Tundra Passages: History and Gender in the Russian Far East

Abstract

Petra Rethmann, Tundra Passages: History and Gender in Russian Far East, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001, 219 pages, ISBN 0-271-02068-X (paper).Reviewer: Regna DarnellUniversity of Western OntarioKoriak reindeer herders of Kamchatka peninsula's north-eastern shore have remained frozen in anthropological canon since early twentieth-century ethnography of Waldemar Jochelson Boas's Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Petra Rethmann's portrait of contemporary Koriak in aftermath of disintegration of Soviet state tacks elegantly between often harsh realities of individual lives and political economy which contextualizes their efforts at agency. For Canadian readers, Koriak experience will evoke an all-too-familiar history of racism, discrimination, forced relocation, residential schools and dogged resistance to imposed assimilation alongside inevitable encroachment and loss of autonomy. The Koriak have been subjected to the unmaking of their world (p. 38). Despite their suffering, they have survived and seek future under their own control. The Koriak are constructing a historical self-critical consciousness... about purpose, function, and creation of tradition (p. 157). Colonization has not precluded continuity; rather, Koriak travel toward their future, drawing on traditions of past.Rethmann challenges Soviet narrative of progress which systematically marginalized Koriak, presenting their regional history in terms of diverse and contentious local standpoint. The meaning of this history is quite different state and people of tundra, women and men, elders and young. History is envisioned an exchange of alternating points of view, jostling with one another, answering back and forth so that for all players matters of history are matters of perspective (p. 31). Such history is necessarily storied and fragmented, depending on positioning of teller. Moveover, stories themselves emerged in fragments, although assembled and edited by Rethmann with view to their original flavour.Although there is no single narrative of contemporary Koriak experience, individuals who shared their stories with Rethmann were rarely at loss words: their strategy... involves transforming rhetoric of primitiveness into rhetoric of knowledge (p. 112). That is, capacity of Koriak articulate political debate itself belies their simplistic categorization as nomadic, wild, and primitive. Long-established devaluation of women intensifies these stereotypes, making their stories even more difficult to bring into public domain. …