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Although Siberian ethnography was an open and international field at the turn of the 20th century, from about 1930 until the late 1980s Siberia was for the most part closed to foreigners and therefore to Western ethnographers. This allowed Soviet ethnographers to establish a virtual monopoly on Siberian field sites. Soviet and Western anthropology developed during that period in relative isolation from one another, allowing methodologies and theoretical approaches to diverge. During glasnost' and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Siberian field was reopened and field studies were conducted by several Western ethnographers. The resulting encounter between Western and former Soviet ethnographers in the 1980s and 1990s produced a degree of cultural shock as well new challenges and opportunities on both sides. This is an experiential account of the mood of these newly reunited colleagues at the turn of the 21 st century.

This chapter describes what happens at the structural level to polysynthetic languages during language obsolescence, attrition, and loss. The changes that take place in decaying polysynthetic languages should be distinguished from (a) those occurring in all obsolescent languages regardless of their type, and (b) changes in “healthy” polysynthetic languages. It is shown that the consequences of polysynthetic language decay are primarily manifested in the collapse of morphological complexity, involving the loss of morphological ‘slots’, the reduction in the number of bound morphemes and their substitution by free ones, the ‘fossilization’ of markers and their reanalysis, the deprivation of word formation productivity, the destruction of noun incorporation, and reduction of allomorphy.

This article deals with "Old-Settler" communities in northeastern Siberia that were founded by Russian settlers in the course of the seventeenth century. Left to their own devices by a distant colonial administration, many of them married native women and adopted local subsistence techniques and other elements of spiritual and material culture. These processes led to the emergence of new group identities, that is to communities that distinguished themselves both from Russians and from native groups. The article provides a brief history of such communities in northern Siberia, to set the regional context, before characterizing the three study communities as experienced by the authors during fieldwork in the late 1990s. In addition, we will briefly introduce the case of the Alaskan Creoles for comparative purposes, to contrast colonial regimes and attitudes to "ethnic mixing." This will enable us to return to the title question and to reverse it, that is, to focus on the factors that led to the emergence of Creole status in Alaska. We will argue that changing colonial policies of the Russian state need to be taken into account in order to understand why there were no Creoles in Siberia.

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