Culture Contact in Evenki Land Inner Asia Book Series
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Culture Contact in Evenki Land Inner Asia Book Series Edited by David Sneath Caroline Humphrey Uradyn E. Bulag VOLUME 7 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ias Culture Contact in Evenki Land A Cybernetic Anthropology of the Baikal Region By Tatiana Safonova and István Sántha LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 All photographs included in this volume are owned by the authors. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Safonova, Tatiana, author. Culture contact in Evenki land : a cybernetic anthropology of the Baikal Region / by Tatiana Safonova and István Sántha. pages ; cm. -- (Inner Asia book series ; volume 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-23306-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Evenki (Asian people)--Russia (Federation)--Baikal, Lake, Region. 2. Evenki (Asian people)-- Russia (Federation)--Baikal, Lake, Region--Social life and customs. 3. Baikal, Lake, Region (Russia)--Social life and customs. I. Sántha, István, 1968- author. II. Title. III. Series: Inner Asia book series ; no. 7. DK759.E83S24 2013 305.894’1--dc23 2013013231 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISBN 978-90-04-23306-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25423-7 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Illustrations vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1. Companionship and Pokazukha: Flexible and Stable Elements of Evenki Culture 26 2. Pokazukha in Public Life: The Bugarikta House of Culture 48 3. Manakan and Andaki: Gender Distinctions and Personal Autonomy Among Evenki 68 4. Evenki People and their Dogs: Communicating by Sharing Contexts 86 5. Hunting: Ethos and Adaptation among Evenki and Buryats 100 6. Perpetual Outsiders: Local Chinese Ethos in Baikal Region 118 7. Evenki Land and Walking Mind 136 Conclusion 167 Bibliography 175 Index of Authors 181 Index of Subjects 183 <UN> <UN> ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 1. Young hunters: catching 18 2. Young hunters: holding 19 3. Repeating after adults 20 4. Evenki castrating a calf at Irgichi’s winter camp 28 5. Evenki distributing objects to sacrifice and consume at the annual ritual 36 6. Bugarikta House of Culture 52 7. Nadya with Ivan, Nadya’s colleague, Volodya and Natasha before the High Water Ritual 70 8. Mira with Nadya’s puppy 90 9. Taiga Buryats hunting for bears 102 10. Evenki driver preparing a vezdekhod to transport nephrite from the mine 130 11. Stills from video footage of Irgichi walking 141 Maps 1.1. Topography and Infrastructure in Bugarikta 150 1.2. Topography and Infrastructure in Mawut 151 2.1. Roads and Paths in Bugarikta 154 2.2. Roads and Paths in Mawut 155 3.1. Companionship and Pokazukha in Bugarikta 156 3.2. Companionship and Pokazukha in Mawut 157 4.1. Movement of Evenki Children in Bugarikta 160 4.2. Movement of Evenki Children in Mawut 161 5.1. Movement of Evenki Dogs in Bugarikta 162 5.2. Movement of Evenki Dogs in Mawut 163 <UN> ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The anthropology we present here is not an entirely rosy account of our experiences in Evenki land, but we think this book changed our lives for the better. We would like to thank all of those whom we met in the field and who were both nice and awful to us. Their influence on this book is substantial. Without the intellectual support that we received from various scholars this book could not have been written. In particular, we are grateful to Roberte Hamayon, Mihály Sárkány, Finn Sivert Nielsen, Nikolai Ssorin- Chaikov, Piers Vitebsky, David G. Anderson, Heonik Kwon, Nurit Bird- David, Peter Schweitzer, Katalin Uray-Kőhalmi, György Kara and Caroline Humphrey for giving us the encouragement to develop the arguments that appear in this text, and for the letters of recommendation, reviews of chapters, feedback on presentations, and the occasional look of reassur- ance that they provided. We received important comments and questions from many anthro- pologists and friends who showed interest in our work. Discussions with them advanced our analysis and helped us to refine our thinking. For this, we are especially indebted to Joachim Otto Habeck, Joachim Görlich, Aimar Ventsel, Olga Ulturgasheva, Marc Brightman, Vanessa Grotti, Art Leete, Brian Donahoe, Kirill Istomin, Csaba Mészáros, László Lajtai, Virginie Vaté, Olga Porovoznjuk and Anton Kramberger. It is an honour and a joy to be a part of this intellectual generation and community. With no small measure of patience and skill, our editor Tristam Barrett helped us to polish our manuscript. Although we wrote this book in English, the first draft certainly benefited from Lisa Nové’s rendering of our more blatant Eastern Europeanisms into conventional English. This book also had its victims. We did not always spend enough time with our parents and children, but we highly value their love, emotional and intellectual support. At various stages this project was supported by grants and fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany; Ministry of Culture and Education of the Republic of Hungary; Wenner-Gren Foundation, Chicago; Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA), Budapest; Mobility Fellowship (European Union-Hungary); Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship; Keizo Obuchi Research <UN> x acknowledgements Fellowship, UNESCO; Young Scientist Fellowship, INTAS, Brussels; Institute of Advanced Studies, Graz; Eötvös Fellowship, Budapest; and the Tatiana Foundation, Ulan-Ude, Russia. We gratefully recognise their support. The arguments that we put forward here were previously published as articles (Safonova and Sántha 2007, 2010a/b/c/d, 2011a/b/c, 2012), but they have been substantially modified in the writing of this book. We thank the publishers for giving us permission to use them in the present work. <UN> INTRODUCTION This book offers an understanding of culture contact through the lens of ‘cybernetic anthropology’ that we develop by drawing on the work of Gregory Bateson. The focus of this book is on Evenki, an indigenous group of hunter-gatherers and reindeer herders who occupy a vast terrain in Central and Eastern Siberia but who share this territory today with the numerous and diverse incomers. Contacts with these outsiders are impor- tant and, we argue, constitutive. This includes not merely contacts with such outsiders as ourselves and other anthropologists — although we sub- mit that ethnography is a form of culture contact. We would go as far as to suggest that Evenki culture is to some extent a product of contact with outsiders. We define this process broadly as that of ‘culture contact’, and our goal in this book is to chart how these contacts are manifested, what is ‘culture’ in this contact situation, and if culture articulation and manipu- lation can be seen as serving strategic ends. Finally, if it takes at least two cultures to sustain the concept of culture contact, what are the forms of this cultural co-existence? Can it be described as a dynamic equilibrium? We also aim to reintroduce and broaden the cybernetic approach in anthropology. Cybernetics – the study of communication and automatic control within natural and mechanical systems – is something of a niche subject in anthropology. It builds on Gregory Bateson’s pioneering research in the 1930s; this approach has been used particularly in studies of local ecology and ritual in Papua New Guinea where Bateson worked but it rarely travelled outside this territory. In our view, Bateson’s theoretical language can be usefully applied to study the ethos of hunter-gatherers, state-society interactions, and culture contact in the daily lives of the inhabitants of the Baikal region of Eastern Siberia.1 Evenki: Egalitarian Nomads The Evenki are one of a number of hunter-gatherer groups living in the Russian north. Numbering around 30,000, they speak a northern 1 Baikal region is a fictionalised name for the area around Lake Baikal that straddles Irkutsk oblast’ and the Buryat republic of the Russian Federation. Local place names and names of informants have been changed throughout the text in order to preserve the anonymity of our informants. <UN> 2 introduction Manchu-Tungus language and live as small dispersed groups in camps and villages over a vast area that extends between the Yenisei River and the Pacific Ocean.2 They occupy the taiga, a belt of pine forest that separates the pastures of the steppe to the south and the vast permafrost of the tun- dra to the north. Winter temperatures can reach as low as −60 °C and although the last ten years have seen increasingly hot summers there is not a single month when the temperature does not drop below 0 °C at night. Mosquitoes and other pests are a perpetual nuisance. There is lim- ited infrastructure, with roads, bridges, telephone networks and emer- gency services almost entirely absent. Despite the changes wrought by population decline, language loss, sed- entarisation, collectivisation, and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet sys- tem, the Evenki have succeeded in maintaining their distinctive egalitarian and animistic culture. Indeed, this book is in no small part an attempt to understand the practices by which the Evenki have managed to remain Evenki in the face of such changes.