1 Acknowledgements I Would Like to Thank Professor Thomas Hylland
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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen and the department of Social Anthropology at University of Oslo for invaluable help. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the division of Industrial Engineering and Management at Uppsala university, and family and friends; Rolf for pushing me, my parents for supporting me, and my children, Simon and Alexander, for going to Siberia with me and for living with this thesis for so long. 1 1. The Social Life of Ethnic Categories 4 A point of departure in my fieldwork experiences ................................................................................................. 4 A point of departure from within anthropology ..................................................................................................... 7 The social life of ethnic categories ................................................................................................................................ 9 Research question ............................................................................................................................................................. 13 Purpose and a hypothesis .............................................................................................................................................. 15 Research design and empirical material ................................................................................................................ 22 A hermeneutics of demystification and ethics ...................................................................................................... 27 Outline of thesis .................................................................................................................................................................. 35 2. Global Indigeneity: A Brief Overview 43 A global movement ........................................................................................................................................................... 43 How can we understand this political movement? ............................................................................................. 46 Indigeneity as a problem of definition? ................................................................................................................... 49 Tensions within global indigeneity ............................................................................................................................ 53 3. Ethnicity Theory: Indigeneity as Emic Category in Boundary Making 56 Social identification and fictive kinship .................................................................................................................. 58 Ethnicity as boundary between, not property of ................................................................................................. 60 Ethnic group or ethnic category? ............................................................................................................................... 65 Emic or etic category? ..................................................................................................................................................... 71 Examples of indigeneity as emic category in boundary making .................................................................. 76 Who and what becomes indigenous? ........................................................................................................................ 76 Indigeneity as an alternative to, or as part of, the global order? ................................................................ 81 4. Indigeneity in a National Order of Things 85 A national order of things ............................................................................................................................................. 85 Order and Anomaly .......................................................................................................................................................... 90 Classification as discourse ............................................................................................................................................. 92 Classification as power ................................................................................................................................................... 95 Classification and knowledge ...................................................................................................................................... 99 5. Ethnicity in Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Anthropology 103 A case of the politics of anthropological knowledge production ............................................................... 105 Anthropology and ethnicity policy .......................................................................................................................... 112 Indigeneity through time, space, and scale .......................................................................................................... 117 The North ............................................................................................................................................................................ 121 Small: 50,000 ..................................................................................................................................................................... 123 Policy towards the small peoples of the North ................................................................................................... 125 The post-Soviet indigenous movement .................................................................................................................. 131 The Ethnic ........................................................................................................................................................................... 136 6. Who Is Indigenous in Altai? 142 The Republic of Altai ...................................................................................................................................................... 145 Anthropological knowledge making of Altaian indigeneity ......................................................................... 150 Two ethnoscapes: Four or no indigenous peoples in Altai ............................................................................ 156 The republican background ....................................................................................................................................... 161 The census .......................................................................................................................................................................... 163 Cutting across the ethnoscapes ................................................................................................................................. 169 Beyond a national order of Altai .............................................................................................................................. 173 All Altaians are indigenous? ....................................................................................................................................... 177 What about Leo? .............................................................................................................................................................. 183 7. What is Northern about the North? 186 A field course to the North .......................................................................................................................................... 189 ‘Northern’ themes ............................................................................................................................................................ 191 The North as story-line ................................................................................................................................................. 195 2 What is Northern about LovoZero? ......................................................................................................................... 203 What is Northern about Saami? ............................................................................................................................... 209 The North as a useful story-line, but for whom? ................................................................................................ 212 8. Repatriation of Human Remains and the Social Life of Ethnic Origin 214 The journey begins ........................................................................................................................................................... 218 The Skulls ............................................................................................................................................................................ 223 The scientific expedition ................................................................................................................................................ 224 The ‘comparative scientific project’ ......................................................................................................................... 227 Ethnic classification ........................................................................................................................................................ 230 Human remains and provenience: ‘Origin’? ........................................................................................................ 238 The social