Please join Professor Laur Vallikivi for a conversation with Book Prize judge Ruth Maclennan about his book, Words and Silences: Nenets Reindeer Herders and Russian Evangelical Missionaries in the Post-Soviet Arctic, which has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2024. Drawing on two decades of fieldwork, Vallikivi presents a rich ethnography of a Nenets community that few outsiders have interacted with, raising questions on critical topics, including colonisation, globalisation and religious change.
The Nenets are one of the very few fully nomadic societies still thriving in the circumpolar North, travelling hundreds of kilometres every year to find new pastures for their reindeer. Vallikivi’s book focuses on the reindeer herders who live in the farthest corner of the European Arctic and who successfully avoided collectivisation and kept their own private herds. These independent-minded Nenets have faced many challenges over the generations – from the persecution of shamans and the spread of the Gulag camps in Soviet times to the impact of the oil and gas industry and climate change today. Despite these challenges, they have managed to preserve their nomadic way of life until now.
A deeper transformation for many independent Nenets came with the arrival of Russian-speaking evangelical missionaries, who have their own history of tension with the state. These conservative Christians kept a low profile during Soviet times but began proselytising in the tundra after the collapse of the atheist regime. Since the mid-1990s, more than half of the Nenets community have become fervent fundamentalist Christians due to the missionaries’ frequent visits to their campsites.
During his years of fieldwork, Vallikivi lived in nomadic tents with newly converted Baptist families, a family undergoing conversion to Pentecostalism, and “pagans” resisting attempts at conversion. He observed the complex interaction between Nenets reindeer herders and Russian evangelicals, in particular, the role played by words and silences. While the nomads’ habitual communication is of few words and long silences, verbose Baptist and Pentecostal missionaries place enormous importance on words. Even if the Nenets aren’t used to the intense talking, many have become speakers of the new religious language, yielding to the missionaries’ demands to burn their sacred objects, abandon animist sacrifices and stop singing epic songs. Those unwilling to convert stay silent to avoid being compelled by the Russians’ intrusive language.
The missionaries’ relationship with the Nenets has wider implications beyond language and religious beliefs. Conversion brings new practices – from raising children to burying the dead – and new attitudes toward the world around them. For example, missionaries instil a new understanding of the environment, stressing that God has given humans the power to govern all other beings. In contrast, Nenets animists have deep respect for the environment, seeing humans and nonhumans in mutually dependent relationships. Conversion can thus represent a complete rupture with earlier lifestyles and spiritual and cultural heritage – with profound ethical consequences.
Read the interview with Laur Vallikivi about his book and research here.
Laur Vallikivi is a social anthropologist and Associate Professor at the Arctic Studies Centre and the Department of Ethnology at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He first travelled to the Nenets tundra in 1999 as an undergraduate student and continued to visit nomadic families there until 2017, including a nearly year-long stay in 2006–2007. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2011.
Vallikivi has published numerous scholarly papers on topics ranging from resistance to colonisation and changing perceptions of the environment among the Nenets of the Great Land tundra, to reincarnation concepts among the Yukaghir of the Lower Kolyma. He has contributed to many publications, including The Siberian World (Routledge), Conversion after Socialism (Berghahn), Arctic Anthropology (University of Wisconsin Press), and the Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics (Estonian Literary Museum, Estonian National Museum, University of Tartu). Words and Silences (Indiana University Press) is his second monograph on the Nenets. He is currently engaged in several projects, including research on religiosity and ethnicity in contemporary Finno-Ugric communities in the Volga-Kama area, the manifestations of Christianity in the Arctic, and the anthropological exploration of silence in communication.
Ruth Maclennan is an artist and researcher whose work includes films, photographs, performances and writing. She has made films in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Arctic Russia. Many of her films and photographs explore how the climate emergency has affected and altered experiences of place and landscape – both for the inhabitants, and as representation. A Forest Tale (2022, FVU/Arctic Art Institute) was shot in the boreal forests of Arctic Russia and shown at Pushkin House in 2023. Treeline (2021, FVU/Forestry England) was selected by the Whitechapel Gallery for Artists’ Film International and toured internationally. Anarcadia (2010, FVU/John Hansard Gallery) was shot in Kazakhstan and toured in the UK and at international film festivals. She has contributed to publications including Ice Humanities: Living, Thinking and Working with a Melting World (Manchester University Press). She is currently Research Associate at Scott Polar Institute, Cambridge University, and also teaches Moving Image at Central Saint Martins and Open College of the Arts.
5a Bloomsbury Square London WC1A 2TA
