Papers by Tatiana Safonova
Abstract: In this article the Evenki way of moving is studied with an intention to reformulate th... more Abstract: In this article the Evenki way of moving is studied with an intention to reformulate the place of movement in modern hunter-gathering cultures. Firstly, the data collected during the fieldworks among two Evenki groups will be presented in a form of special maps carrying information not only about the routes but also various activities. Both groups are cut from each other by a mountain ridge and live in slightly different ecological and social environments, which have a contribution to the difference in their movements. With the one group of horse herders living on the frontier between steppe and taiga and the other group relying on reindeer herding and living deep in taiga, the consequential differences in their mobility routes did not touch the basic patterns in the way their mobility is organized. The second part of the article is devoted to one of this shared basic pattern, the way the Evenki walk by foot. This part is devoted to a comparison between how this cultural p...
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Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research
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Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands, 2018
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During fieldwork among the Evenki of Eastern Buryatia, we experienced many situations of insta-bi... more During fieldwork among the Evenki of Eastern Buryatia, we experienced many situations of insta-bil¬¬ity, characterised by ever changing mood and absence of commitments. We use the concept of a self-corrective system taken from Gregory Bateson to analyse the flexibility of the Evenki culture. We found that the social organisation of this former hunter society is based on com¬pan¬ionship. This form of organisation consists of self-corrective circuits, which give flexibility in every concrete situation, but ensure stability for a long term period. This cybernetic vision gives us the opportunity to deal with such difficult topics as alcohol consumption and aggression in Siberian everyday life. We also study a special pattern of behaviour called pokazukha that evolves in response to strangers’ expectations and wishes to see the Evenki culture as stable and controllable.
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Senri ethnological studies, 2016
This article is based on several periods of long-term field research conducted between 1995 and 2... more This article is based on several periods of long-term field research conducted between 1995 and 2009 among various groups of Evenki, who inhabit the Baikal region of East Siberia. During these expeditions the researchers recognized that it was problematical to categorize the Evenki as exclusively hunter-gatherers, although compared to other people, especially their neighbors, they seemed to maintain a lifestyle best described as hunter-gathering. Based on evidence collected by other ethnographers, mainly Shirokogoroff and Shubin, this article argues that the hunter-gathering lifestyle is always framed by contacts with cattlebreeders, traders, peasants, miners and people with other occupations. Very often transformations and transitions in a hunter-gathering lifestyle are caused by either social or environmental changes. As a conclusion it could be said that the huntergathering lifestyle can be defined as a strategy of adaptation to external circumstances, and in this respect tempora...
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In this article we present the case of the Evenki people, Siberian hunter-gatherers that share so... more In this article we present the case of the Evenki people, Siberian hunter-gatherers that share some traits of egalitarianism with other hunter-gathering people of the world. Using the cybernetic approach, proposed by Gregory Bateson in social anthropology, we describe the circular logic of interaction between genders and study the strategies that Evenki use to solve contradictions between personal autonomy ( manakan ) and dependencies associated with inter-gender relationships. The scope of our interest covers such situations as flirting, conjugal unit establishment, promotion of business contacts with strangers ( andaki relationships), everyday violence and aggression, as well as ecstatic states. The presented analysis of the episodes of interaction in everyday life shows that Evenki social organization is based on a situational approach to the distinction of genders. The research is based on several fieldworks conducted in the Baikal region (Russia), but the core materials relate ...
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Through visual analysis presented in 15 tables the authors looked at the complexity of gathering ... more Through visual analysis presented in 15 tables the authors looked at the complexity of gathering as practice that not only plays a role in subsistence, but also creates meaning and frames an engagement with the environment. Gathering is studied as consisting of several processes: the searching; cleaning and sorting things, to lay out and to dry things; and transportation, consumption and packing. Objects that are gathered are shown to play important roles of mediums for people and their environment. Cases of berries, firewood, jade stones and ice are presented as illustrations of this argument. In the final part of the article gathering is studied as a metaphysical phenomenon: a process of switching from disorder to order and back. Gathering poses many metaphysical questions in a practical form, and the authors propose to look at how people deal with these questions. How does the world change for those who gather things? How do they experience this transformation? Does the human att...
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
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Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 2016
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Inner Asia, 2020
Using ethnographic materials collected in 2008 and 2009 in a distant and isolated village in East... more Using ethnographic materials collected in 2008 and 2009 in a distant and isolated village in East Siberia, this article shows how slow and distorted connections contribute to the development of a specific eco-biopolitical space that can be likened to a spaceship physically disconnected from the mainland. Life in such a ‘bubble’ is dependent on supplies from the mainland, which create rhythms of activities in the community. The lack of access to state services and institutions is compensated by local initiatives to mimic such organisations. The state provides channels of escape from the village, such as emergency flights, but does not invest in infrastructures that would link this settlement to other places. The community ‘bubble’ exists not because of infrastructural absence per se, but because this isolation is asymmetrical. It is easier and faster to get from the village to the centre than it is to return. This imbalance expresses the power relations between the centre and periphery and systematically reproduces conditions in which resources drain from the village. This ‘slow connection’ is the condition for the creation of a specific eco-biopolitical regime, in which a rich place is occupied by people living in poverty.
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Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research, 2020
I would like to express my gratitude for the intellectual support to my supervisor, Violetta Zent... more I would like to express my gratitude for the intellectual support to my supervisor, Violetta Zentai, and my husband, István Sántha. I am also grateful to three anonymous reviewers, whose sharp remarks and critical suggestions helped me to improve this article. In 2016 the Hungarian authorities launched an anti-migrant media campaign in reaction to the migrant crisis when thousands of refugees entered the country. Some news programs depicted migrants as dangerous masses and created visual analogies with pests. In this article I propose to view the meaning of this metaphor from the other side, that of gardens, used as models for the state. My question is: What do metaphors of pests hide and why do they become so popular in situations of crisis? Through ethnography, I show how personal gardening experiences are filled with anxiety, fear, pleasure, and pain and how the resources and positions of gardeners shape their strategies in the struggle against pests. The metaphor of migrant as pest has a painful history of being used by the Nazi regime, but despite its bad reputation, it is still in demand. My ethno-graphic observations lead me to a conclusion that this metaphor conceals but simultaneously redeems the idea of private property and helps to describe crisis as a danger to the established order without explicitly problematizing this order's own controversies. When citizens are invited to deliberate and express their opinion in a referendum on how to deal with migrants, who are presented as parasites, these citizen receive an unprecedented power to choose who stays and who is not welcome in their state. This populist approach transforms the "gardening state" into a "state of gardeners," in which the struggle with "weeds" and "pests" becomes an ordinary duty of every citizen rather than an authoritative task of state institutions, as it was previously described by Zyg-munt Bauman, the author of the "gardening state" concept. After the very mild winter of 2015/16 various pests attacked my garden. 1 The damage was great: I lost all tomato plants in my greenhouse; my broccoli were almost totally 1 My research was based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Hungarian village where I lived and had a garden for five years.
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This article is based on several periods of long-term field research conducted between 1995 and 2... more This article is based on several periods of long-term field research conducted between 1995 and 2009 among various groups of Evenki, who inhabit the Baikal region of East Siberia. During these expeditions the researchers recognized that it was problematical to categorize the Evenki as exclusively hunter-gatherers, although compared to other people, especially their neighbors, they seemed to maintain a lifestyle best described as hunter-gathering. Based on evidence collected by other ethnographers, mainly Shirokogoroff and Shubin, this article argues that the hunter-gathering lifestyle is always framed by contacts with cattle-breeders, traders, peasants, miners and people with other occupations. Very often transformations and transitions in a hunter-gathering lifestyle are caused by either social or environmental changes. As a conclusion it could be said that the hunter-gathering lifestyle can be defined as a strategy of adaptation to external circumstances, and in this respect temporary inclusion of cattle, horse and reindeer breeding, as well as wage labor, do not mean complete assimilation. On the contrary, these strategies help maintain hunter-gathering activities in the long term.
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This article presents some results of the photographic analysis project, that we accomplish on th... more This article presents some results of the photographic analysis project, that we accomplish on the basis of 17,000 photos shot during the anthropological fieldwork between October 2008 and November 2009 among Evenki living in East Buryatia, in the Eastern part of Siberia. The aim of the project is to study the non-verbal patterns of culture. Some activities are significant due to the natural environment and the peripheral position of the Evenki land. Modern and old instruments can be seen together in the taiga, they relate to each other and form pairs. The existence of these pairs show the necessity of the co-presence of modern and old technologies and the importance of the categories – activities – tasks connected with them. An old instrument can remain among the Evenki only if an adaptable new instrument can find its place in the everyday life. Sometimes old practical skills also need to be reinvented for the accomplishment of a particular task. The things which have no modern existing pair, step by step lose their place and extinguish.
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Through visual analysis presented in 15 tables the authors looked at the complexity of gathering ... more Through visual analysis presented in 15 tables the authors looked at the complexity of gathering as practice that not only plays a role in subsistence, but also creates meaning and frames an engagement with the environment. Gathering is studied as consisting of several processes: the searching; cleaning and sorting things, to lay out and to dry things; and transportation, consumption and packing. Objects that are gathered are shown to play important roles of mediums for people and their environment. Cases of berries, firewood, jade stones and ice are presented as illustrations of this argument. In the final part of the article gathering is studied as a metaphysical phenomenon: a process of switching from disorder to order and back. Gathering poses many metaphysical questions in a practical form, and the authors propose to look at how people deal with these questions. How does the world change for those who gather things? How do they experience this transformation? Does the human attempt to collect things become an attempt to order the chaotic environment, classify it, and contain chaos into small volumes of their bags and buckets? This study is based on social anthropological fieldwork conducted among Evenki people of East Buryatia. In this article we pursue two goals. On the one hand we look at how gathering as a practice creates a frame for the relationship between humans and their environment. We look at a particular case of Evenki people from East Siberia. On the other hand we propose a reintroduction of a forgotten methodological approach, a photographic analysis in which photos made by researchers from the field become sources of data to be analyzed and interpreted. Originally this method was proposed by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, but never became wide spread. We argue that advances in contemporary study of materiality and new semiotic approaches in social anthropology provide a basis for the reintroduction of this method on new premises.
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The Evenki of Siberia are modern hunters who live in the extreme envi- ronments of the taiga. The... more The Evenki of Siberia are modern hunters who live in the extreme envi- ronments of the taiga. Their social organization has traits of egalitarian- ism which present a living alternative to the Western form of social orga- nization based on hierarchical structures. This egalitarian social organi- zation maintains its coherence through other mechanisms, which exclude planning, direct management, and authoritarian orders. Our project deals with one particular aspect of the practical implementation of egali- tarianism—how the egalitarian principles of Evenki social organization are expressed in their behavior and forms of interaction. The Evenki’s activities are coordinated not through strict rules, orders, or other verbal forms of communication, but through skills and the experiences of collab- orative enactments. The project is devoted to the study of Evenki everyday life, with a special focus on the role of nonverbal information in social interaction, and is based on photographic and videofilm analysis.
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Papers by Tatiana Safonova