Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny

Description

The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian indigenous peoples, it presents the young people’s narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study brings a new perspective to the anthropology of childhood and uncovers a quite unexpected dynamic in narrating and foreshadowing the future while relating it to cultural patterns of prediction and fulfillment in nomadic cosmology. Dedication Contents Acknowledgements List of Characters Introduction 1. Future Autobiographies and Their Spaces 2. Eveny Childhood and Adolescence 3. Forest and Village 4. Three Future Autobiographies 5. Reindeer and Child in the Forest Chronotope 6. The Village as Domain of Unhappiness: Broken Families and the Curse of the GULAG 7. Cosmologies of the Future in the Shadow of Djuluchen References Index