Where Is the Nomadic Family? Rigid Laws and Flexible Tundra Life in North-East Siberia

Bibliographic Data

ID12120328
AuthorsElena Khlinovskaya Rockhill (0000-0001-6357-5272, Interdisciplinary scholar with backgrounds in biology and anthropology. As an Arctic anthropologist, she studies indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of the Russian North, specialising in kinship, family, state, migration and care. She is an Institute Associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow. She is the author of Lost to the State: Family Discontinuity, Social Orphanhood and..., corresponding author), Lena Sidorova (Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies in the Institute of Languages and Culture of the Peoples of the North-East of the Russian Federation, at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk. She studies the culture of indigenous minorities of the Arctic zone of Yakutia, as well as religious groups and organizations in the city of Yakutsk. Her publications include ‘Family on the edge: neblagopoluchnaya family and the state in Yakutsk and Magadan, Russian Federation’ (with Elena...), Piers Vitebsky (Social anthropologist specialising in the religions and ecologies of indigenous peoples in Tribal India and Arctic Siberia. He recently retired as Head of Anthropology at the Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge. His books include Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (2005); Dialogues with the Dead: the Discussion of Mortality among the Sora of Eastern India (1993); and Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos (2017). He is...)
Year2022
Volume26
Issue1
Pages4-32
Publication date2022-02-24
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNomadic Peoples (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0822-7942 • E-ISSN: 1752-2366
PublisherBerghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3197/np.2022.260102
OpenAlexW4214753026
LanguageEN
Citations received2

We start from a puzzle: in remote Arctic regions of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), why are many reindeer-herding families excluded from official 'nomadic family' benefits? The Republic's Nomadic Family Law is supposed to support indigenous minorities leading a 'traditional' lifestyle, but it often fails. We identify three models of family structure at work, each matching the fluidity of the physical environment and productive process more or less realistically. While our fieldwork reveals a highly flexible and all-embracing indigenous understanding of relatedness, analysis of the urban officials' laws show them to be based on unexamined concepts of 'family' rooted in Russian terminology and based on narrow ideas of the nuclear family rather than on the complementary distribution of labour across a shared space. We suggest that legal initiatives should include a wider ethnographic basis to provide a better understanding of emic concepts, while also consulting the local people most directly affected

Archaeology · Emic and etic · Ethnography · Geography · Herding · Indigenous · Political science · Sociology · Work (physics · Anthropology · Arctic and Russian Policy Studies · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law · Ecology

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