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You know Dasher and Dancer and…

February 2nd, 2008 Jim - South Madison

According to anthropologist Piers Vitebsky, for thousands of years of human history, reindeer were a central means of life.  Entire cultures evolved around the hunting and/or raising of them.  In Siberia, native tribes managed to domesticate reindeer, much in the manner of cattle and horses.  The reindeer provided these tribes with meat, clothing, transportation, and spiritual access. Vitebsky’s The Reindeer People paints a lovely portrait of one of these tribes, the Eveny, and their struggle to maintain the vestiges of a beautiful but doomed culture,  ravaged by change and decades of state oppression.

Vitebsky’s Eveny are resourceful in many ways.  For thousands of years, they’ve managed to live in one of the most inhospitable (for large parts of the year, the temperature is far below zero) and isolated places on earth.  Though they have survived,  a great deal of their cultural resilience has been lost, first whittled away by centuries of Tsarist mistreatment, then seriously eroded by a years of Soviet oppression.  The Soviets imposed on the originally nomadic Eveny a more industrial, factory style of reindeer raising centered on remote villages.  While the Soviet empire lasted, it did a good job of supplying these villages with material goods, transportation, and veterinary help.  The Eveny grew dependent on this largess, forgetting many of their more ancient ways.  Unfortunately, with the demise of the Soviet Union, the supplies suddenly disappeared, leaving the Eveny in the lurch. 

Vitebsky takes great pains to faithfully capture the last, fading echoes of an ancient and mysterious culture.  But I occasionally questioned to what extent he was embroidering his picture of the Eveny’s culture.  As it is, his account provides a rich and fascinating picture of the Eveny’s shamanic/animist religious beliefs, their social mores (Eveny social interaction is governed by a “discretion in the face of the mystery of another human being’s existence”), and their rather unique and complex conception of animals.  This is not a dry, academic book; Vitebsky presents a culture by introducing the reader to a community of individuals who he tracks over time in an at times soap-opera like fashion.  By turns lyrical, learned, angry and funny, this wonder-filled book took me out of my world and broadened it.

Entry Filed under: Nonfiction