This collection of articles seeks to understand how traditional culture becomes a commodity and how a commodity can be claimed as traditional culture in everyday life among post-Soviet indigenous peoples. The authors, four young sociologists and anthropologists from Vladivostok, Ulan-Ude, and Saint Petersburg, call for a thorough re-evaluation of the emerging process of cultural commodification in Siberia and offer fresh ethnographic insights into contested social processes reconfiguring group identity and new claims to cultural heritage. These Russian scholars, who trained at Western academic centers such as the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen (United Kingdom), look at their own societies and localities in Southeastern Siberia and the Russian Far East through the new lens of critical constructivism. Relying on recent theories of ethnicity, cultural geography, and anthropological approaches to locality (Akhil Gupta, James Ferguson, Arjun Appadurai, and Tim Ingold), each author performs a separate study of a specific group, such as students from “the North” in Saint Petersburg, shamans in Ulan-Ude or Nanai and Nivkhi communities in the Amur River region. |