Viliui Sakha Post-Soviet Adaption: A Subarctic Test of Ne� ing’s Smallholder-Householder Theory
The Sakha of northeastern Siberia, Russia, are the highest latitude contem-porary agropastoralists practicing horse and cattle husbandry. In the last 100 years their rural livelihood has gone from household-level subsistence food production in clan clusters of single-family homesteads scattered acro...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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2003
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.506.6101 http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/SEEJ/Viliui/test.pdf |
| Summary: | The Sakha of northeastern Siberia, Russia, are the highest latitude contem-porary agropastoralists practicing horse and cattle husbandry. In the last 100 years their rural livelihood has gone from household-level subsistence food production in clan clusters of single-family homesteads scattered across the landscape, to village-level state agribusiness farm production in com-pact settlements dependent on Soviet socialist infrastructure, to the present-day post-socialist reliance on household-level subsistence food production. This paper explores how Viliui Sakha are adapting in the post-Soviet con-text. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the concomitant dissolution of the centralized state farm system, rural inhabitants have developed household and interhousehold food production capacities based on keeping cows and relying on exchange among kin. One of the basic tenets of Robert Netting’s smallholder–householder theory is that in times of change, the household sys-tem is the most resilient subsistence production unit because of specific quali-ties including intimate ecological knowledge and implicit labor contracts. This research shows in what ways Netting’s householder theory applies for subarctic agropastoralists. KEY WORDS: Viliui Sakha; cultural ecology; circumpolar indigenous peoples; agropastoral-ism; post-Soviet. |
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