The Reindeer People: Living With Animals and Spirits in Siberia [Paperback]

Piers Vitebsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2006

In this acclaimed work, the anthropologist Piers Vitebsky offers a unique account of the Eveny, nomads who live in intimate partnership with an extraordinary animal. For centuries reindeer have provided the Eveny with food, fur, transport, and spiritual sustenance, enabling them to survive in the world's coldest inhabited region, the Siberian taiga, where winter ice freezes six feet thick and the temperature drops to ninety-six degrees below zero.

The book presents a gallery of unforgettable personalities, including shamans, psychics, wolves, bears, dogs, Communist Party bosses, daredevil aviators, and the spirits of fires and rivers. Based on nearly two decades of fieldwork, The Reindeer People is an enthralling and moving testimony to a Siberian native people's humor and endurance at the ecological limits of human existence.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In northeast Siberia, temperatures can drop to 96 degrees below zero. Boiling water flung from a teacup will freeze before reaching the ground. In these unimaginable conditions, the Eveny nomads have lived and thrived for thousands of years. Vitebsky, who teaches anthropology and Russian studies at Cambridge University, has spent much of the last 20 years among these people and their herds of reindeer. No dry anthropological study, his story teems with strong personalities, perilous adventures and time-honored folkways. Wearing thick reindeer coats and boots, Vitebsky accompanies the tribesmen across Siberia seeking small animals to trap and sell. He meets hunters who live alone for a year at a time, Russian bureaucrats whose only concern is making quotas set by their comrades in Moscow, and the extended families whose ties bind them through month-long blizzards and the simple stuff of daily life. At the story's center are the reindeer, providing meat, clothing and income. While the Eveny's ancestors followed the reindeer, migrating from Upper Mongolia to northern Siberia, present-day Eveny now tame, cultivate and survive with them in almost perfect balance. With grace, courage and sensitivity, Vitebsky reveals an extraordinary world, spinning a tale to warm any winter's night. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* British anthropologist Vitebsky has lived among the Eveny in Siberia off and on for more than two decades, closely observing the symbiotic relationship between polar peoples and reindeer, a complex interspecies connection perfected over centuries of shared nomadic life on the vast taiga. Vitebsky chronicles with great detail and much philosophical reflection the daily rounds of Eveny life, carefully explicating the roles of shamans and dreams in their spiritual beliefs. He also documents the brutal attempts of the Soviets to destroy Eveny culture. There has been a revival following the demise of the Soviet Union, but the reindeer population is much diminished, and people are living precarious hand-to-mouth existences made even more trying by high cancer rates caused by uranium mining, pollution, and atomic-bomb-test fallout. Vitebsky is a personable, knowledgeable, and passionate guide, portraying with unabashed feeling the people he has come to know, vividly describing the magnificently resilient reindeer and the luminous beauty of the land, offering amusing accounts of his adventures, and, most memorably, illuminating the "vast field of shared consciousness" that enfolds land, animals, and humans. Vitebsky's generous study elucidates Siberian reindeer culture to a depth never attained before. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (December 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618773576
• ISBN-13: 978-0618773572
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #90,156 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Tungus life, December 28, 2005

By 

kaioatey (Awatovi, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (Hardcover)

I don't know where exactly to put this book - it is partly a memoir, a travelogue, an anthropological study for the lay reader...

Vitebsky spent a number of summers with different bands of Eveny, a Tungus tribe in mid Siberia. These Eveny were all associated with a 'State Farm', a Soviet era relic that regulates the use of the territory assigned to the bands, shipping of reindeer meat and antlers and bringing in supplies. The Farm was in this case controlled by an incompetent, alcoholic director and his cronies, who had been responsible for a number of disastrous decisions that had a big impact on the region as a whole.

Eveny have been hit hard by Soviet times and even harder in the chaos of the perestroika. They lost their shamans and the number of men willing to spend their winters herding reindeer in the forbidding sub sub zero taiga is decreasing, especially as the women refuse to leave the relative comfort of villages for the traditional nomadic way of life. As Vitebsky trails the herders on their annual migration, he is witnessing the impressive array of skills these people have to survive in one of the most inhospitable regions n this planet; slowly, as he is taken into their confidences, he also sees a part of their life that is hidden from the casual visitor. Although their shamans have all been killed, and the rituals all but stamped out, a number of folk 'superstitions' control all areas of Eveny life. Propitiating spirits of the land, dead ancestors, interpreting omens and dreams all play a central role in Eveny activity. There is a number of striking similarities with NA Indians in the relationship to the land, their respect of silence, mutual assistance and the non verbal communication that happens in that silence. Like the Indians, Eveny don't speak much, but when they do, the words mean something... like the Indians, the Eveny are getting destroyed by alcohol.

Vitebsky is mostly interested in social aspects of contemporary Eveny life - social tensions, alliances, intrigues and gossip. Given the tools he has he does a good job in bringing us a portrait of a native community deep in Siberia. Unlike what one might expect, his eveny are no ignorant herders - these guys have been around in schools, the military, they read astronomy, Wittgenstein and Mme Blavatsky and listen daily to radio Moscow; they seemed to be way better informed about the world situation than your average American (which doesn't say a lot).

Nevertheless, given its ambitious title, the book somehow does not deliver what it promises, at least it not for me. 'Living with animals and spirits' was missing something, i guess it was animals and spirits. Above all, Vitebsky is all too careful to approach these except through his informants. Now I also know why I am not an anthropologist. It would be very difficult for me to watch the State Farm director destroy people's lives without getting involved in some way; well, V. is an anthropologist and documents the disintegration that occurs with professional detachment. Still, there is good stuff in there and if you are interested in reindeer, this is the book to read.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Anthropology that reads like a novel., March 16, 2006

By 

Wandering boy (Middle US) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (Hardcover)

Vitebsky's book is a wonderful look at the life, lives and living conditions in an area of the world most of us would consider uninhabitable. While it is an anthropological study, it overflows with human feelings and contact that make this a truly unforgettable read. This truly shows the need for humans to coexist with nature, not rule it.
Read this book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Anthropological Fieldwork at its Finest!, May 26, 2007

By 

Kelly McTighe (Townsend, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Reindeer People: Living With Animals and Spirits in Siberia (Paperback)

For someone who has only traveled so far as a few hundred miles in a sedan, my world is mind-numbingly small. Logistically, I rely on MapQuest to get me from "Point A" to "Point B"... and hopefully back in one piece. Without truly comprehending the land and life enveloping me in a "rural-suburban" town located somewhere in the cesspool of Bowash, I sorely needed a wake-up call to the raw emotion and spirit that has been inherently ingrained in the Eveny people, their reindeer, and their relationship to the expanses of Sakhan Siberia. As Vitebsky relives such experiences in The Reindeer People, his strikingly vivid account of living side-by-side with the Eveny not only intrigues, but brings to light the troubles faced by indigenous people that have been perpetuated by the Soviet era as well as its horrendous aftermath. Vitebsky's tale of the inevitable downfall of what was once a pristine way of life for these people offers a poignantly bittersweet glimpse of what is becoming all but history. Without a doubt, this is one of the greatest books to come my way in a long time!