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Ethnology --- Political anthropology --- Symbolic anthropology

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Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer combines extensive field research with historical inquiry to produce a dramatic study of a minority people in Russia, the Khanty (Ostiak) of Northwest Siberia. Although First Nations, indigenous peoples, have often been victims of expansionist state-building, Balzer shows that processes of acquiring ethnic identity can involve transcending victimhood. She brings Khanty views of their history and current life into focus, revealing multiple levels of cultural activism. She argues that anthropological theory and practice can derive from indigenous insights, and should help indigenous peoples. Balzer brings to life the saga of the Khanty over several centuries. She analyzes trends in Siberian ethnic interaction that strongly affected minority lives: colonization, Christianization, revitalization, Sovietization, and regionalization. These processes incorporate suprastate and state politics, including recent devastations stemming from the energy industry's land thefts. Balzer documents changes that might seem to foreshadow the demise of indigenous ethnicity. Yet the final chapters reveal ways some Khanty have preserved cultural values and dignity in crisis. Khanty identity has varied with the politics of individuals, groups, and generations. It has been shaped by recent grass-roots mobilization, ecological activism, and religious revival, as well as older historical memory, language-based solidarity, and loyalty to a homeland. The Tenacity of Ethnicity demonstrates how at each historical turn, Siberian experiences shed new light on old debates concerning colonialism, conversion, revitalization, ethnicity, and nationalism. This volume will be important for political scientists, historians, and regional specialists, as well as anthropologists and sociologists.

Indigenous peoples --- Ethnology --- Khanty. --- Siberia (Russia) --- Ethnic relations. --- Abrahamian, Levon. --- Alekseev, Eduard. --- Archambaut, Joallyn. --- Artanzee. --- Badger, Mark. --- Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. --- Barth, Frederik. --- Beloiarsk. --- Bourhis, Richard. --- Bureau of Indian Affairs. --- Catherine the Great. --- Christianity. --- Communist Party. --- Dawisha, Karen. --- Dogany. --- Douglas, Mary. --- Dunn, Elizabeth. --- Kazym. --- Khantization. --- acculturation. --- atheism. --- baptism. --- biculturalism. --- bride price. --- chauvinism. --- citizenship. --- civic society. --- civilization. --- collectivization. --- colonialization. --- cooperatives. --- demography. --- ecology. --- economy. --- education. --- energy. --- epidemics. --- ethnic relations. --- ethnocide. --- ethnohistory. --- exploitation. --- film. --- forests. --- functionalism. --- genocide. --- globalization. --- homeland. --- identity. --- ideology. --- individualism. --- liberalism. --- movements. --- nationalism. --- obshchiny.

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Buriats --- Folklore --- Rites and ceremonies --- Shamanism --- Turkic peoples --- Social life and customs --- Religion --- Siberia (Russia) --- Religious life and customs.

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The borders of Russian history, whether chronological, geographical, political or intellectual, have always been patrolled, have sometimes been evaded, but have never been invisible. This volume attempts to extend those borders in several ways. The articles stress continuity rather than ruptures and their organization emphasizes persistent factors over time, particularly across the 1917 divide. Geographical dimensions are explored not through conquest but through regional responses to the center: local variants of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial policies in the Caucasus and Turkestan are complemented by Central Asian petitions for citizenship in the 1930s and Siberian healing in the 1990s. Ukrainian aspirations take a special focus, from Kyivan Rus’ to Ruthenian dreams. Politically, of course, Marxist–Leninist ideology attempted to extend its own frontiers of Russian history. Several studies here attempt to assess the meaning of the Soviet period in terms of ideology, practices, processes and memory. It is fitting too that the now accepted boundaries of the Soviet era—the revolutionary decade and the first decade of transition—are subject to detailed attention and analysis. The intellectual borders of Russian and Soviet history, long policed from within and without, have been breached by the creative and wide-ranging use of newly accessible archival sources that form the basis for these articles. The sense of community exhibited by this collection, however, is not artificial nor is it wholly imagined. It derives from the honoree, whose scholarly life has exhibited the blurring of traditional boundaries, whether disciplinary, generational, or national, that is represented by the contributors to this volume.