Divergent Trajectories

• Main Author: Anderson, David G
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 2000
• Subjects: Arctic; Evenki; Taimyr
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198233855.003.0008; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52585904/isbn-9780198233855-book-part-8.pdf

Abstract FOLLOWING HIS ARRIVAL back in Dudinka, the retired brigadier and new member of the Prezidium of the First All-Evenki suglan was questioned by a journalist from the district newspaper about the history and future of Evenkis in Taimyr (Swvetskii Taimyr, 25 Apr. 1993). ‘So, is it true that there are old Evenki clans on the Khantaika? Will you now seek to form clan communities?’ asked the reporter with pointed curiosity. True to the idiom of a tundrovik, Momi Fedorovich replied with sparing words, ‘Of course there are clans! The Yelogirs, Ukochers, Utukogirs, Kilmagirs, Pankagirs. Clan communities? Well, there’s an idea … ‘ In the space of the half-page article, the reporter thrice emphasized the staid replies of his informant in an apparent attempt to leave the reader with an image of a wise and simple man. The passion in the article lay instead in the logic of the reporter’s questions: if a people had clans in the pre-Soviet past then its post-Soviet future must lie with returning to those same clans. The young reporter could not know that Momi Fedorovich twenty years earlier was interviewed for the same newspaper on how he saw his newly awarded Order of Labour reflecting a lifetime of collectivized reindeer herding. At that time this distinguished communist, and son of the rich Yelogir herder who donated his herd to the collective farm ‘Red Trapper’, replied with the same clipped enthusiasm to similarly leading questions about a very different future. To a man who spent his life living with kin and reindeer within an extensive landscape, the narrow ideas of ‘clan community’ and ‘state farm’ set before him in different decades must have seemed equally abstract.