Red Ties and Residential Schools. Alexia Bloch
Читать онлайн книгу.
Identities in Theory and Practice
The complexity of allegiances that any individual or even household could have in Tura in the 1990s is illustrated in the hybridity of cultural practices reflected in the Evenk folk festival in Baikit described in the opening pages of this chapter. Despite these elements of hybridity in contemporary Evenk social practices, indigenous intellectuals often consider identity as something fixed or simply rooted in the past. Considering identity as fluid and in constant negotiation is not a politically strategic stand for groups seeking to lay claim to contested resources or power in various forms. For instance, like Evenk intellectuals, Maya intellectuals are struggling to gain control over the representation of their daily lives and history, and they also invoke an essentialist analytic style in their discourse (Fischer and McKenna Brown 1996: 3). These efforts on the part of indigenous intellectuals are in striking contrast to the predominant contemporary approach among social scientists thinking about issues of identity. Siberian studies has encountered a tension similar to that in Maya studies, where the trend for “foreign” academics has been to avoid essentializing identities, and to instead emphasize multivocality and the various and shifting dynamics of power over time (Anderson 2000; Bloch 2001; Grant 1995a; Rethmann 2001).2
While popular conceptions of identity sometimes homogenize and freeze it as an unchanging element, contemporary social science theories tend to concur that identity is more accurately theorized as ever-changing. In Comaroff and Comaroff’s terms, identity is “both a set of relations and a mode of consciousness” (1992: 54). This concept of identity combines an understanding of how large-scale historical processes of power and situational perspectives mold identities, but it is certainly not the only view of how identity works.
The anthropological research into the formation of identity, and particularly ethnicity, has been widespread since the 1960s (see Eriksen 1993; R. Cohen 1978). Scholars have viewed ethnicity in a range of ways, but there have been two dominant directions of thought: the primordialist and the instrumentalist. Primordialist theorists emphasize the idea of ethnic categories as rooted in a common past or shared heritage and as remaining intact despite cultural contacts (Geertz 1973; Gurvich 1980; Gumilev 1990). While this approach to ethnicity has been sharply criticized by many (see R. Cohen 1978), understanding primordialist concepts of ethnicity can potentially provide important means of understanding consciousness and what one scholar calls the “nature of the stuff on which groups feed” (Eriksen 1993: 55). This is especially the case for indigenous groups worldwide that are increasingly calling upon primordialist theories of identity as they compete with multinational interests over scarce resources (Conklin 1997; Fischer and McKenna Brown 1996).
In contrast to the primordialist approach, the instrumentalist approach, with Abner Cohen (1974) and Fredrik Barth (1969) at the forefront, emphasizes the political aims served by and justifying the maintenance of ethnicity. While Barth focuses on ethnic boundaries and considers them as categorical ascriptions that determine a “most general identity” (1969: 13) and Cohen focuses on ethnic identity as a political tool for securing resources (1974), they both center their analyses on the synchronic nature of ethnic identity. The broader historical and hegemonic processes influencing identity are not central to their discussions.
While thinking of ethnicity as a political tool is particularly useful in situations of “social change” such as the Evenki are experiencing, it is important to understand how and why ethnic identity gets mobilized and reproduced. If one assumes that “ethnicity” is not a primordial category, then how does one explain how it remains salient to a group of people and situationally more or less pertinent in times of social change? As illustrated in the setting of the Evenk folk festival described above, this is a critical question.
Many anthropologists today agree that it is important to avoid an either/or approach to ethnic identity because this disregards important factors potentially influencing the formation of identities (see Bentley 1981). Some research has moved away from an either/or way of thinking about ethnicity and instead looks to situational explanations (see Okamura 1981). By adopting this approach instead of just instrumentalist or primordialist explanations for ethnic identity, research is less restricted by a preconceived model of how ethnicity operates. Adopting a situational perspective can also result, however, in too little attention to the sociostructural aspects of identity. Keyes (1981: 10), for instance, emphasizes the multiple sources for identities and notes that ethnic identity becomes a personal identity only after an individual takes it up from a “public display” or “traffic in symbols.”
A recent trend in scholarship related to ethnicity emphasizes that ethnicity is just one of the factors feeding into the formation of identities. Moving from studying ethnicity to studying identity allows for the examination of the ambiguities of identity; the world is not accurately reflected by attempting to divide fixed groups by the rigid boundaries that are often raised in the study of ethnicity. Several authors instead root their analyses of identity in both the concrete historical and contemporary social forces impinging upon identity (Constable 1997; Rosaldo 1980; Gilroy 1987; di Leonardo 1993). These analyses highlight the multiple social forces such as economic position, racial categories, gender, and geography that influence identities, while recognizing the role collective and individual resistance can play in the process of identity formation. Social identities are rarely firmly bounded and more frequently exist in flux, with blurred bounds reflecting hybridity and global cultural transformations (see Bhabha 1994; Appadurai 1996; Ong 1999). From this perspective, identities are not just situational and a matter of “choice” for an individual (see Worsley 1984: 246). Identities are part of larger processes, but they are not just subject to these megaprocesses with humans playing little or no active part.
This approach to thinking about how identities take shape is informed by the important work on post-colonial concepts of nation and power. Much of this work examines how a sense of “nation” is created in contexts in which the frameworks of colonial eras continue to operate in one way or another (see Chatterjee 1993; Mamdani 1996). This work is strongly influenced by “subaltern studies,” a direction in scholarship that has particularly focused on South Asia and sought to write historiography from the perspective of those who have been colonized. Perhaps because of its emphasis on critiquing structural aspects of colonial legacies, this influential school of thought has tended to exclude considerations of the disparate experiences of individuals caught up in nation-building.3 The emphasis on close examinations of groups and a type of sociological homogenizing, with little attention to the interpretations and narratives of individuals who comprise these groups, points to an alternative approach that can be taken to the study of power.
Recent work suggests that how transformations of power are experienced, including during processes of nation-building and “modernity,” depends very much on subject position (Rofel 1999; Lancaster 1988; Abelmann 1997). This subject position is constituted through a range of factors such as ethnicity, generation, class affiliation, profession, and gender, and these factors interweave in various ways to influence how people interpret histories and how they depict their lives. In presenting a discussion of both contemporary designations of identity and the historical roots of Evenk identities, the following sections create frameworks for understanding historical consciousness of individual Evenki who together are reconfiguring what it means to be part of this community.
Local, Newcomer, and Native
Like three-quarters of indigenous Siberians in Russia, the indigenous Siberian population in the Evenk District has been concentrated in rural areas until quite recently (Fondahl 1998: 83; Savoskul 1971). As government support for state sable and fox farms lagged beginning in 1993, the primary means for making a living in this area disappeared. The desperate material circumstances in rural areas resulted in substantial migration to regional centers. Small regional centers such as Tura continued, however, to be populated predominantly by Russians and Ukrainians, as well as a small number of refugees, like those from the civil war in Tadzhikistan.
Figure 2. The Udygir family in an Evenk District village. Photo by the author, 1998.
Over the 1990s, this web of people in the Evenk District made up a population ranging