Words and Silences (2024) tells the story of an extraordinary group of independent Nenets reindeer herders in the northwest Russian Arctic. Under socialism, these nomads managed to avoid the Soviet state and its institutions of collectivization by hiding in remote tundra areas. However, soon after the atheist regime collapsed, while some staunchly resisted, many of them abandoned animist blood sacrifices, burned their spirit figures, and became fervent fundamentalist Christians under the influence of Russian evangelical missionaries. Since the mid-1990s, verbose Baptist and Pentecostal pastors have successfully converted dozens of taciturn reindeer herders and turned them into speakers of the new religious language, while stubborn old-timers have chosen to respond with silence in the face of the Russians’ intrusive words.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork over almost twenty years, Laur Vallikivi explores how speech, and the avoidance of it, become both a catalyst and an obstacle for forming a new personhood, sociality, and cosmology. Moving beyond studies of modernization and globalization that have all-too-predictable outcomes for Indigenous peoples, this intimate anthropological account invites us to view not only religious devotees but also words and silences themselves as agents producing profound ethical consequences for nomads’ lives. The book lays bare the moral complexity of the mission encounter in which Christianity, with its explicit and rigid set of rules, meets the lingering tacit–and often fluid–ontological sensibilities of a community which was shamanistic within living memory.