Bruce Forbes, Senior Scientist, Arctic Centre, University of Lapland:
Yamal is a land of continuous permafrost underlain by enormous deposits of natural gas over which the Nenets have served as responsible stewards for a millennium. Their prospects for continued survival-with the arrival of powerful players like Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly, and the escalating sounds of foreign companies clamoring for access to the resources-range from reasonable to impossible, depending on whom you talk to. This book will enable readers to approach the debate well informed. The book is a gripping read, whatever one's background.
This volume's strengths mirror the specializations of its authors, namely, very strong ethnohistorical scholarship and astute appraisal of various political policy scenarios... It is well illustrated with color photographs and would serve as a nice textbook for any course in these subjects.
Igor Krupnik, Research Anthropologist, Arctic Studies Center, Smithsonian Institution:
This book tells the story of the most successful indigenous resistance to modern state pressure across the entire eight-time-zone span of Siberia and perhaps the entire Arctic. The saga of the Nenets people on Yamal is a powerful message of unprecedented importance to all who are concerned about minority cultural survival.
Siberian Survival takes us through an unusually intelligent reading of leadership and gender, ecological development, native epistemologies, and twentieth-century rebellions. The book's innovative organizational centerpiece is the legend of the 'Five Iaptiks,' a mini-thriller in the lore of people becoming gods and gods becoming people... In the best sense, 'Five Iaptiks' and the book's other narrative strategies work as performative gestures to help us imagine how the Nenets navigate the world around them... This slim volume accomplishes a great deal in a short space. Lucid prose and beautiful photographs make its overall argument for understanding recent environmental politics through the lens of an enduring Nenets worldview all the more persuasive. This book should be well appreciated by readers in anthropology, colonial history, ecology, religion, gender politics, and northern studies.
Myths that rank in beauty and simplicity with those of Homer and tales of heroism and perserverance that attest to the ongoing resilience of the local population in the face of centuries of attempted colonization.... Golovnev and Osherenko... have given us a valuable and conscientious study, graced by a plethora of color photographs of life on Yamal,... their love for this inhospitable peninsula of sand, clay and mosquitos is sincere and infectious.
Based on extensive fieldwork and hitherto unavailable Russian archival sources, this masterful study is a deep ethnographic and ethnohistorical account that demonstrates how flexibility enabled the Nenets to avoid cultural disintegration despite severe outside pressures. The authors' eloquent and carefully reasoned argument... has far-reaching implications for other arctic peoples and indigenous societies throughout the world... Essential for all circumpolar arctic collections.
Andrei V. Golovnev and Gail Osherenko... seek to understand the Nenets and 'their phenomenal capacity to keep their... culture, language and lifestyle' after four centuries of Russian Rule. Behind this, generally encouraging, story lurks the problem of local sources of natural gas and oil, the exploration and extraction of which (begun in the 1960's) threatens to destroy the fragile tundra and the Nenets' way of life... The authors' presentation of the options is stark: can the Nenets' way of life survive in competition with the State's thirst for oil extraction under Soviet-mafia management, with its traditional disregard for 'small peoples' and the natural environment?
Elise Boulding, author of The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time:
Andrei Golovnev and Gail Osherenko show us how the colonial intrusions from the South in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries only strengthened the inventiveness of the Nenets, due in no small part to flexible social patterns that allowed women as well as men to provide leadership. The authors also argue convincingly for creative economic and social policies that protect property rights and decision-making autonomy for the Nenets while at the same time improving an ailing Russian economy.
Compelling... A deceptively short, well-illustrated, and suberbly edited book.
