Native whites: contesting local identities on Russia’s resource frontier Niobe

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Russian North
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.527.4278; http://www.units.muohio.edu/havighurstcenter/publications/documents/Thompson.pdf

In social investigations of the post-Soviet Russian North, whites haunt the ethnographic stage from the wings.1 Social scientists bypass the northern industrial town on the way to the native village, producing over the past decade a remarkable profusion of research on the indigenous experience. The assumed transience of white figures, in contrast to the rootedness of native people, raises the question of their long-term importance to life in northern communities. The terms in currency – priezhii or “incomer ” for whites and mestnyi or “local ” for natives – reproduce the idea that there are two kinds or people in the North, the recently arrived, and by implication the soon to leave, and the eternal native, who will always remain. Aware of the diverse and diasporic origins of the white population, we also assume that, whereas native settlements are the site of fairly bounded cultures, with detectable senses of collectivity and community, for whites, community and close cultural affinity are part of a mythic village past on the Russian “mainland” (materik). Community kinship networks bind natives across settlement and region. Most whites, in contrast, came north in ones and twos, leaving family networks behind. Native cultural identity emerges in many ethnographic accounts from a close, practical