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ETHNOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF LOCAL HISTORY
Koester D.
Ethnology is the analysis of human society and culture, how social groups are organized and exist through time and how they differ from each other. Ethnography, in contrast, focuses on description. Thus, if ethnography has the goal of describing the cultures and forms of social organization of particular social groups, ethnology seeks to take that descriptive information and organize it into new understandings. For a long time in American and British anthropology, ethnological studies were synchronic, that is, they examined only a particular period in time in the life of a people. Their aim was to understand how the social group functioned. There were ethnologists, even famous ethnologists, who specifically said that they were not interested in historical events or individuals' actions. History was filled with unique occurrences; they were interested, they said, in scientific regularity. [28; 29]
Since the 60s, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in understanding both the regular functioning of society and how it exists over time. Not long ago, along these lines, many theorists spoke of "ethnic processes." They were attempting to determine the particular nature of historical processes among particular groups of people. This was a phrase that did not make much sense to me; I preferred to think of historical dynamics, of tendencies, group-internal processes and external influences. There are numerous interesting questions. Why do groups, given similar environmental circumstances, choose differing modes of subsistence? Why do groups with shared mythologies differ in their modes of performance? How do particular forms of social order, with particular forms of leadership, organization of labor and exchange relationships develop? How do ideas of kinship and family relations change?
Such questions are particularly interesting in Russia because the state has been so active in trying to regulate both the social order and the belief-system of the people. Yet, cultural traditions survived the Soviet period and many are working hard to preserve them. The history of the Soviet
period and after is important for ethnological science because it can show us how cultural traditions survive under conditions of state manipulation and management.
A number of recent studies have focused on the political-economic history of the Soviet period and the political-cultural dynamics of the post-Soviet aftermath in Siberia and the Far East. Archival documentation has been used in combination with historical interviews in Nivkh communities in Sakhalin [9], in Taimyr in the study of Nenets, Nganasan, Dolgan and Evenk life [1; 35], in the Ob river basin by Marjorie Balzer [4], Art Leete (Tartu) and Leonid Shargorodskii [32], in Kamchatka.by Olga Murashko, and Nelson Hancock in Kamchatka [24; 25; 26; 27] and in Chukotka by Igor Krupnik, Nikolai Vakhtin, Evgenii Golovko, Peter Schweitzer and Patty Gray [23; 31]. Alexia Bloch has examined the historical role of schools in the lives of Evenk people [5] and is working on a life history, and Petra Rethmann used mini-life histories to significant effect in her Tundra Passages to show explore Koryak women's lives in the Soviet period [30]. All of this ethnohistorical research meshes with the diachronically oriented ethnographic work of I. Gemuev in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug [7; 8], Piers Vitebsky and Marjorie Balzer in Sakha Republic [2; 3; 33; 34], Anna Kerttula in Chukotka [22], Caroline Humphrey in Buryatia and Tuva [10; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16], Gail Fondahl in southeastern Siberia [6], Erich Kasten in Kamchatka [17; 18; 19; 20; 21] and others, including a burgeoning cohort of indigenous scholars. They have combined to give us a vital picture of Soviet planning and cultural management, of indigenous groups and individuals interacting with the Soviet state, and of historical processes working in relation to environmental, cultural, social and political-economic developments. What has been lacking in all of this research has
been extended, life-long portraits, the kind of the in-depth examination of the internalization and external expression of value systems, personal projects and historical contingency that have been the hallmark of life history studies in anthropology. The Soviet Union was a massive, horrific and at the same time progressive (in both negative and positive senses of progress) social experiment that brought planned cultural development to thousands of indigenous people across the Soviet North. How people experienced and actively engaged this social engineering project with their lives is the most critical question today for understanding the effects and aftereffects of Soviet domination. Study of these questions helps us to answer questions about the relationship between the effects of extreme policy in extreme environmental conditions. It provides an important comparative study of the exercise of imperial power.
At the same time, it is important that indigenous communities in Kamchatka continue to record local history and preserve and sustain development of cultural traditions. The communities are concerned with resource rights and environmental issues brought on by the immense changes that have taken place in the last ten years and the climate for new forms of economic development. They want to be able to articulate traditional environmental cares, principles and perspectives in an international context. The urgent need now is to coordinate research plans and develop a collaborative project to preserve, record and publish local history.
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