Antler on the sea: Chukchi, Yupik, and Newcomers in the Soviet North.

• Main Author: Kerttula, Anna Marie
• Other Authors: Kelly, Raymond C.
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 1997
• Subjects: Antler; Chukchi; Newcomers; North; Russia; Sea; Soviet; Yupik; Bering Sea; Sireniki; Chukotka; Chukotka Peninsula; eskimo*; Sirenik*
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/130513; http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:9732115

This dissertation describes the social-cultural organization of three groups, Chukchi, Yupik (Eskimo), and Newcomers (western, primarily Slavic, immigrants), in the village of Sireniki, located on the Bering Sea coast of the Chukotka Peninsula in the far northeast of the former Soviet Union. Through an examination of 18 months of ethnographic field data (collected between 1989-1991) and an analysis of anthropological theories on ethnicity, nationalism, and structural opposition, this work explores the hypothesis that the development of collective group identity and cultural transformation among northern indigenous peoples in the Soviet Union was heavily influenced not only by the structure of the Soviet system, but by the mobilization of oppositional relationships between the groups, relationships based on prior cultural forms, symbols, and meanings. Through relocation programs, mandatory schooling, economic collectivization, the control of natural resources, and the domination of political power, Soviet state authority reinforced the structural bases of collective identity to which the Chukchi, Yupik, and Newcomers adapted and which they made meaningful via their own cultural conceptualizations of each other. The solidification of collective identity and its maintenance through symbolism, ideology, economic and social structure, and culture is discussed for all three groups. A detailed ethnographic description and analysis reveals that Soviet economic and social policy transformed local cultural boundaries and facilitated the ensuing dialogue of difference. Of special significance to this work are the cultural collectivities of the groups as they relate to: (1) the articulation of Soviet state authority on Chukotkian indigenous groups; (2) the in-migration and integration of Newcomers to Sireniki; (3) the social, economic, ideological, and symbolic differences among groups; and (4) the persistence of native cultural texts and meanings within the context of state ideology and structure and Russian cultural ...