Joachim Otto Habeck

Size and Place in the Construction of Indigeneity in the Russian Federation

Within the Russian Federation there are nearly 200 recognized “nationalities,” approximately 130 of which could claim to be “indigenous.” However, only 45 peoples are officially recognized as “indigenous small‐numbered peoples of the Russian Federation” and thereby qualify for the rights, privileges, and state support earmarked for indigenous peoples. This status is conditioned upon a maximum group size of 50,000. While experts insist that this numerical criterion is provisional and without serious political implications, our fieldwork demonstrates that it has become a social fact that cannot be ignored, especially in light of the 2002 All‐Russia Census and the release of its results in 2004. This numerical benchmark forces a dichotomization into small‐numbered versus non‐small‐numbered peoples and creates a peculiar type of identity politics based on ethnic‐group size. The “indigenous small‐numbered” status is also conditioned upon a set of overlapping but often contradictory residency requirements. Using case studies from southern Siberia and the north of European Russia, we document the dynamic interplay between these dimensions of identity and the opportunities for maneuvering in the competition for the benefits that attach to certain categories. However, indigenous peoples who engage in such identity politics run the risk of becoming “incarcerated” within the confines of those categories.

Introduction: Growing research on youth in Siberia

This special issue of Sibirica comprises a selection of papers presented at the conference “‘Everything is still before you”: being young in Siberia today’ (Halle, November 2003). This introduction opens with a short review of the conventional social-sciences approach toward youth (especially indigenous youth) as an ‘object of concern’. A brief summary of the subsequent papers follows, highlighting several crosscutting themes: (1) the concept of youth, the process of becoming an adult and the expectations connected with it; (2) acquisition of knowledge within and outside formal education; and (3) sports, music and games as meaningful and creative spheres of social interaction. The introduction concludes with the argument that the ambit of ‘Siberian’ anthropology can be significantly enlarged through the integration of sociological and cultural studies approaches and methods into ethnographic inquiry.

Siberian Automobility Boom: From the Joy of Destination to the Joy of Driving There

Abstract On summer Fridays, hundreds of people from Novosibirsk, Siberia undertake an eight-hour drive to the Altai Mountains only to drive back on Sunday. Rather than mountaineering, many of these tourists spend their time there relaxing in a sauna or preparing barbecue, i.e. doing things they could easily do much closer to their hometown. Exploring this somewhat bizarre pattern of weekend travel ethnographically, while simultaneously placing it in the genealogy of (post-)Soviet holiday-making and desire for cars, this article aims at a deeper understanding of the (leisure) automobility boom in the context of changing habits of travelling in contemporary Siberia. During the course of the analysis, the neologism car-hold, an analogy of household, is proposed to depict the hybrid collective of humans and non-humans held by the car. The article further argues that there are unfolding relations between the entities forming a car-hold and its changing environment that generate an altered emotional geography of the weekend drive to Altai as opposed to routine driving.

Introduction: Experience and Emotion in Northern Mobilities

Abstract This introduction opens a special section on emotional and experiential aspects of travel in Northern and Siberian landscapes. Conventional representations of the Arctic as a frontier have foregrounded the difficulties and risks of travel. The collection of articles presented here serves to complement this perspective, exploring both negative and positive connotations of travel. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in Greenland and Siberia, authors discuss the joy of movement along with moments of frustration and tension. Time and seasonality, companionship and imagination, and anticipated and unexpected encounters all bear particular significance in the Far North; simultaneously, they are key to a more nuanced understanding of the emotional qualities of travel in general.