© Kulturstiftung Sibirien
Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology
General editors: Erich Kasten and David Koester |
Stephan Dudeck Der Tag des Rentierzüchters: Repräsentation indigener Lebensstile zwischen Taigawohnplatz und Erdölstadt in Westsibirien 2013, Fürstenberg/Havel: Kulturstiftung Sibirien 351 pp., 20 Farbabbildungen ISBN: 978-3-942883-17-7 Euro 34; paperback PDF (3.6 MB) |
The Khanty live as reindeer herders in the Western Siberian Taiga but their lifestyle is endangered by crude oil extraction on their land. Today their lives are divided socially as well as spatially between the town and the forest. By taking the celebration of the Day of the Reindeer Herder as an example, the book describes the indigenous strategies to keep cultural difference and autonomy alive by drawing boundaries and maintaining religious practices and social norms. The author shows how the people of the Taiga use their traditions of hiding and avoiding as well as new ways of public representation to cope with the changes.
Stephan Dudeck is an anthropologist at the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland, documenting the oral history of reindeer herders in the European Arctic. He received his doctoral degree at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale. Between 1993 and 2009 he regularly visited Khanty and Nenets reindeer herders in the vicinity of the Western Siberian Oil- and Gas fields. His travels also took him to the Kola Peninsula, the Komi Republic, the Amur region, Kamchatka and to Central Asia to the Nuratau mountains in Uzbekistan and to the Pamir. His research interest is the lifestyles of nomadic people, especially reindeer pastoralists, fishers and hunters in an increasingly industrialised world, their oral history, neo-traditionalism, technological innovation and the practices of hiding and avoidance. He published on Siberian reindeer pastorialism, indigenous education, the relationship of indigenous people to the oil industry, minority rights, the safeguarding of languages and traditional knowledge and the methodology of politically engaged and collaborative ethnographic research. His photographic works have been shown in exhibitions in Berlin, Leipzig, Halle, Frankfurt a.M. and Goettingen and he was involved in the production of several ethnographic films.