to undo the displacement of indigenous lifestyles and identities to the imagined landscape beyond and before the Russian/Soviet state. It is, rather, to chart forms of government that expand alongside displacement, to examine the social life of the state in everyday contexts extending well beyond formal institutions, and to theorize statehood from a unique vantage point.
Review
"Ssorin-Chaikov merits the highest commendation for producing this oustanding work of scholarship."Slavic Review
Review
"[T]he book is engaging, well written, and perceptive. It is an important contribution to improving our understanding of indigenous life in the Soviet and post-Soviet Subarctic."ARCTIC
Synopsis
A rich and sophisticated ethnography of a stateless indigenous society and its complex and troubling relations with its natural environment and the Soviet state that dominated it.
Synopsis
“Ssorin-Chaikov merits the highest commendation for producing this oustanding work of scholarship.”—Slavic Review
“The Social Life of State is an impressive book. It makes intelligent and well-balanced use of archival material along with the fieldwork observations, and it is highly successful in problematizing the volatility of ‘authenticity as a social and cultural category for the indigenous populations as wells as for the Russians.” —Journal of Modern History
About the Author
Nikolai V. Ssorin-Chaikov is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University.
Table of Contents
Introduction -- State : deferral, difference and diffusion -- Power : time and the other -- Site : nesting hierarchies, nesting orientalism, and capitalism as "the other" -- Making wildness and empire : from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century -- Russian Iasak over Central Siberia -- Politics of gift and tribute -- Meanings of lawlessness -- The Katonga area at the turn of the twentieth century -- Recording social categories -- The fur trade, 1900-1917 -- Primitive communists on the Podkamennaia Tunguska River -- Constructing Soviet meetings -- "Ethnographic principle" as a knowledge practice -- Siberian social organization in early Soviet scholarship -- Designing clan Soviets -- Structuralist politics -- After capitalism : the tenacious visibility of the "old regime" in the early Soviet politics of difference -- Unmasking and uprooting -- The Soviet "ethnographic present-perfect" -- Second nature in the mirror of social constructivism -- Ethnography and reporting -- Class origin as genealogy -- The "eye," the socialist "I," and the capitalist "he" in the Soviet ethnographic present perfect -- Poetics of unfinished construction -- The visibility of the state -- Vanishing as unfinished construction -- The economy of labor shortage -- Expansion in the economy of shortage -- Poetics of development as employment -- Poetics of unfinished construction -- From state orphans to children of nature -- Boarding school -- Fosterage and apprenticeship -- Distinction and proper place -- Social life of the state : commands -- Social life of the state : call-signs and nicknames -- Narratives of autonomy -- Mothering tradition -- Surrogate workers and modes of production -- Female workers in the Katonga collective -- The making of professional housewives : Katonga -- The making of professional housewives : theory -- The social space of traditionalism -- The specter of domesticity and the invention of tradition -- Conclusion.