Yupik Transitions: Change and Survival at Bering Strait, 1900–1960 by Igor Krupnik and Michael Chlenov (review)

YUPIK TRANSITIONS: CHANGE AND SURVIVAL AT BERING STRAIT, 1900–1960 is a detailed ethno-history of the Yupik people in Asia and the culmination of over thirty years of fieldwork and archival research that began in 1971. Using oral histories and archeological and documentary evidence from Russia and the United States while drawing on a substantial bibliography of secondary sources, ethnographers Igor Krupnik and Michael Chlenov have written a comprehensive historical account of Yupik social institutions. They seek, according to the prologue written in 1987, to perform a social reconstruction of the system that “allowed the Yupik to endure the centuries of changes, from the arrival of the Russian Cossacks in 1648 through the promise of Soviet communism that was never fulfilled” (xxii).

Two-thirds of the book focuses on establishing a model for the Yupik social system as Kropnik and Chlenov contend it existed from the late nineteenth century to the Soviet era. The first six chapters detail the development and function of what the authors refer to as “contact-traditional society” and describe the social structure of Yupik patrilineal tribes, family, kinship, territory, migrations, and labor relationships that centered on the village. Chapter 7 explores the “lifetime” of the “contact-traditional” model by tracing elements of Yupik society as related in Yupik oral histories through centuries of archeological evidence and European travel logs. Finally, chapters 8–10 address successive stages of the Soviet administration characterized by communist indoctrination, the collective farm era, forced Yupik relocations, and the “Great Reform” that the authors argue irrevocably shattered Yupik society by 1960.

While Kropnik and Chlenov claim to approach their study through themes of change, transition, resistance, and resilience, there are many instances in their framing and analysis that would give any scholar of Indigenous studies great pause. The authors display a troubling tendency to dismiss Indigenous knowledge and Yupik oral histories, which they frequently refer to as “memories” or “lore” (1, 45, 49, 50, 189, 210, 219). The opening lines of the first chapter state that oral histories as a form of knowledge are “fragile” and “unsecured” and therefore unreliable in comparison to those “put on paper or preserved on tape” (1). Elsewhere, they argue that employing “lore for past social reconstruction is often problematic, as it is rarely an authentic projection of the social and cultural institutions of the time” (210).

Though endeavoring to foreground Yupik strategic adaptation and resistance to Soviet colonialism, the historical narrative that emerges is saturated in the language of inevitable decline, extinction, and disappearance (xxvi, 61, 149, 225, 242, 258, 265, 293). Thus the model of Yupik “contact-traditional society” serves as an essentialized and static ideal against which any deviation is perceived as the demise of the Yupik social system. Unfortunately, this framing drowns out the dynamic and flexible nature of Yupik society and leaves readers with the impression that not only are the Yupik incapable of change in the absence of an outside catalyst, but also that Yupik society is outside the realm of “modernity.” This is strikingly apparent in their study of the intensification of Soviet “modernization” (263) as the authors fail to recognize Yupik influence on the nature of these encounters, even claiming that these changes and transitions “took place completely imperceptibly to the people themselves, who did not view their society in terms of social anthropology” (259).

Additionally, the density of ethnographic description leaves little room for meaningful analysis, particularly in the context of settler colonialism and empire, constituting a tremendous opportunity the authors have regrettably missed. Numerous examples of Yupik people creatively leveraging their location at the heart of U.S. and Russian imperial borderlands surface in the text, though with little to no consideration for how these moments represent the strategic negotiation of empire by Indigenous people—an analysis that would contradict the overwhelming tone of declension that characterizes the book (8, 9, 12, 45, 96, 208, 237).

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