Dmitriy Oparin is an associate member of the Passages laboratory (UMR 5319 – Université Bordeaux Montaigne, Université de Bordeaux, CNRS). He is an anthropologist and historian whose research focuses on religion, ritual space and ritual dynamics in the indigenous Russian Arctic. He has also worked among Muslim migrants in Siberia and Moscow. He is the author of several books of history based on Moscow heritage and memory.
There is currently a Russia-wide boom of interest in local and family history, a peculiar kind of genealogical Renaissance. Families in Russia research private history, searching for data in archives, hiring historians and genealogists, traveling to “ancestral homelands,” and interviewing older relatives. My anthropological interest centers on common practices of working with the past and approaches to family history research among a 1600-strong population of Asiatic Yupik, the indigenous population of coastal Chukotka in the North-Eastern Russian Arctic.
Among the Asiatic Yupik, ancestral memory and various practices of family history preservation are imbued with local ideas of reincarnation. They are also incorporated into complex animistic representations of the reciprocity between the living and the dead and the transcendence of these worlds. The tools for preserving and constructing the memory of the family's past and building relationships with ancestors are abundant, including powerful objects, powerful words (spells), images (dreams) and ritual actions. I am trying to understand how interest in family history is linked to animistic cosmologies and rituals, and why the latter are so resistant to the numerous challenges of both the past (state atheism, forced “modernization,” forced relocations, Russification) and the present (rise of Christian influences, increasing social deprivation).
Family History and Ritual
A local woman once said: “If you are a pagan, you should ask for help from [deceased] relatives.” The entirety of the contemporary ritual life of Chukotka’s non-Christian Yupik population is closely connected with historical family memory. Knowledge about a particular ritual, the nuances of feeding the spirits, or of “Eskimo” healing practices are usually passed on, as well as transformed, within the family (or within a group of several related families). The stories of elders and the personal observations of each individual become a source of ritual information. A child is typically given a Yupik name in honor of a deceased relative, signifying that the ancestor has returned through rebirth.
Not only does the child receive the name of the “returned” relative, but the person’s whole range of psychological and physical characteristics, preferences, and mannerisms are attributed to the child and sought in their behavior and appearance. Each family keeps old things that belonged to their ancestors: clothing patterns, pieces of pelts, beads, stones, women’s knives, notebooks filled with writing, old photographs, and Soviet-era documents.
All these items are kept as mementos of family history and of specific people who have passed away. They are also used in healing. Nearly every Indigenous family in the region practices healing with the help of ancestors through old documents, photographs of deceased relatives, and particular old objects that have biographies and associated powers.
A Sense of Loss
In virtually every conversation I had about ritual knowledge and tradition, the topic of interruption in the transmission of knowledge and tradition would come up. Almost everyone experienced breaks in continuity as sad but natural and inevitable losses; in some situations people experienced these losses as failures or instances of personal impoverishment. Ignorance of a given ritual that had been known to elders, the loss of a ritual or of ritual objects, the fear of making a mistake in the ritual and the associated deliberate rejection of the ritual, the frustrating realization of the irrelevance and uselessness of the ritual in the present-day context—all these topics came up in conversations with most of my interlocutors, who reported such losses as forming the basis of introspection and emotional experience.
I believe, however, that ritual space has not, as a whole, become impoverished. Instead, it has become more vernacular, acquiring more space for creativity and freedom. Doubts and deficits in sacred information produce the need to search for new solutions, stimulate creativity in ritual practices, and provoke the emergence of new forms of preserving and reconstructing family memory.
Among my interlocutors, I encountered a desire to compensate for ignorance of traditional ritual knowledge. Some people are starting to record their older relatives on their smartphones, attempting to memorize previously written spells in the Yupik language, engaging in a constant search for information—the sources of which are relatives, knowledgeable fellow villagers, and ethnographic literature. Many families draw up their own family trees themselves, and old photographs are carefully preserved in women’s handbags and Soviet-era briefcases and suitcases.
Photographs of deceased relatives are often hung on the walls of people’s houses. In the office belonging to the village hunters, photographs are propped up on the windowsill showing marine mammal hunters who have drowned, died of old age, or succumbed to disease. Between 2009 and 2012, Yekaterina Dombrovskaya (née Nutanaun), a native of Novoye Chaplino who now lives in the regional center of Provideniye, independently conducted a large-scale investigation culminating in the publication of the book The History of Our Family, in which seven extended genealogical schemes were printed.
Reasons for Resilience
Despite decades of Soviet atheist propaganda, the subsequent introduction of Christianity (Russian Orthodoxy, charismatic evangelical movements brought in by missionaries in the 1990s, and trips to Anglican Alaska after the opening of the borders), and the dramatic decline in knowledge of the Yupik language, Indigenous practices and perceptions related to interactions with spirits have proven resistant to extinction and oblivion.
Why is this the case? The first reason is the invisibility of these rituals: feeding the spirits and healing with ancestral objects didn’t require separate facilities or elaborate ceremonies. Because they couldn’t be monitored, they could not be effectively prohibited.
Second, these practices do not depend on religious authorities. Each family builds its own relationship with significant ancestors. Moreover, these practices and representations have no definite canon. The creativity and individual character of rituals make people constantly reinvent the ritual forms that frame relations with nonhumans.
Material objects involved in communication with spirits are easily transformed from the mundane to the sacred. Endowed with new social meanings, ordinary Soviet objects like an item of clothing, a photograph, or a document, become medicines and tools for communicating with spirits. Thus, the sacred, material world does not consist of a stable set of objects, but is composed of improvised means.
But the most important reason for the constant reproduction of animistic practices—despite the fact that some words disappear (spells in the Yupik language are often rejected as dangerous), objects are lost, and the mechanics of ritual can be forgotten—is that these practices and representations are vital to both the living and the dead. The well-being of both depends on rituals. Respect for family memory, love for departed relatives, affection for a loved one, and grief at loss must find expression. The expression is a dynamic system of rituals and memory tools that may be preserved or lost, but may also be reinvented.
