The Performative Machine: Transfer of Ownership in a Northwest Russian Reindeer Herding Community (Kola Peninsula)

Abstract

The article is ba.sed on longitudinal fieldwork with reindeer herders in the Kola Peninsula, northwest Russia. Its main ethnographic focus is SKhPK 'Tundra' (sel'sko khoziastvennaia ptoizvoditet'naia kooperatsiia -agricultural producing cooperative) of Lovozero. The main argument is that a state of communal affairs under the dominance of the state farm isovkhoz). during the Soviet period, privileged domestic economies of the farm workers to be supported by the collective assets of the farm. The authors sec this state of "private-in-the-collective" arrangement as "sovkhoisni" and view the present variety of rural organisational forms in Russia as greater or lesser departures from it.

Komi reindeer herding: the effects of socialist and post-socialist change on mobility and land use

“…The reliability of Soviet reindeer herding statistics is often questioned. This especially concerns those relating to private reindeer (Tuisku 2002; Stammler & Ventsel 2003), collectivized reindeer of the 1930s–40s (Slezkine 1994; Habeck 2005) and the structure of reindeer losses (Konstantinov 2002; Konstantinov & Vladimirova 2006). However, in the context of this research, little else could be done other than to accept the statistics at face value.…”

Socioeconomic Life of Climate Change: Extensivity in Reindeer Husbandry in Relation to Synergies between Social and Climate Change (Kola Peninsula)

“…(Dvinin, 1959: 10Á11). 19 Personal (lichnii) and private (chastnii), used in reference to deer, are synonymous in the herding community; but 'private' in this sense is 'private-in-the-collective' Á a property form to be carefully distinguished from 'private-outside-the-collective' as, for instance, when talking about private herding in Fennoscandia (Konstantinov, 2004;Konstantinov & Vladimirova, 2006;Vladimirova, 2009). 20 Very recently, a representative of the Agricultural Committee at the Murmansk Regional Government has been involved in counting activities (Regnum, 2009), as have also representatives of the State Veterinary Service of Murmansk Region (Utkin, 2009).…”

“…In previous work (Konstantinov, 2007;Konstantinov & Vladimirova, 2006) it has been argued that, seen from a grass-roots perspective, the most relevant factor in recent years for the acceleration of extensivity has been the new opportunities for redistributing former sovkhoz property Á opportunities that came with reorganization in the autumn of 1992. A more specific technical reason that triggered this development came to be the abolition of an upper limit for possession of private deer by active herders.…”

Mobile Phone Revolution in the Tundra? Technological Change among Russian Reindeer Nomads

“…These vehicles were also used for camp migration, bringing herders with their households on to new installations functioning as intermediary camps between the villages and the tundra pastures (prombaza). In these regions, scholars have highlighted the far-reaching negative legacy of these technological changes, because their maintenance became unaffordable, resulting in a collapse of reindeer herding in Chukotka (Krupnik & Vakhtin 2002) and a state of stagnation and agony on the Kola Peninsula, where the old half-broken Soviet vezdekhod symbolises the whole state of the northern rural economy (Konstantinov & Vladimirova 2006). Vitebsky (2002) highlighted the social-cultural and spiritual consequences of this mode of production supported by aviation in the Sakha Republic: The tundra became a mainly male space, as men were the workers of the tundra, while women stayed in the villages, caring for children and working in the Common to these developments is that mechanised transport influenced the former northern subsistence economies in Russia in a top-down manner, as a tool of the centralised planners to turn the tundra ranges into a giant open-air meat factory and nomads into workers of the 'agro-industrial complex' (agropromyshlennyi kompleks).…”

“…Moreover, the type of reindeer herding practised in Murmansk resembles the Sámi system in Fennoscandia rather than the close-herding practice in large parts of the Russian North. On the other hand, the different orientation of the state reindeer herding policy in Russia was crucial, and this explains why large mechanised transport vehicles (vezdekhods) were even more important than the snowmobile, at least during the Soviet times, if not until today (Konstantinov & Vladimirova 2006).…”