The Reindeer People: Living With Animals and Spirits in Siberia – An Epic History of the Eveny Nomads and Soviet-Era Survival - Softcover

Vitebsky, Piers

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618773576 ISBN 13: 9780618773572

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2006

Synopsis

Since the last Ice Age, the reindeer's extraordinary adaptation to cold has sustained human life over vast tracts of the earth's surface, providing meat, fur, and transport. Images carved into rocks and tattooed on the skin of mummies hint at ancient ideas about the reindeer's magical ability to carry the human soul on flights to the sun. These images pose one of the great mysteries of prehistory: the "reindeer revolution," in which Siberian native peoples tamed and saddled a species they had previously hunted.

Drawing on nearly twenty years of field work among the Eveny in northeast Siberia, Piers Vitebsky shows how Eveny social relations are formed through an intense partnership with these extraordinary animals as they migrate over the swamps, ice sheets, and mountain peaks of what in winter is the coldest inhabited region in the world. He reveals how indigenous ways of knowing involve a symbiotic ecology of mood between humans and reindeer, and he opens up an unprecedented understanding of nomadic movement, place, memory, habit, and innovation.

The Soviets' attempts to settle the nomads in villages undermined their self-reliance and mutual support. In an account both harrowing and funny, Vitebsky shows the Eveny's ambivalence toward productivity plans and medals and their subversion of political meetings designed to control them. The narrative gives a detailed and tender picture of how reindeer can act out or transform a person's destiny and of how prophetic dreaming about reindeer fills a gap left by the failed assurances of the state.

Vitebsky explores the Eveny experience of the cruelty of history through the unfolding and intertwining of their personal lives. The interplay of domestic life and power politics is both intimate and epic, as the reader follows the diverging fate of three charismatic but very different herding families through dangerous political and economic reforms. The book's gallery of unforgettable personalities includes shamans, psychics, wolves, bears, dogs, Communist Party bosses, daredevil aviators, fire and river spirits, and buried ancestors. The Reindeer People is a vivid and moving testimony to a Siberian native people's endurance and humor at the ecological limits of human existence.

About this title

About the Author

PIERS VITEBSKY is the head of anthropology and Russian northern studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. His previous books include Shamanism and Dialogues with the Dead: The Discussion of Mortality Among the Sora of Eastern India. The Reindeer People has been selected as a finalist for the 2006 Kiriyama Prize in nonfiction.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Reindeer People

Living with Animals and Spirits in SiberiaBy Piers Vitebsky

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2006 Piers Vitebsky
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618773572
PROLOGUE

Soul-flight to the Sun

In the Verkhoyansk Mountains of northeast Siberia, Eveny nomads are on
the move*. Teams of reindeer pull caravans of sledges down the steep slide
of a frozen mountain river. Bells tinkle on the lead reindeer while dogs on
short leashes dive closely alongside through the snow like dolphins beside a
boat. One man sits on the lead sledge of each caravan, his right foot
stretched out in front of him and his left foot resting on the runner ready to
fend off hidden rocks and snagging roots. Passengers or cargo sit on the
sledges behind. The passage of each caravan is visible from afar by a cloud
of frozen reindeer breath.
This is the coldest inhabited place on earth, with winter
temperatures falling to -96°F (-71°C). The ice is a condition of the water for
eight months of the year and by January it is 6 feet thick. Throughout the
winter, warm springs continue to break through the surface of rivers, where
they erupt as frozen turquoise upwellings, like igneous intrusions in rock, and
freeze into jagged obstructions. Caravan after caravan jolts over the last ridge
of river ice and skims across a great frozen lake in an epic sweep stretching
almost from shore to shore. Deep lakes provide a more level surface and the
ice that forms from their still water glows black, marbled with milky white
veins snaking into the depths. The sudden speed and the spray of ice
crystals flung into our faces behind the hypnotic flash of the reindeer's
skidding hooves make it easy to feel that we are about to take off and fly into
the air.

Thousands of years before the tsarist empire taxed them and the Soviet
Union relocated them into State Farms, the ancestors of today's Eveny and
of their cousins the Evenki had moved out from their previous homeland in
northeast China and spread for thousands of miles across forests and
tundras, swamps and mountain ranges, from Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean,
from the Pacific almost to the Urals, making them the most widely spread
indigenous people on any landmass. Even today, elders can tell stories of
journeys that make young people, tied to their villages and dependent on
aircraft, smile with disbelief. The old people achieved this mobility by training
reindeer to carry them on their backs and pull them on sledges. The endless
succession of short migrations* from one camp site to the next, which they
have shared with me, gives no more than a glimpse of the power of reindeer
transport and of the way in which this creature has opened up vast swathes
of the earth's surface for human habitation.
The association between reindeer and flying is very ancient –
much, much older than European or American ideas about Santa Claus*.
Scattered across the deserts and steppes of western Mongolia and
stretching into the Altai Mountains in the west and up to the border of
Manchuria in the east, stand ancient 'reindeer stones' dating from the Bronze
Age* some 3,000 years ago. These upright standing stones are set above
graves or surrounded by the remains of fires and sacrificed sheep and
horses. They are carved with various animals, but most often with reindeer.
On the earlier stones the image of the reindeer is simple, but some 500
years later it has become more ornate. On these stones, the reindeer is
depicted with its neck outstretched and its legs flung out fore and aft, as if
not merely galloping but leaping through the air. The antlers have grown
fantastically till they reach right back to the tail, and sometimes hold the disc
of the sun or a human figure with the sun as its head. The flung-out hooves
seem to represent more than just a leap: it is as if the artist has caught the
reindeer in the act of flying through the sky in an association with a deity of
the sun.
It seems the climate of Mongolia dried out towards the end of the
first millennium bc, coming closer to today's desert conditions in which
reindeer can no longer live, except in one small, cool mountain region. But
other evidence suggests that even where it had disappeared, the reindeer
persisted in the imagination like a mythic or archetypal creature. At Pazyryk
in the nearby Altai Mountains, the burial mounds of chiefs from around 500–
400 BC contain food as well as fine clothing, gold ornaments, harps, combs,
and mirrors, decorated with a range of animals including reindeer. By the
second century ad, one of the horses sacrificed in a grave wears a face-mask
made of leather, felt, and fur and adorned with life-size antlers, clearly
dressed up to imitate a reindeer*. It seems a reindeer was still better than a
horse for riding in the afterlife. Some 1,500 years later, in the seventeenth
century, at a battle between the Oirot Mongols and the Manchus 60 miles
from Ulaan Baatar, a Mongolian chronicle tells us that the wife of the Khan
Daldyn Bashig Tu rode into battle on 'a reindeer with branching antlers'*.
Since real reindeer had been absent from this region for 2,000 years, this
probably indicates a continuation of the custom of dressing a horse in a
reindeer mask.
The reindeer appears in an even more intimate association with
the Pazyryk people – in tattoos on their bodies. After death they were
eviscerated, sewn up and mummified*, as if they would be needing their flesh
as well as their provisions for whatever afterlife or rebirth they were expecting.
Even so, these bodies might not have survived had it not been for the water
that flowed into the graves*, sometimes through the breaches left by grave
robbers. This water then froze around the mummified bodies. Three of the
bodies found so far bear tattoos, and have been preserved so perfectly that
we can see the designs clearly. Here on the shoulders are depicted the
same reindeer as on the standing stones, with their hooves flung out and
their exaggerated antlers. But in the tattoos the imagery of flight is made
even more explicit. The branching of the reindeers' antlers sometimes looks
like the feathering of birds' wings, and on some of them each tine of the
antler ends in a tiny bird's head.
When I first read about these tattoos as a child I did not imagine
that the association of reindeer with flight had been carried by migrating
populations to lands where reindeer still existed far to the north, still less that
I would one day live among people who in their own childhood had taken a
ritual voyage to the sun on the back of a flying reindeer. I reached this
northern region in the late 1980s, and learned about this rite from my first
Eveny friend, Tolya, during some of our travels together. Small but muscular,
a former wrestling champion with an impish sense of humour, he was already
feeling the call to abandon his role as an official in the Soviet administration
and to reach back through the veils of boarding school and the Soviet Navy to
rediscover the ancient traditions of his ancestors. As we rode from camp to
camp, this ritual was one of Tolya's discoveries*. We crouched around
darkened stoves at night, while I listened to Tolya talking intently to nomadic
elders, who included his own mother, in a native language I could not yet
understand. I did not know that in front of me precious words were being
spoken by people who might have been the last left alive on earth capable of
saying them. These words revealed a continuity of ideas, carried over
thousands of miles and thousands of years, with the birds on the tips of the
reindeer antlers tattooed on the shoulders of the mummies in the Altai and
the carvings in Mongolia of reindeer holding the sun aloft in their antlers.
These elders told Tolya that reindeer were created by the sky god
Ho¨ vki, not only to provide food and transport on earth, but also to lift the
human soul up to the sun. From their childhood seventy, eighty, or more
years before, they remembered a ritual that was carried out each year on
Midsummer's Day, symbolizing the ascent of each person on the back of a
winged reindeer. During the white night of the Arctic summer, a rope was
stretched between two larch trees to represent a gateway to the sky. As the
sun rose high above the horizon in the early dawn, this gateway was filled
with the purifying smoke of the aromatic mountain rhododendron, which
drifted over the area from two separate bonfires. Each person passed around
the first fire anticlockwise, against the direction of the sun, to symbolize the
death of the old year and to burn away its illnesses. They then moved around
the second fire in a clockwise direction, following the sun's own motion, to
symbolize the birth of the new year.
It was at this moment, while elders prayed to the sun for success
in hunting, an increase in reindeer, strong sons and beautiful daughters, that
each person was said to be borne aloft on the back of a reindeer which
carried its human passenger towards a land of happiness and plenty near the
sun. There they received a blessing, salvation, and renewal. At the highest
point, the reindeer turned for a while into a crane, a bird of extreme
sacredness.
I still do not understand how the old Eveny acted out the
experience of flying through the air, but they would mime their return to earth
by sitting on their own reindeer as if they were arriving from a long journey,
expressing tiredness, unsaddling their mount, pitching a tent and lighting a
fire. This rite was followed by a hedje, a circle dance in the direction of the
sun, and a feast of plenty.
The annual soul-voyage made by the elders whom I met with
Tolya was a small-scale echo of the voyages made by shamans, men and
women whose souls can leave their bodies while they are in a state of trance
and fly to other realms of a cosmos which is believed to have many layers.
Whereas laypersons could only fly on the back of a reindeer, shamans could
turn into a flying reindeer. The word shama´n or hama´n comes to us from the
language of the Eveny and the Evenki, two closely related peoples of the
Tungus language family. All Arctic peoples have comparable figures, known
by various names, as do other peoples in many parts of the world. The role of
the shaman is closely linked to hunting as a way of life. Before the
development of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, all humans depended on
hunting to survive, and it is hard to imagine that any other kind of religion
could have existed. Shamans develop the ordinary hunter's skills and
intuitions by flying over the landscape to monitor the movements of migratory
animals and by performing rites to stimulate the vitality of animals and
humans alike.
In Siberia, shamans combine a distinctive imagery of reindeer and
of bird-flight. Their costumes sometimes include imitation reindeer antlers,
occasionally tipped with wings or feathers, placed on the headdress or
attached to the shoulders at the very point where reindeer are tattooed on the
Pazyryk mummies. Like the participants in the Eveny midsummer ritual,
shamans may ride to the sky on a bird or a reindeer. But their relationship
with these animals goes far beyond mere riding. One shaman is suckled by a
white reindeer during his initiatory vision as he incubates in a bird's nest on a
branch high in the tree that links earth and sky*. Another becomes a reindeer
himself by wearing its hide, while hunters with miniature bows and arrows
surround him and mime the act of killing. The hide is then stretched across
the broad, flat drum that the shaman will beat as accompaniment to his
trance. Another shaman, seeking to consecrate his reindeer-skin drum, is
guided by spirits as he combs through the forest to find the location where
the reindeer was born and traces every place it has ever visited over the
course of its life, right up to the point where it was killed. As he picks his way
through bogs and over fallen branches, he picks up the scattered material
traces of its existence – snapped twigs, dried dung – to gather together every
possible part of its being, and then moulds them into a small effigy of the
reindeer. When he sprinkles the effigy with a magical 'water of life', the drum
comes to life. Like a reindeer itself but with enhanced power, it is now
capable of bearing the shaman aloft with its throbbing beat to nine, twelve, or
more levels of the heavens.

Copyright © 2005 by Piers Vitebsky. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.



Continues...

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Edition details

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0618773576
• ISBN 13: 9780618773572
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496