Indigenous Christianity: Missionaries, Modernity, and Marginality in the Siberian Tundra

This book traces the story of a Nenets indigenous community in Siberia and how its members' lives were transformed by religious conversion in post-Soviet and Putin’s Russia. Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in a region now largely closed to outsiders, it offers an intimate account of faith, power, and endurance in one of the Arctic’s most marginalized communities.

Nenets nomads, long shaped by Russian colonialism and Soviet modernization, experienced sweeping conversions in the mid-1990s, culminating in the creation of a tundra church tied to a radical evangelical movement. Amid Putin’s tightening control—when indigenous peoples and minority faiths faced renewed surveillance and harassment—the book follows Nenets and missionaries whose encounters across the tundra sparked tensions between converts and non-converts, faith and state. Through stories of hope, loss, and resilience, it reveals how global evangelical Christianity intersects with local traditions, reshaping kinship, belonging, and modernity in the Siberian tundra.

Tatiana Vagramenko, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at University College Cork and Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, works at the intersection of anthropology, religious studies, and digital humanities.