Living with Koryak Traditions: Playing with Culture in Siberia

Living with Koryak Traditions: Playing with Culture in Siberia. Playing with Culture in Siberia Alexander D. King Book Published by: What does it mean to be a traditional Koryak in the modern world? How do indigenous Siberians express a culture that entails distinctive customs and traditions? Government institutions both impose state ideologies of culture and civilization and are sites of community revitalization for indigenous Siberians. To most Koryaks, tradition does not function simply as an identity marker but also helps to maintain moral communities and support vulnerable youth in dire times.

To most Koryaks, tradition does not function simply as an identity marker but also helps to maintain moral communities and support vulnerable youth in dire times. Debunking an immutable view of tradition and culture, King presents a dynamic one that validates contemporary indigenous peoples?

Author with Volokha at Pakhachi private herd. The equal parts of a sign. Hololo dancing in Tymlat. Fakel dancers preparing for performance. Koryak Okrug Regional Museum exhibits. Chukchi and Koryak reindeer herders warred with one another for centuries over pasturage and deer, and by all accounts the northern Chukchi were more successful in their aggression.

The census counted about fourteen hundred Chukchi in total living in the kao. In the kao Evens numbered about people. Another community of Even reindeer herders lives to the south in the Kamchatka Oblast villages of Esso and neighboring Anavgai map 2. Evens are also found in greater concentration in Magadan Oblast and are scattered about Siberia.

Along with Evenk people, they speak Tungusic languages. They also stand out from Koryak and Chukchi reindeer herders by riding astride deer, which Koryaks and Chukchi consider a sin. This practice is common in southern Siberia among Tuvans, Buryats, Evenks, and other cultures where deer herding is primarily for transport while hunting for food in a forest or mixed forest-tundra ecology.

Penzhinskiy Rayon has great difficulty supplying reliable electricity and other infrastructure. Severe flooding in the spring of damaged several of the northernmost villages, and extensive repairs were not possible. However, one could and still can find residence groups based on sisters.

Koryak kinship was and continues to be bilateral, and individuals were mobile, moving from one group to another see Antropova ; Vdovin An important institution in traditional social organization was the trading friendship or partnership, which is found all over Siberia. Typically, a Nymylan man had a reindeer-herding partner. These exchange networks provided Nymylans with reindeer skins and meat and provided Chavchuvens with seal skins, dried fish, and other marine products. When coated with seal oil, a pair of sealskin boots is waterproof, which is important during the spring melt when slushy snow is still very cold.

Sealskin straps and cords are also essential for lashing sleds, snowshoes, and deer and dog harnesses.

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These exchange networks likewise moved European commodities around. So iron, tobacco, tea, and sugar were common all over northeast Asia long before Russians were a common feature of the local landscape. I have found no convincing evidence of any clan structures. This overview of places and people in northern Kamchatka hints at the diversity and hybridity of indigenous Siberian cultures as lived in villages, towns, summer fishing camps, and with reindeer herds and on the roads, trails, and air corridors among these places.

It also reflects the standard accounts of culture groups found in the scholarly literature in English and in Russian e. Nonetheless, I also found that people often talked about culture, tradition, and language in a quite different way, one implicitly akin to current theoretical approaches that understand culture as separate from groups, not having clear boundaries, and being more of a process than an object. Boasian Semiotics of Culture I want to emphasize that Koryak culture, as well as all the other cultures including Russian that I have touched upon, do not necessarily correspond to specific groups of people.

Indeed, in the Russian Federation census, over half of the people in the Koryak Okrug responding to the question of ethnic cultural identity indicated two or more categories. Eveny and Chukchi speak Koryak; Russians participate in and produce Koryak things hats, carvings, etc.

Cultures can blur into one another and still be distinctive in their differences. If we follow the Boasian model of portraying what is prototypical and divergent in a culture e. Whorf provide a subtle and sophisticated model of culture in their writing. Boasian anthropology understands culture as open-ended, without dis- tinct borders, shifting through time, and the work of people yet not beholden to any one person.

The most important patterns are largely unconscious, but these patterns can be made conscious. Therefore culture is not a prison from which there is no escape. No matter how heavy the shackles of tradition, they can be loosened and discarded. This means that any under- standing of culture is itself cultural—all meaning and action is relational, by which I mean that our activities are carried out in relation to other people, in relation to other meanings, in relation to other activities.

Knowledge and understand- ing are constituted through intersubjective negotiations of interconnected beings in an environment. In simpler words, a person is not a brain in a vat being deceived by a demon, as hypothesized and rejected by Rousseau. Culture is the product of persons human and nonhuman talking to one another, acting and reacting to one another in specific contexts that always include memories of precedents.

I also take as unproblematic the fact that things and 9 concepts from arrowheads to tea to myths and even phonemes 10 can move through communication networks far beyond the 11 travels of individual people. Thus locating culture in the specific 12 interactions of people does not deny the power of large-scale 13 institutions of social and economic organization Silverstein 14 While it 20 is useful to think about how Chukchi culture has a certain 21 style and emphasis different from Alutor or Siberian Eskimo 22 cultures see, e.

Separating Koryak culture 26 systematically from Chukchi culture can only be achieved in 27 the same manner that Alexander severed the Gordian Knot. School and public meetings of a political bent were the best 4 places to hear about culture as a set of codified traditions. A 5 culture group was understood in these contexts to comprise 6 the conjunction of a specific population practicing one set 7 of customs and speaking a single language.

This is a model 8 of culture that Boas took apart long ago, but it still 9 remains common and is, for better or for worse, effective in 10 politics. This was not the only model of culture current in 11 Kamchatka, however, as I learned from conversing with people 12 like Valeri Yetneut and Valentina Dedyk about local culture s 13 and language s.

Talk about dance 17 groups, especially small family dance groups based in villages, 18 was grounded in a largely implicit theory of culture that I find 19 very interesting.

Whether analogous to styles or personalities, 20 the cultures of which these people speak are ideal types, not 21 bounded either geographically or conceptually sets of traits. I believe most of the problems presented by discussing 27 cultures in the plural result from presenting ideal types as the 28 conclusions of analysis when they are at best well-informed 29 hypotheses preceding it.

A recent edition of Charles 33 Peirce The equal parts of a sign. The critical thing for 30 me is that Peircean semiotics allows for a direct engagement 31 of people in the world. In other words, 6 Peircean semiotics and Boasian anthropology together provide 7 us with a theory of meaning and culture that is grounded in 8 everyday realities: Uses of semiotics in 14 anthropology have been dominated by contributions from 15 linguistic anthropologists see Silverstein for a review.

This semiotics puts the ethnographer 19 the interpretant in view, and so I am in the frame and voiced 20 as the first person. Just the same, I try not to fill the picture 21 and rather focus on the signs, which is to say the interactions 22 I shared with people in Kamchatka form the substance of my 23 presentation.

Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics

One can 28 see this in the conversation earlier related with Volodya and 29 Slava. An approach that understands culture as a theory of 30 the world does not get the system of these kinds of cultural 31 concepts. A Geertzian ethos and worldview approach assumes 32 the transparency of language. Volodya and Volokha produced relationships with each other, the deer, and me through their production of signs, 1 2 3 talking.

Living with Koryak Traditions: Playing with Culture in Siberia

Of course signs are not limited to speech. They can 4 include photographs and drawings, gestures, even dances. If 5 something means something to someone, then it is a sign. Most 6 of the time this happens when people speak or write—that is, 7 use language. While social identities e. Studying language 14 in this way has made real progress in understanding cultural 15 life, the distinctive roots of human conceptualization.

People 16 think by talking, and talking is using language. Linguistic 17 action is special because it is both social action and analysis 18 of that action. Speaking both gets things done and is used to 19 examine those things getting done. These orders of metacom- 20 mentary are infinitely fractal. It indexed a lifetime 29 of relating to, living with, and communicating with reindeer. An 31 icon is a sign with a meaning that is a product of resemblance.

Such a person sounds like a Koryak. Accent, then, is one example of an indexical icon 4 Silverstein Koryak dance moves are another example, 5 as I discuss in chapters 2 and 3. Further, it has gained salience outside 13 the discipline among other scholars as well as with lawyers, 14 national governments, international agencies, and indigenous 15 activists. Others find it most annoying when sociologists, 22 23 or worse, politicians, set the terms of public discussion about 24 culture in ways anthropologists find simplistic or possibly 25 racist.

Living with Koryak Traditions: Playing with Culture in Siberia | Alexander D King - theranchhands.com

I quickly learned that few people in Koryakia were 32 interested in identity politics. Most found it irrelevant or dis- 33 tasteful. After much reflection and analysis, I have found that the subtext 1 2 3 to local discourses about culture and tradition is often very 4 subtle and sophisticated.

The point of this argument is often ignored and is 14 worth repeating today: The Boasian separation 20 of culture, biology, and language remains an important caveat 21 for understanding the complexity of multiple typologies at 22 work in everyday life. Just as biology and culture can only be 23 integrated through a focus on the actual processes by which 24 persons develop in an environment, so the connections between 25 language and culture can only be understood in terms of actual, 26 situated practices of speaking Hymes Whorf understood that language is part of culture and not an analogy for it or simply a marker of a 4 cultural group Rather, Whorf argues that a close 5 semiotic analysis of language and linguistic categories e.

These 8 common patterns are associated, and one does not necessar- 9 ily cause the other. Whorf was too careful a scientist to make 10 such crude claims as that language determines worldview.

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Margaret 16 Paxson provides an excellent example of the analytic 17 power of this kind of approach in her discussion on the pat- 18 terning of Russian grammatical categories and their harmony 19 with local cosmology and social organization in a small peasant 20 village in northern Russia. Different words or just an accent. This conversation is important because the Chukchi 19 people in Middle Pakhachi and Achayvayam are notorious 20 in their chauvinistic conservatism.

This meant a continuation 21 of practices called traditional by all and abandoned by most 22 other Koryak and Chukchi communities. Most Pakhachi people were 26 proudly reindeer Chukchi and disparaged maritime Koryaks 27 as inferior in one way or another. Despite awareness that 28 they spoke a variant of Koryak called Chavchuven and not 29 Chukchi, Koryaks were completely different from Pakhachi 30 Chukchi by their incomprehensible Koryak language.

That 31 said, these kinds of attitudes seem limited to only these two 32 villages of Middle Pakhachi and Achayvayam. In the multicultural center that is Palana I 7 was taught that greetings in Koryak were gendered. This struck me 12 as a good example of Russian administrators appropriating 13 Koryakness for their own purposes to legitimate their posi- 14 tion of trying to set up the kao as a fully independent political 15 territory, separate from Kamchatka Oblast.

In my own experi- 16 ences of greeting and talking with a variety of interlocutors in 17 Palana, I found that my use of the Koryak term was marked 18 as indexing my role as ethnographer—that guy interested in 19 Koryak language and culture. Traveling to various 24 native villages, I found that the simple gendered distinction 25 between amto and may did not hold. In the reindeer-herding 26 village of Middle Pakhachi, for example, may was used to call 27 out to a spouse. Once 31 I asked my Middle Pakhachi friends about this difference, 32 and they confirmed that it struck them as weird to be greeted 33 with may.

Whorf points out 9 that understanding the proper forms for plurals in Hopi did 10 not allow him to deploy plurals and singular forms correctly 11 in sentences He still had two more years of work 12 13 learning the appropriate way to say things not constrained by 14 grammar or morphology so much as by idiom, usage, and a 15 way of speaking. My problem in properly using one of the first 16 words anyone learns of a foreign language was compounded 17 by two axes of variation in code sounds, vocabulary, gram- 18 mar and way of speaking. One axis is across space; different 19 speech communities villages or village factions spoke dif- 20 ferent variants of Koryak and Alutor, but there was nothing 21 surprising about this, nor were the variants particularly dif- 22 ficult to understand.

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The second axis was social but not in the 23 commonly documented sense of social class or group status 24 such as high class vs. It is taught in 29 schools, heard on the radio, and printed in the newspaper. In spite 5 of that, people in villages other than Palana used the term 6 Palana language palanskii iazyk to refer to the standard or 7 official variant of Koryak found in newspapers and taught in 8 schools throughout the okrug.

Dunn reports that standard 9 Chukchi is supported by the authority of textbooks and the 10 written word as well as the state institutions with which it is 11 associated—schools, the press, and official plaques in Anadyr 12 Dunn I found the opposite in 13 Kamchatka: I cannot avoid it, however, as nearly every- 22 one in Kamchatka defined my task there as studying their 23 traditions traditsii or customs obychi.

Living with Koryak Traditions: Playing with Culture in Siberia

Traditions are commonly thought of as being 27 rooted in the past, and to document their invention is sup- 28 posedly to discredit their authenticity as real traditions e. As I elaborate in subsequent 30 chapters, my use of the term is not connected to the stultified 31 and boxed-in culture typically ascribed to Koryaks by eth- 32 nographers and folklorists. Thus 6 the early Soviet ethnographers were most likely referred to 7 the grandparents when they were doing their research in the 8 s and s, when the grandparents I talked to were small 9 children, and ethnographers in the future will be referred to 10 grandparents who were young and inexperienced when I was 11 asking such questions in Since the 17 elders are the embodiment of tradition, change is built into 18 this folk-model of culture and tradition, as I discuss in detail in 19 chapters 2 and 3, where I analyze local practices and discourses 20 surrounding Koryak dance groups.

Dance in Kamchatka is a 21 good synecdoche for culture in Kamchatka because it is avail- 22 able to anyone. Dancing engages the whole person and implicates the 28 dancer in wider social relationships and cultural symbols. Indeed, Peircean semiotics shows that all 16 meaning exists only through our interpretation of signs.