"Refuting essentialist notions of Nenets culture, the author explores the dialogue between reindeer nomads and the surrounding world and shows how global processes and concepts such as culture, property, and market are expressed in local practices. He demonstrates how reindeer nomads move freely between subsistence and commodity production; state-owned and private reindeer; animism, communism, and market relations; and territorial defence and cooperative knowledge of the land. This study makes an original and significant contribution to wider debates about nomadic pastoralism and to anthropological studies of trade, barter, property, and territoriality."--GoogleBooks
The issue of collective and multiple property rights in animals, such as cattle, camels or reindeers, among pastoralists has never been a subject of special cross-cultural and comparative study. Focusing on pastoralist societies in East and West Africa, the Far North and Siberia, and the Eurasian steppes, this volume addresses the issue of property rights and the changes these societies have undergone due to the direct or indirect influence of modernization and globalization processes. The contributors also investigate the interplay of older sets of rights and modern marketing policies; political, ecological and economic effects of collectivization and de-collectivization; the existence of collective and private property in the Soviet Union and its successor states; state taxation and destocking measures in African dry lands; and the effects of quarantine, as well as import and export regulations. The rich and well-researched ethnographic, historical, and economic data in these chapters provides new theoretical insights into the matter of property rights in animals. Anatoly M. Khazanov is Ernest Gellner Professor of Anthropology (Emeritus) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His publications include Nomads and the Outside World (1st. ed. Cambridge University Press, 1984) and After the USSR: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Politics in the Comonwealth of Independent States (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). Günther Schlee is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Until 1999, he was a Professor for Social Anthropology at the University of Bielefeld. His publications include Identities on the Move: Clanship and Pastoralism in Northern Kenya (Manchester University Press 1989).
Xi'an, the former Chang'an - home to the terracotta army and capital to 13 dynasties of Chinese emperors - experienced World Heritage fame in 1987 when the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor was listed. In 2014, five more heritage sites in Xi'an were listed as part of the Silk Roads World Heritage nomination. The ancient capital represents glorious moments of Chinese history and local citizens are proud of Xi'an's archaeological and historical status. However, the modern cityscape is as much shaped by high rises as by historical buildings and heritage policies intersect with demands for urbanization, modernization, and economic growth. This book seeks to understand how modernity, history, and heritage are reconciled in this city where the past meets the future.
This volume is devoted to aspects of space that have thus far been largely unexplored. How space is perceived and cognised has been discussed from different stances, but there are few analyses of nomadic approaches to spatiality. Nor is there a sufficient number of studies on indigenous interpretations of space, despite the importance of territory and place in definitions of indigeneity. At the intersection of geography and anthropology, the authors of this volume combine general reflections on spatiality with case studies from the Circumpolar North and other nomadic settings. Spatial perceptions and practices have been profoundly transformed by new technologies as well as by new modes of social and political interaction. How do these changes play out in the everyday lives, identifications and political projects of nomadic and indigenous people? This question has been broached from two seemingly divergent stances: spatial cognition, on the one hand, and production of space, on the other. Bringing these two approaches together, this volume re-aligns the different strings of scholarship on spatiality, making them applicable and relevant for indigenous and nomadic conceptualizations of space, place and territory.
Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, this book focuses on concepts such as domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. By looking into hunting rituals and herding techniques, the ethnography questions the dynamics between people, domesticated reindeer, and wild animals. It focuses on the role of the spirited landscape which embraces all living creatures and acts as a unifying concept at the center of the human and non-human relations.
Pastoralism as a land use system is under recognized in terms of its contribution to food provision, livelihoods as well as to human security. This book is the first attempt to explore the dynamics of economic spaces of pastoral production and commodity systems for explicit South and North positionings. It develops and applies a new approach in combining agri-food, market and commodity chain perspectives with livelihood approaches. This enables new understandings of re-aligning exchange relations between the global south and the global north. The case studies presented open up new empirical insights in largely under-researched areas, such as Afghanistan, Chad, Tibet and Siberia and very recent changes in industrialized economies with major pastoral sectors. The book reveals new evidence and theoretical insights about significant changes in established producer-consumer relations in agriculture and food.
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.
Soon after the first Earth Day in 1970, the academic world saw a virtual explosion of new, interdisciplinary 'environmental' programs, many of which took explicit note for the first time of the fact that 'environmental' problems are inherently social problems as well. Even in the new programs, however, issues of equity and the environment were usually relegated to isolated classes on environmental ethics. Today, they still are.
