Human anxieties, bovine solutions: Political subtexts of native cattle conservation in north-eastern Siberia ...
For over 300 years the Turkic-speaking Sakha of north-eastern Siberia have lived uneasily in a colonial relationship with the Russian/Soviet state. Since the 1990s, there has been a strong ethnic de-colonising backlash which has struggled to find an appropriate form, from attempts to revive shamanis...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository
2020
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.62318 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/315209 |
| Summary: | For over 300 years the Turkic-speaking Sakha of north-eastern Siberia have lived uneasily in a colonial relationship with the Russian/Soviet state. Since the 1990s, there has been a strong ethnic de-colonising backlash which has struggled to find an appropriate form, from attempts to revive shamanism to budgetary wrangles with the federal government in Moscow. The economy and identity of the Sakha people are closely bound up with cattle. I argue that cattle are now coming to be used as a metaphor for the Sakha people themselves, to create a new and powerful ethnonationalist discourse. This focuses on a distinctive local breed, which under Soviet technocratic agriculture was considered primitive, hybridised with Russian breeds, and made almost extinct –¬ just as, it is now claimed, Soviet social evolutionist policies encouraged Sakha humans to catch up with and assimilate with Russians. I analyse this as a series of parallel anxieties: not simply about the racial purity of the Sakha people, but also about the ... |
|---|