PDF version of SPRI Review 2011 - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

Polar Social Sciences and Humanities
Words and silence: Nenets reindeer herders’ conversion to evangelical christianity
As the first ethnography of religious conversion in
the contemporary indigenous Russian North, this is a
major contribution to anthropological debates about
the globalisation of Christianity. Analysis focused on
the introduction of a new language ideology based
on an ideal of truthful speakers who use words to
reflect their ‘inner’ selves. Christian language not
only offers tools for radical self-refashioning but also
provides novel ideas and dispositions about agency,
authority, morality, personhood, and time. Conversion
offers a distinctive path to global forms of modernity.
Unlike almost every person in the Soviet Union,
these particular small Nenets nomadic communities
remained outside state institutions like school, army
and the collective farm, and it was only in the post-
Soviet period that they were registered as citizens at
all. The missionaries also have their own history of
martyrdom and persecution by the state, and bring
an alternative regime of obedience and claims of
universal truth which promises to change the herders
on the spiritual level. Thus, the herders are led to burn
their ancestral sacred items and abandon ‘devilish’
practices like drinking reindeer blood. Vallikivi’s
research was funded by the Gates Foundation and the
Estonian government.
Laur Vallikivi and Piers Vitebsky
Loneliness and opportunity for Greenlandic students in Denmark
Janne Flora took her ongoing study of relatedness
and loneliness in Greenland in a novel direction, by
conducting fieldwork among Greenlandic students
who move to Denmark for the political purpose of
eradicating Greenland’s reliance on imported Danish
professionals. By distinguishing cultural ideas of moreand
less-desirable forms of separation and solitude,
her study reveals a stark contrast in ideas according
to social circumstances and regional origins. Young
people, often male, from remote villages cite fear of
displacement from land, separation from kin, and
loneliness as reasons for not travelling to Denmark.
But young people from the capital, Nuuk, usually
female, are keen to go there in quest of anonymity
and ‘freedom’ from intricate local kinship obligations.
These findings have important implications for
demography and mental-health policy, and resonate
closely with Olga Ulturgasheva’s recent research
contrasting indigenous youth brought up in more and
less remote locations in Siberia. Here, too, attachment
to land and kin keeps young people at home, and
girls are more oriented to a distant metropolis than
boys. This continuation of SPRI’s longstanding research
programme on family dynamics in the Arctic underlines
the need for policy to be based on painstaking
fieldwork and analysis at the community and family
level. Flora’s research was funded by the Carlsberg
Foundation.
Janne Flora, Olga Ulturgasheva
and Piers Vitebsky
Dog teams and sledge on the sea ice in northern Greenland
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