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Ethnohistory 49.4 (2002) 873-875



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The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective. By Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, xv + 326 pp., introduction, maps, photographs, figures, notes, bibliography, index, appendixes. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Northwestern Siberia, that part of northern Eurasia that is so rich in marshes, fish, and petroleum, and where the fur trade boom happened four centuries ago and the oil fever began four decades ago, is the homeland of the Khanty (population 23,000), a people of the Ugrian branch of the Uralic language family. This remote area, located nearly as far away from the Atlantic as from the Pacific, had always been a difficult one for Westerners to reach, especially while the Soviet regime severely restricted any foreigner's travel in that area.

In 1976 Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, then a young American graduate student, succeeded in being the first Western anthropologist to penetrate the Iron Curtain as far as the Ob River. Even though Soviet ethnographers supervised her, this first entry initiated an ethnographic and a human discourse between the author and her "Khanty friends" that has persisted for more than twenty years, widening topically and taking place at various locations in the Northern Hemisphere. Balzer's meetings and conversations with her native interlocutors have occurred in Russia and America, in homes and conference rooms that the book's photographs nicely illustrate. The author has not limited her job to ethnographic research but has played an activist's role in helping Khanty leaders' establish international contacts. Thanks to all this, the book, in its central and best part, is a cohering story of "conceptualizing and reviving ethnicity together."

Chapters entitled "Colonization," "Christianization," "Revitalization," "Sovietization," and "Regionalization" present ethnohistorical events covering the past four centuries. According to the author's analysis, during the pre-Soviet era, the Khanty-Russian interaction in the spheres of the economy, religion, and male-female relations (including intermarriage and cohabitation) can be differentiated into three aerial patterns: a Russian dominance in the southern townships, a somewhat uneasy interdependence [End Page 873] in the northern villages, and a Khanty dominance in the backwoods region (33–34). These (and possibly a few other patterns) could have been established more cogently if the author did not rely so heavily on the notion of "Siberiak," a mere geographical cliché meaning any person from Siberia, but, instead, identified the various specific categories of the Russian actors, such as the Novgorodians, the Cossacks, and the Muscovites.

Readers familiar with Siberian history will be baffled by a series of unfortunate errors on pages 31 and 32, which place several famous historical characters in the wrong eras and locations. Thus we are told that in 1346 "Cossacks [actually ‘Novgorodians'] Aleksander Abakumovich and Stepan Lyapa fought skirmishes against Tatar Khans Ediger and Bekbulat." The problem is that both of these khans lived two centuries later. Equally erroneous is a statement that famous Cossack headman "Ermak's successful lightning tactics against the Tatar Khan Kuchum and Kuchum's violent death by drowning are celebrated in Russian. . . poetic song narratives." In fact, it was Ermak who drowned and the songs mourn his death.

The pace of the narrative picks up in the chapter titled "Regionalization," which deals with the post-Soviet era and draws on the author's interviews, some participant observation, and published literature. A number of memorable and vivid scenes and characters appear here. Prominent among the latter are the seven Ugrian women who "have started and been the backbone" of the Association for the Salvation of the Ugra movement. Paying a great deal of attention to the women's role in the current political struggle, the author makes a general argument that "women recently have become the ‘backbones' of Khanty . . . village and town life . . . in part because they are often better educated and have tended to be less prone to alcoholism" (149). In the same chapter the reader is led through a complex sociopolitical labyrinth of recent and modern-day life of these indigenous Siberians, encountering a series...

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