SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

2024

WORDS AND SILENCES

Words and Silences 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.

THE REBIRTH OF A PEOPLE: REINCARNATION COSMOLOGY AMONG THE TUNDRA YUKAGHIR OF THE LOWER KOLYMA, NORTHEAST SIBERIA (WITH LENA SIDOROVA)

We focus on Tundra Yukaghir reincarnation cosmology and its workings in the current ethnic revival by examining rebirth accounts from the Lower Kolyma. In Sovietized Siberia, the atheist state fought against everything that was “religious” and thus contributed to the wane of reincarnation ideology and related ritual practices. In addition, the state suppressed a distinct Yukaghir ethnicity it had partly constructed itself. In the 1990s, rebirth returned to public discourse, which coincided with the time of a vibrant ethnic revival movement. We shall explore how today Yukaghir elders, who fear their people will die out, link the idea of individual reincarnation with the trope of “the rebirth of a people.” In this particular sociohistorical context, they juxtapose the trajectories of personal and collective becoming through the notion of recognition, as both gaining full personhood and full peoplehood depends on being acknowledged by others (the living and the dead) as well as by oneself.

This is a paper in "Arctic Anthropology" (vol. 54, no. 2: 24–39).

2014

ON THE EDGE OF SPACE AND TIME: EVANGELICAL MISSIONARIES IN THE TUNDRA OF ARCTIC RUSSIA

Evangelical missionaries have missionised pretty much throughout Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among their favourite targets are the small-numbered indigenous groups in the Russian Arctic, where the numbers of converts are steadily growing. One particular denomination, known as the Unregistered Baptists, are among the leading agents of religious change in the North today. They are driven by the promise of the return of Christ after the gospel is preached “at the ends of the earth”. I suggest that the Baptists’ agenda is shaped, on the one hand, by the literal reading of the Bible, which allows them to be the divine instruments at the end times and, on the other hand, by the idea of Russia’s special role in God’s salvation plan. I shall analyse the Baptists’ ideas and practices, using among others Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope in order to demonstrate how powerful narratives are created and lived.

This is a paper in "Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics" (vol. 8, no. 2: 95–120).

2011

WHAT DOES MATTER?: IDOLS AND ICONS IN THE NENETS TUNDRA

This paper examines a mission encounter in the Nenets reindeer herders’ tundra. In post-Soviet Arctic Russia, Pentecostal and Baptist missionaries of Russian and Ukrainian origin have been fighting against idolatry and trying to persuade the Nenets to burn their sacred images or khekhe’’. They claim that among the indigenous Siberians idolatry exists in its quintessential or prototypical form, as it is described in the Bible. I shall suggest that this encounter takes place in a gap, in which the Nenets and Protestant have different understandings of language and materiality. Missionaries rely simultaneously on the ‘modern’ ideology of signification and the "non-modern" magic of the material. They argue that idols, which are nothing" according to the scriptures, dangerously bind the "pagans’" minds. For reindeer herders, for whom sacred items occupy an important place in the family wellbeing, the main issue is how to sever the link with the spirits without doing any damage.

This is a paper in "Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics" (vol. 5, no. 1: 75–95).

2009

CHRISTIANISATION OF WORDS AND SELVES: NENETS REINDEER HERDERS JOINING THE STATE THROUGH CONVERSION

The Yamb-To Nenets, a small group of nomadic reindeer pastoralists, live in the eastern part of the Nenets Autonomous District (Okrug) of northern Russia. Unusually, during the Soviet period they were never collectivized but continued to live as private reindeer herders. This happened because, until the late Soviet period, the authorities did not - or, at least, pretended not to - know of their existence. As they were never registered with any Soviet institution, this small group of Nenets was able to live in the tundra on their own.

This is a chapter in an edited volume "Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, Modernities and the Technologies of Faith" (edited by M. Pelkmans, Oxford, New York: Berghahn, pp 59–83).