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 THE SIBERIAN WORLD

The Siberian World provides a window into the expansive and diverse world of
Siberian society, offering valuable insights into how local populations view their
environments, adapt to change, promote traditions, and maintain infrastructure.
Siberian society comprises more than 30 Indigenous groups, old Russian settlers,
and more recent newcomers and their descendants from all over the former Soviet
Union and the Russian Federation. The chapters examine a variety of interconnected
themes, including language revitalization, legal pluralism, ecology, trade, religion,
climate change, and co-creation of practices and identities with state programs
and policies. The book’s ethnographically rich contributions highlight Indigenous
voices, important theoretical concepts, and practices. The material connects with
wider discussions of perception of the environment, climate change, cultural and
linguistic change, urbanization, Indigenous rights, Arctic politics, globalization, and
sustainability/resilience.
The Siberian World will be of interest to scholars from many disciplines, including
Indigenous studies, anthropology, archaeology, geography, environmental history,
political science, and sociology.

John P. Ziker is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Boise

State University in Boise, Idaho, USA. His work focuses on social networks, climate
change, and demography.

Jenanne Ferguson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology,

Economics and Political Science in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Her work in lin-
guistic and sociocultural anthropology focuses on Indigenous and minority language
revitalization, urbanization and globalization, and linguistic creativity/verbal art.

Vladimir Davydov is Deputy Director for Science at Peter the Great Museum of
Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
St. Petersburg, and a research fellow in the Chukotka branch of North-Eastern
Federal University, Anadyr, Russia. His work focuses on mobility, infrastructure,
human–animal relations, reindeer herding, anthropology of food, and the history of
Siberian ethnography.
 THE ROUTLEDGE WORLDS

THE UMAYYAD WORLD THE SÁMI WORLD

Edited by Andrew Marsham
THE ASANTE WORLD
Edited by Edmund Abaka and Kwame Osei
Kwarteng
THE SAFAVID WORLD
Edited by Rudi Matthee
THE BIBLICAL WORLD, SECOND
EDITION
Edited by Katharine J. Dell
THE TOKUGAWA WORLD
Edited by Gary P. Leupp and De-min Tao
THE INUIT WORLD
Edited by Pamela Stern
THE ARTHURIAN WORLD
Edited by Miriam Edlich-Muth, Renée Ward
and Victoria Coldham-Fussell
THE MONGOL WORLD
Edited by Timothy May and Michael Hope
Edited by Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara
Alakorva and Sigga-Marja Magga
THE WORLD OF THE ANCIENT SILK
ROAD
Edited by Xinru Liu, with the assistance of
Pia Brancaccio
THE WORLD OF THE BAHÁ‘Í FAITH
Edited By Robert H. Stockman
THE QUAKER WORLD
Edited by C. Wess Daniels and Rhiannon
Grant
THE ANCIENT ISRAELITE WORLD
Edited by Kyle H. Keimer and George A.
Pierce
THE ANGKORIAN WORLD
Edited by Mitch Hendrickson, Miriam T
Stark and Damien Evans
THE SIBERIAN WORLD
Edited by John P. Ziker, Jenanne Ferguson
and Vladimir Davydov

https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Worlds/book-series/WORLDS
THE SIBERIAN WORLD

Edited by

John P. Ziker, Jenanne Ferguson, and

Vladimir Davydov
 Designed cover image: Iuliia Kuzenkova / Alamy Stock Photo. ‘Travelling in
winter, a man standing on Frozen lake Baikal with Ice cave in Siberia, Russia’
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, John P. Ziker, Jenanne Ferguson, and
Vladimir Davydov; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of John P. Ziker, Jenanne Ferguson, and Vladimir Davydov to be
identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
With the exception of the Introduction, no part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
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made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No
Derivatives 4.0 license.
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trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent
to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ziker, John P. (John Peter), 1965- editor. | Ferguson, Jenanne,
1983- editor. | Davydov, Vladimir, 1981- editor.
Title: The Siberian world / edited by John P. Ziker, Jenanne Ferguson,
Vladimir Davydov.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series:
Routledge worlds | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifers:
LCCN 2022046488 (print) | LCCN 2022046489 (ebook) | ISBN
9780367374754 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367374778 (paperback) | ISBN
9780429354663 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethnicity--Russia (Federation)--Siberia. | Human
ecology--Russia (Federation)--Siberia. | Human geography--Russia
(Federation)--Siberia. | Indigenous peoples--Russia
(Federation)--Siberia. | Siberia (Russia)--Population. | Siberia
(Russia)--Social conditions.
Classifcation: LCC DK758 .S535 2023 (print) | LCC DK758 (ebook) | DDC
305.800957--dc23/eng/20221122
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046488
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022046489
ISBN: 978-0-367-37475-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-37477-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-35466-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429354663
Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
 CONTENTS

List of tables x
List of contributors xi

Introduction 1
John P. Ziker, Jenanne Ferguson, and Vladimir Davydov

PA R T I: INDIGENOUS LAN G U AG E RE VIVAL AND

CULTURAL CHANG E 2 9

1 Language vitality and sustainability: Minority Indigenous languages in

the Sakha Republic 31
Lenore A. Grenoble, Antonina A. Vinokurova, and Elena V. Nesterova

2 (Socio)linguistic outcomes of social reorganization in Chukotka 47

Jessica Kantarovich

3 Kŋaloz’a’n Ujeret’i’n Ŋetełkila’n—Keepers of the Native Hearth: The

social life of the Itelmen language—documentation and revitalization 64
Tatiana Degai, David Koester, Jonathan David Bobaljik, and Chikako Ono

4 The phenomenology of riverine names and hydrological maps among

Siberian Evenki 79
Nadezhda Mamontova, Thomas F. Thornton, and Elena Klyachko

5 The tundra Nenets’ fre rites, or what is hidden inside of the Nenets
female needlework bag tutsya? 96
Roza Laptander

v
 — Contents —

6 Transformations of cooking technologies, spatial displacement, and

food nostalgia in Chukotka 110
Elena A. Davydova

PART II: LAND, LAW, AND E CO L O G Y 121

7 Customary law today: Mechanisms of sustainable development of

Indigenous peoples 123
Natalya Novikova

8 Indigenous land rights and land use in Siberia: Neighboring

jurisdictions, varied approaches 139
Viktoriya Filippova, Gail Fondahl, and Antonina Savvinova

9 Evenki “false” accounts: Supplies and reindeer in an Indigenous enterprise 156

Tatiana Safonova and Istvan Sántha

10 Climate change through the eyes of Yamal reindeer herders 166

Alexandra Terekhina and Alexander Volkovitskiy

11 Nature-on-the-move: Boreal forest, permafrost, and pastoral strategies

of Sakha people 179
Hiroki Takakura

12 Fluctuating human-animal relations: Soiot herder-hunters of South-

Central Siberia 192
Alex C. Oehler

13 Ecology and culture: Two case studies of empirical knowledge among

Katanga Evenkis of Eastern Siberia 205
Karl Mertens

PA R T I II: CO-CREATION OF PEOPLE AND THE STATE 217

14 Dancing with cranes, singing to gods: The Sakha Yhyakh and post-
Soviet national revival 219
Eleanor Peers

15 Double-edged publicity: The youth movement in Buryatia in the 2000s 232

Hibi Y. Watanabe

16 Soviet Debris: Failure and the poetics of unfnished construction in

Northern Siberia 246
Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov

vi
 — Contents —

17 Local gender contracts and the production of traditionality in Siberian

Old Believer places 261
Danila Rygovskiy

18 Arctic LNG production and the state (the case of Yamal Peninsula) 273
Ksenia Gavrilova

19 Biography of alcohol in the Arctic village 285

Anastasiia A. Yarzutkina

20 Sanctioned and unsanctioned trade 298

Aimar Ventsel

21 Longitudinal ethnography and changing social networks 310

Susan Crate

PA R T I V : FORMAL AND GRASSROOTS INFRASTRUCTURE AND

SIBERIAN MOBILITY 323

22 Evenki hunters’ and reindeer herders’ mobility: Transformation of

autonomy regimes 325
Vladimir Davydov

23 The infrastructure of food distribution: Translocal Dagestani migrants

in Western Siberia 340
Ekaterina Kapustina

24 Development cycles of cities in the Siberian North 352

Nadezhda Zamyatina

25 What difference does a railroad make?: Transportation and settlement

in the BAM region in historical perspective 364
Olga Povoroznyuk and Peter Schweitzer

26 Stuck in between: Transportation infrastructure, corporate social

responsibility, and the state in a small Siberian oil town 378
Gertrude Saxinger, Natalia Krasnoshtanova, and Gertraud Illmeier

27 Hidden dimensions of clandestine fshery: A misfortune topology based

on scenarios of failures 393
Lidia Rakhmanova

28 Infrastructural brokers in a logistical cul-de-sac: Taimyr’s wild winter

road drivers 405
Valeria Vasilyeva

vii
 — Contents —

29 Ice roads and foating shops: The seasonal variations and landscape of
mobility in Northwest Siberia 416
Mikhail G. Agapov

PART V: RELIGIOUS MOSAICS IN SIBERIA 429

30 Contemporary shamanic and spiritual practices in the city of Yakutsk 431

Lena A. Sidorova

31 The making of Altaian nationalism: Indigenous intelligentsia, Oirot

prophecy, and socialist autonomy, 1904–1922 446
Andrei Znamenski

32 Missionaries in the Russian Arctic: Religious and ideological changes

among Nenets reindeer herders 461
Laur Vallikivi

33 Nanai post-Soviet Shamanism: “True” shamans among the “neo-shamans” 475

Tatiana Bulgakova

34 Feeding the gi’rgir at Kilvei: An exploration of human-reindeer-

ancestor relations among the Siberian Chukchi 488
Jeanette Lykkegård

35 Feasts and festivals among contemporary Siberian communities 501

Stephan Dudeck

36 Animals as a refection of the universe structure in the culture of Oka

Buryats and Soiots 517
Veronika Beliaeva-Sachuk

PART VI: CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY 529

37 Economics of the Santan trade: Proft of the Nivkh and Ul’chi traders
in Northeast Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries 531
Shiro Sasaki

38 Power, ritual, and art in the Siberian Ice Age: The collection of
ornamented artifacts as evidence of prestige technology 549
Liudmila Lbova and Tatyana Rostyazhenko

39 Archaeology of shamanism in Siberian prehistory 563

Feng Qu

viii
 — Contents —

40 Rock art research in Southeast Siberia: A history of ideas and

ethnographic interpretations 575
Donatas Brandišauskas

41 A history of Siberian ethnography 587

Anna Sirina

42 Cycles of change: Seasonality in the environmental history of Siberia 607

Spencer Abbe and Ryan Tucker Jones

Index 623

ix
 TABLES

1.1 Indigenous minority populations, 2010 and 2002 32

1.2 Defnitions of Arctic social indicators by domain 34
1.3 Speakers of Indigenous minority languages and percentage of ethnic
population 39
4.1 Categories of Evenki riverine names: continuity and change 89
8.1 Interviewees 144
8.2 Obshchina size 146
15.1 The basic orientations of the activities of youth organizations in
Buryatia (N=75) 235
15.2 Some details about Istok’s staff members 237
15.3 Migration balance in Buriatiia between 2002 and 2011 239
37.1 Price list of commodities determined by D. Matsuda in 1812
(Matsuda, 1972, pp. 219–225) (Prices are estimated by pieces of
Sakhalin sable fur.) 537
37.2 The numbers of boats and crews and quantity of silk garments, silk
cloth, and cotton cloth from 1853 to 1867 539
37.3 List of commodities of the trade in 1853 (Kaiho, 1991, pp. 7–8) 540
37.4 Price list of the commodities of the Nivkh (Schrenck, 1899, pp.
281–283) (Items that can be compared with prices of the Japanese side) 542

x
 CONTRIBUTORS

Spencer Abbe is PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of

Oregon, USA. He specializes in the interactions between earthquakes and empires in
the North Pacifc, 18th–20th centuries.

Mikhail G. Agapov is Senior Research Fellow of Laboratory for Historical Geography

and Regionalistics (LHiGR) at University of Tyumen, Russia. His scientifc interests
are history and anthropology of the Eurasian Arctic.

Veronika Beliaeva-Sachuk is Senior Research Fellow of Arctic Research Center

at Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of
the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia. Her research deals with
Indigenous people of Southern Siberia with a focus on Buddhism, shamanism, and
reindeer herding.

Donatas Brandišauskas is a social anthropologist with research interest in human/

non-human relations, animism, reindeer herding and hunting of Indigenous Evenki
of East Siberia and the Far East. He is Professor at the Institute of Asian and
Transcultural Studies and Senior Researcher at the Faculty of History of Vilnius
University, Lituania. His monograph Leaving Footprints in the Taiga: Luck, Spirits
and Ambivalence among the Siberian Orochen Reindeer Herders and Hunters (2019)
is an ethnographic study of the ontology of luck among contemporary reindeer herd-
ers and hunters. His current ethnographic inquiries include themes of Indigenous
land use, customary law, and human-predator interactions.

Tatiana Bulgakova is Professor at Herzen State Pedagogical University, St. Petersburg,

Russia. Her research focuses on Nanai shamanism.

Susan Crate is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University,

Virginia, USA.

Jonathan David Bobaljik is Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University,

Massachusetts, USA. His interests include language universals, morphology, syntax,

xi
 — Contributors —

and the documentation of endangered languages. He has been involved with the
Itelmen language since 1993.

Vladimir Davydov is Deputy Director for Science at the Peter the Great Museum
of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of
Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia, and Research Fellow at the Chukotka Branch of
North-Eastern Federal University, Anadyr, Russia. His research focuses on mobility
of Evenki, Dolgan, and Chukchi reindeer herders.

Elena A. Davydova is Research Fellow of the Arctic Research Center at the Peter the
Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy
of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia, Research Fellow at the Chukotka Branch of North-
Eastern Federal University, Anadyr, Russia and PHD candidate in the Department of
Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research
interests are food-related infrastructures, supply, mobility, and materiality of food in
the Russian Arctic.

Tatiana Degai is an Itelmen scholar from Kamchatka Peninsula, the Pacifc coast of
Russia. Her research and teaching are inspired by the epistemologies of her commu-
nity and are focused on three key areas: Indigenous knowledge systems; revitalization
and stabilization of Indigenous languages; and Indigenous visions on sustainabil-
ity and well-being. She is Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology,
University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Stephan Dudeck is a social anthropologist working as a Research Fellow in Arctic

Studies at the Institute of Cultural Research, University of Tartu, Estonia, as Fellow
at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies e.V. (IASS), Potsdam, Germany,
and as Associated Senior Researcher at the Anthropology Research Team, Arctic
Centre, University of Lapland, Finland. Since the mid-1990s he established collabo-
rations with Indigenous communities in Western Siberia and the Russian North in
research on the impact of extractive industries, relations to the environment, and
preservation of cultural heritage.

Viktoriya Filippova is Senior Researcher in the Department of History and Arctic

Studies at the Institute for Humanities Research and Indigenous Studies of the North,
Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, Yakutsk, Russia.

Gail Fondahl is a recently retired and now Adjunct Professor of Geography at the
University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. Her research focuses on Indigenous
rights in the Russian north.

Ksenia Gavrilova is Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Historical Geography and
Regional Studies at Tyumen State University, Russia, and at the Center for Arctic
Social Studies at the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia.

Lenore A. Grenoble is John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor in the

Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, USA, and the Director of the
Arctic Linguistic Ecology Lab at North-Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk, Russia.

xii
 — Contributors —

Gertraud Illmeier is an MA Student in the Department of Social and Cultural

Anthropology at the University of Vienna, Austria. She works on the project confgu-
rations of “remoteness” (CoRe) and conducts thesis research on Siberian transport
infrastructures and resource extraction impacting local (Indigenous) communities.

Ryan Tucker Jones is Ann Swindells Professor in History at the University of Oregon,
USA. He is the author of Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (2022)
and Empire of Extinction: Russians and the Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867
(2014).

Jessica Kantarovich is Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Linguistics at the

University of Chicago, USA. She specializes in language contact, variation, and
change in Siberia and the Arctic.

Ekaterina Kapustina is Leading Research Fellow of the Department of Caucasus at the

Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian
Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia. Her research deals with translocal migra-
tion between the Dagestan Republic and industrial centres of the Russian Arctic.

Elena Klyachko is PhD Student in Linguistics at the National Research University

Higher School of Economics (HSE), Moscow, Russia. She holds an MA in
Computational Linguistics from HSE (2014). She has conducted research among the
Siberian Ewenki since 2008. Her main interests include Tungusic dialectology and the
application of natural language processing methods to study low-resource languages.

David Koester is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA.

Natalia Krasnoshtanova is Researcher at the V.B. Sochava Institute of Geography,

Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Irkutsk, Russia. Her research
focuses on the socio-economic development of remote regions of the North and
Siberia, sustainable development, and the relationship between Indigenous people
and industry in Eastern Siberia.

Roza Laptander is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Hamburg,

Germany. She works on documentation of the Nenets language and spoken history
of the Western Siberian Nenets.

Liudmila Lbova is Doctor of Historical Sciences and Full Professor in the Department
of International Relations at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, St.
Petersburg, Russia. Her area of interest includes prehistory and ancient art, technol-
ogy, and the archaeology of the Stone Age.

Jeanette Lykkegård is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Anthropology

at the Aarhus University, Denmark. Her feld of research includes life and death pro-
cesses among the Siberian Chukchi, and the experience of home among Ukrainian
refugees in Denmark.

xiii
 — Contributors —

Nadezhda Mamontova is currently a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow with the Geography

Program at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. She has conducted
research among the Siberian Evenki since 2007.

Karl Mertens is Doctoral Candidate at the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior pro-
gram of Boise State University, USA. His research interests include human behavior,
decision making, and cooperation.

Elena V. Nesterova is a Candidate of Philological Sciences and Researcher in the

Sector of Northern Philology, Institute of Humanitarian Studies and Problems of
Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberian Branch Russian Academy of Sciences,
Yakutsk, Russia. Her research focuses on Even language and folklore.

Natalya Novikova is a legal anthropologist and Leading Research Fellow at the

Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow,
Russia. She has carried out feld research among Khanty, Mansy, Nenets, Nivkhi,
Oroki, Eskimos (Russia), Inuvialuit (Canada), and Sami (Norway).

Alex C. Oehler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Regina,

Saskatchewan, Canada. His research focuses on sentient landscapes and animal-
human communication.

Chikako Ono is Professor at Hokkai-Gakuen University, Sapporo, Japan. She is a

linguist working on Itelmen grammar.

Eleanor Peers is Arctic Information Specialist with the library of the Scott Polar
Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, USA. She has held research fel-
lowships at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany,
and the University of Aberdeen, UK. She has been conducting research in Sakha
(Yakutia) since 2003.

Olga Povoroznyuk is Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of

Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research
interests include infrastructure and development, identity, ethnicity and indigeneity,
postsocialism, and postcolonialism in Siberia and Circumpolar North.

Feng Qu is Founding Director and Professor at the Arctic Studies Center at Liaocheng
University, China, and also Affliate Professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks
and Indiana University Bloomington, USA. His academic interests include Arctic pre-
history, ethnography, shamanism, animism, and ritual. His research areas include
China, Siberia, and Alaska.

Lidia Rakhmanova is Senior Lecturer at the National Research University Higher

School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia. Her feld of interests includes post-soviet
informal economies and fsheries and lifeworlds of seasonally isolated settlements.

Valeria Vasilyeva is Research Fellow of the Center for Arctic Social Studies at the
European University, St. Petersburg, Russia. Her research addresses mobility, space,
and infrastructure in the Russian North.

xiv
 — Contributors —

Tatyana Rostyazhenko is Graduate Student in the Department of Archaeology and

Ethnography at the Novosibirsk State University, Russia. She specializes in Paleolithic
History and Art, ancient technologies, prestige technologies, and exchanges in Siberia.

Danila Rygovskiy is PhD Candidate at the Department of Estonian and Comparative

Folklore, University of Tartu, Estonia. He works with communities of Russian Old
Believers in Siberia and Estonia, focusing on women's roles in religious practices,
leadership, spiritual writing, and identity. He also looks at Russian Old Believer rules
of ritual purity and their implications in practice, communication of Old Believers
with non-Old Believers and Siberian Indigenous peoples, and the meaning of external
pieties for Old Believer religious traditions.

Tatiana Safonova is Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central
European University, Hungary. She has been involved in anthropological research of
Siberian peoples for more than 15 years, focusing on the documentation of hunter-
gathering lifestyles. Her recent research is devoted to the study of right-wing pop-
ulism and its everyday forms in the Hungarian countryside.

István Sántha is Senior Research Fellow at the Research Centre for the Humanities
of the Loránd Eötvös Research Network (the Institute of Ethnology of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences). As a social anthropologist, he has studied the relationships
between hunter-gatherers of the taiga and cattle breeders of the steppe in the Baikal
region. Recently, he has focused on Hungarian orientalist approaches to Central Asia
and Siberia and social disintegration during WWII.

Shiro Sasaki is Director of the National Ainu Museum and Professor Emeritus at the
National Museum of Ethnology, Japan.

Antonina Savvinova is a social geographer, cartographer, and Head of the Laboratory of

Electronic Cartography Systems at the Ecology and Geography Department of Institute
of Natural Sciences, North Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk, Russia. She studies the
traditional nature use of the Indigenous peoples of the North in Yakutia.

Gertrude Saxinger is Social Anthropologist at the Department of Political Science at

the University of Vienna, Austria, and at the Institute of Social Anthropology at Uni
Bern, Switzerland. Her current research and political foci are “solidarity in mining”
and decolonial co-creative research methodology.

Peter Schweitzer is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

at the University of Vienna, Austria, and Professor Emeritus at the University of
Alaska Fairbanks, USA. He is past president of the International Arctic Social
Sciences Association (IASSA) and a founding member of the Austrian Polar Research
Institute (APRI).

Lena A. Sidorova is Associate Professor (Docent) in the Department of Culturology

at the Institute of Peoples and Cultures of the Far East of the Russian Federation at

xv
 — Contributors —

the North Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk, Russia. She is editor of the literary-
artistic journal Ilin.

Anna Sirina is Chief Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology,
Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, and RSF project participant at Peter the
Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy
of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia. Her scientifc interests are ethnography of Evenkis
and history of science.

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov is Associate Professor (Docent) at the National Research

University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia. He works at the inter-
section of ethnographies of the state, exchange theory, the anthropology of time,
and ethnographic conceptualism. Published on the new far right, ethnographies
of war, history, and anthropology, the most recent book is Two Lenins: A Brief
Anthropology of Time (2017).

Hiroki Takakura is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Center for Northeast

Asian Studies, Tohoku University, Japan. He studies human-animal relations and
ethnohistory in Sakha Republic and the Russian Far East.

Alexandra Terekhina is a social anthropologist and researcher at the Arctic Research

Station of Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, Russian Academy of Sciences,
Labytnangi, Russia, and a Research Affliate at the Peter the Great Museum of
Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences. She
studies the culture of Arctic nomads in Yamal.

Thomas F. Thornton is Professor of Environment and Society at the University of

Alaska Southeast, USA, Director of the Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center, USA, and
Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change
Institute, UK. His research focuses on human-environmental systems in the Gulf of
Alaska and North Pacifc, where he has worked since 1989.

Laur Vallikivi is Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Arctic

Studies Centre at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He has done long-term feldwork
in Nenets reindeer-herding communities and published widely on religious change in
the Russian Arctic.

Aimar Ventsel is Research Professor of Arctic Studies at the University of Tartu,

Estonia. He has studied youth cultures, Dolgan reindeer herders, and sub-national
statehood of the Republic of Sakha.

Antonina A. Vinokurova is Associate Professor, and Head of the Department of

Northern Philology at North-Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk, Russia. Her scien-
tifc interests are Even language, literature of the peoples of the North, Even folklore,
and ethnolinguistics.

xvi
 — Contributors —

Alexander Volkovitskiy is a social anthropologist, archaeologist, and researcher

at the Arctic Research Station of Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, Russian
Academy of Sciences, Labytnangi, Russia. His research deals with socio-ecological
systems in the Yamal tundra.

Hibi Y. Watanabe is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tokyo,

Japan. He studies the ethnography and ethno/regional history of Siberia.

Anastasiia A. Yarzutkina is Head of the Scientifc and Educational Center at the

Chukotka Branch of North-Eastern Federal University, Anadyr, Russia and Senior
Research Fellow in the Arctic Linguistic Ecology Lab at North-Eastern Federal
University, Yakutsk, Russia. Her scientifc interest is ethnography of Chukotka.

Nadezhda Zamyatina is Assistant Professor at Lomonosov Moscow State University

(Faculty of Geography) and Leading Research Fellow at the National Research
University Higher School of Economics (Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism)
in Moscow, Russia. Her research interests are mental space, geographical images and
concepts, territory marketing, city images, and urban development.

Andrei Znamenski is Professor of History at the University of Memphis, Tennessee,

USA. He has authored several books, including The Beauty of the Primitive:
Shamanism and Western Imagination (2007), Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and
Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia (2011), and most recently, Socialism as a Secular
Creed: A Modern Global History (2022).

xvii
 INTRODUCTION

John P. Ziker, Jenanne Ferguson, and

Vladimir Davydov

THE CHALLENGE OF SIBERIA

Spanning eight time zones and thirteen million square kilometers, Siberia is home to
Indigenous Siberians—the so-called “small-numbered native peoples of the North”
(korennye malochislennye narody Severa), more populous Indigenous Siberian ethnic
minorities, Russian old settlers, and newcomers and their descendants from all across
the former Soviet Union and east Asia. Siberia as a region has been geographically
defned in slightly different ways throughout history and different regimes; at its
broadest delineation (which we take here) it encompasses all of northern Asia from
the Ural Mountains in the west to the sea of Okhotsk and Pacifc Ocean in the east,
the Arctic Ocean in the north and the borders of central-east Kazakhstan, Mongolia,
and China to the south. Around 37 million people call this vast space home as of
2022, according to estimates made in late 2021 (Goskomstat, 2022).
Siberia consists of seemingly endless boreal forests (taiga), large rivers that empty
into the Arctic and Pacifc Oceans, and vast wetlands critical for migratory birds. The
region contains a variety of ecological zones from temperate grasslands, savannas,
and shrublands to Arctic marine biomes and polar desert (tundra). Much of Siberia
is underlain with permafrost—ground that is permanently frozen for two or more
years—although with global warming trends differentially affecting the north, the
extent of permafrost and its depth is changing quickly. With its population living in
remote communities across the tundra and taiga, towns and regional centers, areas of
intense industrial development, and large cities mainly along the trans-Siberian high-
way, the Siberian world is a human mosaic as well as environmental mosaic—one
that is as dynamic as it is expansive.
This is not the frst attempt at capturing the cultural diversity of the region.
One of the inaugural English-language volumes on the ethnography of Siberia was
Maksim G. Levin and Leonid P. Potapov’s (eds.) Peoples of Siberia (1964), frst
published in Russian in 1956 (Levin & Potapov, 1956). Dedicating a chapter to
each of 30 Siberian Indigenous groups, and also touching on the Russian popula-
tion of Siberia, the archaeology of the region, and physical anthropological char-
acteristics, the Levin and Potapov volume is a comprehensive descriptive account
leveraging Russian (Soviet) ethnography of the region at that point in time. It is
organized in a very straightforward, descriptive manner, with each chapter covering

DOI: 10.4324/9780429354663-1 1
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Joseph
Hergesheimer, an essay in interpretation
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Title: Joseph Hergesheimer, an essay in interpretation

Author: James Branch Cabell

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Language: English

Original publication: Chicago: The Bookfellows, 1921

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOSEPH

HERGESHEIMER, AN ESSAY IN INTERPRETATION ***
Joseph Hergesheimer
An Essay in Interpretation
 Joseph Hergesheimer
An Essay in Interpretation

By
James Branch Cabell

“And we dreamed a dream in one night, I and he: we dreamed

each man according to the interpretation of his dream.”

CHICAGO
THE BOOKFELLOWS
1921
One thousand small paper and ninety-nine tall paper copies of this monograph
have been printed for The Bookfellows in August, 1921. The edition is the first;
Mr. Cabell the author is Bookfellow No. 513 and Mr. Brewer the printer is
Bookfellow No. 14.

Copyright 1921 by
James Branch Cabell
 To
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

with friendship and large admiration

as goes the past, and with
cordial faith in what
is to come.
 ONE

O say they, speak they, and tell they the tale, in “literary
gossip,” that Joseph Hergesheimer “wrote” for a long while
before an iota of his typing was transmuted into “author’s proof.” And
the tale tells how for fourteen years he could find nowhere any
magazine editor to whose present needs a Hergesheimer story was
quite suited.
It is my belief that in approaching Mr. Hergesheimer’s work one
should bear constantly in mind those fourteen years, for to me they
appear, not uncuriously, to have shaped and colored every book he
has thus far published.
The actual merit of the writing done during that period of
“unavailability” is—here, at least—irrelevant. It is not the point of the
fable that he high-heartedly wrote a story to which, when completed,
his unbiased judgment could not quite honestly deny such deference
as is due to a literary masterpiece; and which, through some odd
error, was rejected by a magazine that every month was publishing
vastly inferior stories; and which was later declined by another
magazine, and by a host of magazines, with a dispiriting bland
unanimity not unsuggestive of editorial conspiracy. Meanwhile—of
course—he had written another tale, which was much better than the
first, and which proved to be an equally faithful chaperon of return
postage. So story followed story, each dreeing the same weird....
And he used to wait for the postman, no doubt, and to note from
afar that it was a large envelope; and would open the damned thing
with a faint hope that perhaps they just wanted some slight changes
made; and would find only the neat, impersonal, and civilly
patronizing death-warrant of hope. So Joseph Hergesheimer kept on
with his foolishness, without any gleam of success, or even (they
report) any word of encouragement. And doubtless his relatives said
the customary things....
Yet none of these circumstances, either, is the point of the
apologue, because in all save one detail the comedy has been
abraded into pointlessness by over-constant repetition; and is, of
course, being futilely performed at this moment in one prefers not to
reflect how many thousand homes. The leading rôle, though, is too
unprofitable and irksome for any quite sane person to persist in
enacting it for fourteen years. This Joseph Hergesheimer did: and
that is the fable’s significant point.
 TWO

ES, it is the boy’s illogical pertinacity that is the fable’s point,

because it so plausibly explains why nearly all the men in Mr.
Hergesheimer’s books are hag-ridden by one or another sole desire
which spurs them toward a definite goal at every instant of their
mimic lives. These men but variously reflect, I take it, that younger
Hergesheimer’s “will to write,” that unconquerable will. To Mr.
Hergesheimer, even to-day, it probably seems natural that a man’s
whole living should be devoted to the attaining of one desire quite
clearly perceived, because his own life has been thus dedicated. The
more shrewd mass of practical persons that go about in flesh are
otherwise; and comfortably fritter through the day, with no larger
objective at any time in mind than the catching of a car, the rounding
off of a business transaction, the keeping of an engagement for
luncheon, and the vesperal attendance to some unmental form of
recreation, with one small interest displacing another in endless
succession, until bedtime arrives and the undertaker tucks them in.
It explains to me the Hergesheimer women, too, those troublingly
ornamental odalisques. They are fine costly toys, tricked out in
curious tissues: and, waiting for the strong male’s leisure, they smile
cryptically. They will divert him by and by, when the day’s work is
dispatched, maintaining their own thoughts inviolate, even in the
instant of comminglement wherein the strongest man abates
reserve: but their moment is not daylit, for the Hergesheimer women
are all-incongruous with what is done during office hours, nor are
they to be valued then. Sometimes they are embodied ideals, to be
sure, remotely prized as symbols or else grasped as trophies to
commemorate the nearing of the goal: but for the most part they rank
candidly as avocational interests. I find nowhere in Joseph
Hergesheimer’s stories any record of intimacy and confidence
between a man and a woman.... And this too, I think, reflects that all-
important formative fourteen years wherein, whatever may have
been Mr. Hergesheimer’s conduct of his relatively unimportant
physical life, his fundamental concernments were pursued in a
realm, of necessity, uninhabited by women. Indeed, no woman can
with real content permit the man whom she proprietorially cherishes
to traffic in this queer lonely realm, and she cannot but secretly
regard his visits thereto as a personal slight. So the creative literary
artist is (when luckiest) at silent feud with his women, because the
two are perpetually irritated by the failure of their joint effort to ignore
the fact that she ranks necessarily as an avocational interest.
 THREE

HAT, though, was the precise goal of the fourteen years of

visually unproductive “writing”? Those earlier stories have
never been printed, so that one perforce advances on a bridge of
guesswork. But certainly, in all that is to-day accessible of Mr.
Hergesheimer’s creative feats—with one exception duly noted
hereinafter—there is a patent negligence, and indeed an
ostentatious avoidance, of any aiming toward popularity. That during
the fourteen years young Hergesheimer labored toward the applause
and cheques of a “best seller,” is to the considerate inconceivable.
Nor could that well have been a motive strong enough to sustain him
thus long, since the maker of reading-matter, like any other
tradesman, has need of quick returns where the artist battens on
immediate rejections.
No, Mr. Hergesheimer’s monomania, one estimates, was then, just
as it seems to be to-day, to write for his own delectation—in large
part because he could not help it, and in part with the hope of,
somehow and some day, obtaining an audience with the same or, at
any rate, a kindred sense of beauty.... This, to be sure, is always a
vain aspiration. That which, in effusions such as this, we loosely talk
about as “beauty” probably does not exist as a vital thing save here
and there in the thoughts of not too many and not to be too seriously
taken persons. In life, rather frequently, one appears to catch a
glimpse of something of the sort just around the corner or over the
way, but it is rarely, and perhaps never, actually at hand. Sometimes,
of course, one seems about to incorporate the elusive thing into
one’s daily living; and, striving, finds the attempt a grasping at an
opalescent bubble, with the same small shock, the same disrupting
disillusionment.
“Beauty,” thus, is by the judicious conceded to be an
unembodiable thought, not even quite to be grasped by the mind;
and certainly never nicely nor with any self-content to be
communicated via the pages of a book, wherein are preserved, at
best, the faded petals and the flattened crumbling stalks of what
seemed lovely once to somebody who is as dead as are these
desiccated relics of his ardor and of his disputable taste.
In brief, it may be granted—and by Mr. Hergesheimer most
cheerfully of all persons—that during these fourteen years Mr.
Hergesheimer was attempting the preposterously impossible.
 FOUR

OW, to my thinking, there is something curiously similar to

that unreasonable endeavor to be found in all the
Hergesheimer novels. Here always I find portrayed, with an
insistency and a reiteration to which I seem to detect a queer
analogue in the writings of Christopher Marlowe, men laboring
toward the unattainable, and a high questing foiled. No one of the
five novels varies from this formula.
Anthony Ball, of The Lay Anthony, strives toward the beauty of
chastity—not morally concerned one way or the other, but resolute to
preserve his physical purity for the sake of a girl whose body, he
finds at last, has long ago been ravished by worms. Again there is in
Mountain Blood no hint of moral-mongering—for Mr. Hergesheimer
is no more concerned with moral values than is the Decalogue—
when Gordon Makimmon toils toward the beauty of atonement, to
die in all a broken man, with his high goal yet gleaming on the
horizon untouched. The three black Pennys flounder toward the
beauty of a defiant carnal passion, which through the generations
scorches and defiles, and burns out futilely by and by, leaving only
slag where the aspiring lovely fire was. And through the formal
garden ways of Java Head pass feverishly at least five persons who
struggle (and fretfully know their failure to be foredoomed) toward
the capturing of one or another evincement of beauty, with the
resultant bodily demolishment of three of them and the spiritual
maiming of the others.
That which one, for whatever reason, finds most beautiful must be
sought; it is a goal which one seeks futilely, and with discomfort and
peril, but which one seeks inevitably: such is the “plot” of these four
novels. Such is also, as I need hardly say, the “plot” of the
aforementioned fourteen years wherein not anything tangible was
achieved except the consuming of youth and postage....
Nor does the dénouement differ, either, in any of these novels: the
postman comes with the plethoric envelope which signals from afar
that the result of much high-hearted striving is not quite suited to the
present needs of this world’s editor; and sometimes the postman is
Age, but more often he is Death.
 FIVE

OW the fifth, and incomparably the finest and loveliest, of the

Hergesheimer novels is Linda Condon, which renders self-
confessedly a story of “the old service of beauty, of the old gesture
toward the stars”—“here never to be won, never to be realized”—of
the service which “only beauty knows and possesses”.... For Linda
Condon is to be valued less as the life-history of a woman than as
the depiction—curt, incisive, and yet pitying—of a shrine that,
however transiently, was hallowed.
At the exacting workaday pursuit of being a human being this
Linda fails, fails chilled and wistful. She has, like more of us than
dare proclaim the defect, no talent whatever for heart-felt living, so
that most persons seem but to pass grayly upon the horizon of her
consciousness, like unintelligible wraiths gesticulating,—and always
remaining somehow disjunct and not gravely important,—the while
that all the needs and obligations of one’s corporal life must be
discharged with an ever-present sense of their queer triviality.
Toward nobody, neither toward Linda Condon’s mother nor lover, nor
husband, nor children, may she, the real Linda, quite entertain any
sense of actual attachment, far less of intimacy....
Meanwhile she has her loveliness, not of character or mind, but a
loan of surpassing physical beauty. And to Linda Condon her own
bright moving carcass becomes a thing to be tended and preserved
religiously, because beauty is divine, and she herself is estimable, if
at all, as the fane which beauty briefly inhabits.... And by and by,
under time’s handling, her comeliness is shriveled, and her lovers
are turned to valueless dust: but first, has Linda’s lost young beauty
been the buried sculptor’s inspiration, and it has been perpetuated in
everlasting bronze. The perfection of Linda Condon’s youth is never
to perish, and is not ever to be dulled by old age or corrupted in
death. She comprehends this as she passes out of the story, a
faded, desolate and insignificant bit of rubbish, contented to know
that the one thing which really meant much to her is, as if by a
miracle, preserved inviolate. The statue remains, the immutable child
of Linda’s comeliness and Pleydon’s genius, the deathless offspring
of transitory things.
Beauty is divine; a power superior and even elfinly inimical to all
human moralities and rules of thumb, and a divinity which must
unflinchingly be served: that, in this book as always, is Mr.
Hergesheimer’s text. For this is the divinity which he, too, serves
unflinchingly, with strangely cadenced evocations, in striving to write
perfectly of beautiful happenings.
It is an ideal here approached even more nobly than in the
preceding Hergesheimer books. Nowhere has Joseph Hergesheimer
found an arena more nicely suited to the exercise of his most
exquisite powers than in this modern tale of domnei,—of the worship
of woman’s beauty as, upon the whole, Heaven’s finest sample of
artistic self-expression, and as, in consequence, the most adequate
revelation of God; and as such a symbol, therefore, a thing to be
revered above all else that visibly exists, even by its temporary
possessor. That last is Mr. Hergesheimer’s especial refinement upon
a tenet sufficiently venerable to have been nodded over by Troy’s
gray-bearded councillors when Helen’s skirts were rustling by,—and
a refinement, too, which would have been repudiated by Helen
herself, who, if one may trust to Euripides’ report of her sentiments,
was inclined less elevatedly to regard her own personal appearance,
as a disaster-provoking nuisance.
Well, and to Linda, also, was beauty a nuisance—“a bitter and
luxurious god,” that implacably required to be honored with sacrifices
of common joys and ties and ruddy interests, but was none the less
divine. Sustained by this sole knowledge, Linda Hallet passes out of
the story, when youth is over, regarding not very seriously that which
is human and ephemeral, even as embodied in her lovers and her
children, nor in herself, but rather always turning grave blue eyes
toward that which is divine; passes, at once the abandoned
sanctuary, the priestess, the postulant, and the martyr, of that beauty
to which fools had once referred as “hers”; passes not as the
wreckage of a toy but as an outworn instrument which has helped to
further the proud labor of a god; and passes, as all must pass,
without any sure comprehension of achievement, but with content.
That, really, is The Happy End....
 SIX

HICH reminds me that for the most part I am rattling very old
bones. Those seemingly unfruitful fourteen years are to-day at
one with those other fourteen years which brought an elder Joseph
into Egyptian publicity. Mr. Hergesheimer has “arrived”: his books
have found their proper and appreciative audience; whereas his
short stories are purchased, and probably read, along with the
encomiums of ready-made clothing and safety razors, by the I forget
how many million buyers of the world’s most popular magazine....
Now, here, I think, one finds stark provocations of uneasiness. I
speak with diffidence, and am not entirely swayed, I believe, by the
natural inclination of every writer to backbite his fellow craftsman. In
any event, dismissing Gold and Iron (after some reflection) with
unqualified applause, I take up The Happy End; and of the seven
stories contained therein six seem to me to display a cornerstone of
eminently “popular” psychology, ranging from the as yet sacrosanct
belief that all Germans are perfectly horrid people, to the axiom that
the quiet and unrespected youngest brother is invariably the one to
exterminate the family enemies, and duly including the sentiment
that noble hearts very often beat under ragged shirts. And I am
made uneasy to see these uplifting faiths—these literary baking-
powders more properly adapted to the Horrible Trites and the
Gluepot Stews among reading-matter confectioners—thus utilized by
a Joseph Hergesheimer.
I am made uneasy because I reason in this way: when Mr.
Hergesheimer consciously is writing a short story to be printed next
to advertising matter in some justly popular periodical, Mr.
Hergesheimer, being rational and human, cannot but think of the
subscribers to that popular periodical. I forget, I repeat, how many
millions of them have been duly attested upon affidavit to exist, but
certainly not many thousands of our fellow citizens can regard Mr.
Hergesheimer at his best and purest with anything save bewildered
abhorrence. So he must compromise,—subconsciously, I believe,—