Overview

Words and Silences tells the story of an extraordinary group of independent Nenets reindeer herders in the northwest Russian Arctic. Under socialism these nomads managed to avoid the Soviet state and its institutions of collectivization, but soon after the atheist regime collapsed, while some staunchly resisted, many of them became fervent fundamentalist Christians. By exploring differing concepts of how traditional and convert Nenets use and define words and of the meanings they ascribe to the withholding of speech, Laur Vallikivi shows how a local form of global Christianity has emerged through intricate negotiations of self, sociality, and cosmology. Moving beyond studies of modernization and globalization that have all-too-predictable outcomes for indigenous peoples, Words and Silences invites us to view not only religious devotees, but words themselves, as agents of a complex and ongoing transformation.

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9780253068767

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Reviews

"""A masterpiece! . . . Words and Silences presents an unusually rich ethnography on a part of a community in Europe's farthest Arctic Northeast, with a focus on an extremely difficult topic to do fieldwork on.""—Florian Stammler, author of Reindeer Nomads Meet the Market: Culture, Property and Globalisation at the ""End of the Land"" ""Vallikivi foregrounds speaking and communication in his analysis of the transformation from 'pagan' to Christian. . . . This is by far the most polished and impressive study I have read.""—Alexander D. King, author of Living with Koryak Traditions: Playing with Culture in Siberia"

Author Information

Laur Vallikivi is Associate Professor at the Arctic Studies Centre and the Department of Ethnology at the University of Tartu.

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