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Reindeer People: living with animals and spirits in Siberia
Piers Vitebsky
xvi + 464 pp, 16 plates of photographs, notes, bibliography
London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005
This unique book is a beautifully written exploration of the intense partnership between a nomadic people and an extraordinary animal.
With its exceptional adaptation to cold, the reindeer has made human life possible over vast swathes of the earth's surface. Images carved into rocks and tattooed on the skin of frozen mummies reveal ancient ideas about the reindeer's magical ability to carry the human soul on flights to the sun. Piers Vitebsky, the first westerner to live with Siberian reindeer people since the Russian revolution, traces the modern continuation of these ideas as he enters the inner world of the Eveny of northeastern Siberia and follows their migrations for nearly twenty years through the swamps, ice-sheets and mountain peaks of the coldest inhabited region of the world.
The Eveny experience of the cruelty of history is explored through the unfolding and intertwining of their personal destinies. The interplay of domestic life and power politics is both intimate and epic, as the reader follows the diverging fate of three charismatic but very different herding families through dangerous political and economic reforms. Whether in the violence of political conflict or the tender anxieties of unspoken love, reindeer remain the foundation of Eveny life and serve humans as food, transport, dream symbols and animal doubles. Against a backdrop of reformist rallies, sledge races, helicopter mercy flights, gulag prison survivors and reindeer sacrifices, the reader experiences the humour, wisdom and passion of a gallery of unforgettable characters who include herders, hunters, shamans, psychics, wolves, bears, dogs, communist party bosses, daredevil aviators, spirits of fires and rivers, and ancestors in graves.
The Reindeer People is an account of one of the greatest transformations in modern history, witnessed from one of the remotest locations on earth. A vivid and moving testimony to a Siberian native people's endurance and humour at the ecological limits of human existence, it will become a key work for our appreciation of a region which is attracting increasing academic as well as popular interest.
Winner of the 2006 Kiriyama Prize for non-fiction
The Kiriyama Prize is awarded annually for an outstanding book on the region of the Pacific Rim and South Asia (see kiriyamaprize.org and waterbridgereview.org). One prize is awarded for non-fiction and one for fiction. The 2006 winner for fiction was Luis Alberto Urrea for The hummingbird's daughter, set in Mexico.
Previous Kiriyama winners include Suketu Mehta for Maximum city: Bombay lost and found, Nadeem Aslam for Maps for lost lovers, and Michael Ondaatje for Anil's ghost. This is the first time the prize has been awarded to a work of anthropology.
"An anthropological tour de force. Vitebsky's book reminds us what anthropology is really about... The Reindeer People is destined to become a classic work. It will be read and relished for many years to come." - Professor Paul Stoller, West Chester University and Temple University; Author of Money has no smell: the africanization of New York City and Sensuous scholarship
"The work of an acutely observant and unusually dedicated field-worker at the height of his powers. The author captivates the reader with his delicate sense of human relations and sure grasp of the realities of Eveny life at an extraordinary moment in history. The power of the narrative and the exquisite evocation of place make this book a masterpiece of anthropological writing." - Professor Jean Briggs, Memorial University of Newfoundland; Author of Never in anger and Inuit morality play
"Best book of the year" - Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Stalin: the court of the red tsar
"An important seminal work... really breaking new ground" - Kiriyama Prize citation
"Vitebsky's generous study elucidates Siberian reindeer culture to a depth never attained before" - Booklist (American Library Association), starred review
"A worthy companion to V. K. Arseniev's Dersu the Trapper, Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams and other landmark books of the Far North" - Kirkus, starred review
"A huge amount of anthropological interest is in this book... lays open for us the process of doing anthropology... a most unusual and brilliant book. It has poetic descriptions of those bleak landscapes, it has drama, it has characters one gets to know, and it grips one with the desire to know what happened to them next." - Times Literary Supplement
"Vitebsky has accomplished what many anthropologists aspire to... a uniquely unvoyeuristic and candid exploration of the relationships between an anthropologist and the people whom he starts out studying but comes to love" - Times Higher Education Supplement
"A brilliant fusion of genres... By the end of the book, it becomes clear just what the author has achieved. One is drawn in to the beauty of the writing, the compelling drama... But the greatness of the work lies beyond the narrative... Vitebsky leaves no room for doubt as to the stature of the Eveny people, the profundity of their knowledge and culture... a rare and wonderful thing" - Humanitas
"A wondrous, complex story... and Vitebsky tells it beautifully" - Guardian (London)
"If you read one book this year... read Reindeer People. This book will grip and enlighten anyone... Like the reindeer themselves, this book takes wing" - Daily Telegraph (London)
"So intimate, so revealing and so moving... This book is required reading" - Moscow Times
Book of the Month, Geographical Magazine
Book of the Month, Soyuz: Research Network for Postsocialist Studies of the American Anthropological Association and American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies