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Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia
Houghton Mifflin
December 2005
480 pages
ISBN: 0618211888
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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. The interplay 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.
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