5

SILENCE AND BINDING WORDS

Silence Acts

Like many other Indigenous groups in the circumpolar regions, Nenets are described as silent or taciturn compared to the non-Natives in the region.¹ Anthropologists have argued that the relative scarcity of verbal interaction among the Siberian aborigines is not “an absence” or “inadequacy” but rather a specific way of being and a cultural form of communication.² When starting my field research among Nenets, I quickly realized that the herders’ world was far less verbal than the “Russian” towns and villages where, for instance, in prayer houses people address and explain themselves to one another and to God using, in a couple of hours, more words than one can hear in a Nenets tent during several weeks of a lonely spring or autumn migration. And yet at other moments—for instance, when kin arrive—the tent is gradually filled with vivid talk slowly resuming its habitual state of few words and long silences after they leave, occasionally interrupted by loud shouts of men who lasso reindeer or the fire crackling or a snowstorm howling. These sounds take on meanings for those who can hear them as meaningful in the world full of sentient beings, and thus these sounds become voices.

In this chapter, my focus is on how words and silences are challenged in the mission encounter. Yet silence is a relative category, the usage of which depends on social contexts, one’s mood, and many other circumstances (Bakhtin 1986, 134; Basso 1970; Bauman 1983; Braithwaite 1990; Enfield and Sidnell 2022; Jaworski 1993; Tannen and Saville-Troike 1985). This category is shaped by local theories of language and personhood, which includes assumptions of what words and silences can do in the world. Furthermore, it is a matter of ethics—that is, how people evaluate their and others’ words and in which circumstances silences can be broken or words imposed. In the tundra, as in many other places, lots of things go without saying. It can be habitus-related silence (taken for granted as “the universe of the undiscussed,” Bourdieu 1977, 168) or it can be a lack of need to say out loud or an explicit restraint (e.g., avoidance of uttering names of persons, spirits, diseases, etc.). Indeed, especially for an outsider, it is often hard to determine whether silence means that something is unsayable because this something is not there to be said or is there but is not usually put into words because this something does not belong to the verbal realm, or something is actively avoided. The question is when silence is revelation, concealment, or self-defense or all of them at the same time.³ And because of the intense ambiguity of silence, people can interpret the same silence differently, especially when it involves people from different cultural worlds.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, there is a clash between Russian and Nenets communication styles—their language ideologies are different and, in some aspects, incompatible, as in the case of addressing, persuading, or repeating. I suggest that in certain contexts, Nenets take words as binding and silence as protecting. They do not see silence necessarily as an absence but a constitutive part of life in the tundra, sometimes an essential means of self-protection against binding words and unwanted relations (as a Western Apache said to Keith Basso [1970, 217], “it is right to give up on words” in ambiguous social situations). This has significant bearing on the outcomes of mission encounters. While some non-Christians avoid talking to missionaries to resist conversion, most Christians avoid speaking of what is unpleasant to God in order not to lose his grace. Importantly, in both wordscapes, speech and silence are seen as shaping relations between humans and spirit agents. Sometimes the rules are rather straightforward. Nenets parents tell their children not to be noisy when it is dark outside (Nenyang 1997, 228; see also Lehtisalo 1924, 117–18; Laptander 2020a, 55–56) and not to shout out in the winter forest to hear whose voice echoes louder, as this is said to attract the attention of malevolent spirits (Golovnev 1995, 320–21).⁴ In converted families, keeping silence in similar contexts may be justified with the idea that any playful noise is unpleasant to the Christian deity, who expects from his subjects the obedient following of rules with full seriousness and restraint.

In the eyes of Nenets old-timers, evangelical converts look, or rather sound, noisy, like most lutsaq (cf. Fienup-Riordan 1991; Wiget and Balalaeva 2011, 173). Yet this is not a mere noise, as it is potentially dangerous. Words have a power to create undesirable relationships: they affect existing understandings of sociality and personhood but also go against underlying values, such as autonomy, respect, and dignity. In the eyes of the Baptists, the loud moments in the old-timers’ life is taken as a noise. Missionaries argue that the babble, laughter, songs, and curses of the so-called pagans lead them to eternal damnation. Although Nenets converts struggle with the new kind of verbality, as I shall show in chapter 6, they see it as a fundamental value and skill. Baptist Yegor agreed by saying that as a “pagan” he had been disorderly and noisy, and that other nonconverts still are. For him, speaking in a right manner had become living his life meaningfully. In his eyes, Christian talk and song is productive and protective. It can also be emotionally rewarding, as what young Vera once characterized as “an exciting life out in the city where people can talk to one another and pray together.” To their ears, the verbal world of prayers, sermons, and instructions is not a noise but a purposeful way of being together with the Christian God and fellow believers. Saying the right things is a moral requirement, as this is the only way to prove one’s sincerity and loyalty, which guarantees God’s protection and ultimate salvation.⁵

Figure 5.1. Ural Nenets searching for wood material in the forest tundra, April 2007.

I shall argue that speech acts are inseparable from what one might call silence acts. Silence as refraining from speech is an ethical choice for both Christians and non-Christians. When silences are used depends on local communicative patterns. Both evangelicals and non-Christians actively avoid speech (any utterances or specific words) in some contexts: speaking is always a choice of what to say and what to repress, be this conscious or otherwise. Michael Billig (1999, 261), a scholar of discursive psychology, has argued that “in conversing, we also create silences.” He rethinks the Freudian concept of repression by claiming that it is produced daily through discursive avoidances and commands. When one is taught what can be said, it always implies what cannot be said. Children are exposed to demonstrations or are explicitly taught what is unspeakable (and undoable or even unfeelable) and when one needs to refrain from speaking (Schieffelin 1990). There is a certain parallel with political and religious regimes that aim to silence their subjects, producing discourses that consist of the said and the unsaid (Foucault 1978, 27–30; see also Carrette 2000; Grice 1975; Humphrey 2005; Jaworski 1993). Or, to take an example from the Soviet context: every day after reading the fresh Pravda (“Truth”), a local party activist and patient in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (1991, 210–11) knew, by reading between the lines, not only what he could speak about but also on what matters he had to keep silent.

Baptist missionaries, who aim to control the speech and silence of those they try to convert, must get people talking in the first place. It is not always successful though. While a silence of not responding means failure for evangelists, it may mean maintaining habitual freedom for Nenets. Let me give an example of performative silence acts that work as protection against an unwanted transformation.

Yegor’s uncle Vata was one of those reindeer herders in the Yamb-To community who had decided not to convert to Christianity. He saw himself as one of the most defiant opponents of the new faith. Still, the missionaries kept visiting him, with the hope of saving this family. Vata’s resistance can be seen in what he did and said, but also in what and when he did not say. When I stayed with Yegor, everybody there was joking about Vata, ridiculing the way he lived. “His tent barely stands, and his clothes are full of holes,” Yegor said, and laughed. This kind of comment worked metonymically: it characterized not only the dwelling but also the spiritual situation in which Vata was living. Before the beginning of the autumn migration, I arrived at Vata’s camp, where he stayed with his wife, Tado, and two adult sons. The youngest son had recently moved out to his married sister’s tent after a drunken fight between the brothers. Yegor told me, “You need to see the life we all used to live.” He spoke as if there were two different speeds of development. In a way, he did not only send me a few dozen miles away but also back to his “pagan” past. A linear temporality had certainly become prominent in his and other Christians’ thinking.

When arriving at Vata’s camp, I found a small tent ahead with sheets of tarpaulin indeed full of holes. Inside there was a mess compared to the tidy tents of the punryodaq. Unpainted floorboards (lataq) were a sign of “an untidy household,” as I was taught. Vata did not come out to greet me, as his limbs were aching; he explained later, he had hiccup worms (ikota khalyq, see chap. 2) in his body, which caused pain and made him to want to drink vodka. Vata’s tent and clothes were shabby, but not because he did not have enough reindeer, as one might have expected. He had more than a thousand, but he had just not gone along with the campaign of home embellishment, like Baptists around him.⁶ Another reason for the dilapidated state of affairs was that Vata’s wife was old and feeble—especially taking into account that her adult sons had no wives—and was not able to keep up with the demand for new garments and tent covers.

After a couple of days, I had developed a very friendly rapport with Vata. In many ways, the atmosphere was much less tense and controlled than at Yegor’s where disciplining selves and others was pervasive. At one point, Vata started to sing old songs (yarabts, syudbabts, yabye syo). After hours of singing every night Vata was in an unusually good mood. He had not done this for some time, as he said, he was not willing because of illness. The singing practice was vanishing even more importantly because rarely did anybody ever come to listen to his songs, as most people around had become Baptists who denounced Nenets singing.

I heard conflicting versions from both Vata and missionary Pavel about their encounter. Like Iriko, the first time the Baptist missionaries visited him, Vata was approachable and repeated words from sermons and prayers. But as we saw in Iriko’s case, repetition can misfire. In this repetition, Pavel saw Vata’s sincere attempt to transform himself into a believing person by responding to God’s call. Vata’s repetition was interpretable not only as a sign of apparent eagerness, “thirst for God’s Word,” but also as a sign of the Holy Spirit working inside him. As I have argued (see chap. 4), from the Nenets vantage point, this was a participatory act or a sign of respect but did not necessarily agree with the meanings of the words said (the separate question is, as with Iriko, to what extent the semantic content of missionaries’ talk was understood). I had seen several times how somebody repeated words of a storyteller or in an everyday conversation as a part of Nenets communication pragmatics.⁷

Figure 5.2. Alcohol helps to appease spirits, September 2006.

To Pavel’s surprise, the next time he visited Vata, the old man maintained a silence throughout his stay. In the meantime, as Vata explained, he had come to a decision not to repeat or talk to the missionaries but to stay silent. He described the last visit by Pavel, who tried to prompt him to talk back. “When last winter Pavel Ivanovich came to my tent, I did not tell him a word. Pavel Ivanovich said, ‘At least say one word to me.’ No, I did not say anything. [Vata smiles victoriously.] I was silent. I am now always silent when he comes. . . . If I became a Baptist, everybody would become a Baptist. Khriska told me that if I became a Baptist, he would as well. The late Ekhor told me the same.”

By stopping his repetitions, Vata tried to avoid a wave of change coming from the lutsa world. Having understood that participatory repetitions are misunderstood by evangelists, Vata decided to avoid even a yes, as if realizing that this might be taken as an act of promising and commitment to a dreaded change (cf. Cavell 2010, 320–21). He saw missionaries’ words as harmful weapons that had a power to change people. The social ties existing around him were being broken, and new ones, undesirable in his eyes, were being formed. The engagement with Russians seemed to have severe consequences: people were giving up the Nenets ways of sociality like singing epic songs, gift exchange, visits with drinking, card and sport games, and eating meat and blood together around a freshly slaughtered reindeer. His explicit restraint from words was a refusal of this type of engagement, an act of self-defense and a protection of the old kind. It was an act of avoidance of the unwanted force of missionaries’ language, as any verbal response would have made Vata vulnerable to the missionary’s intrusive and demanding utterances.

This tactic of maintaining silence is not Vata’s ad hoc invention. In Nenets language ideology, especially in situations of negotiation, silence is understood as a lack of agreement. An example of this kind of silence act is the case where a father does not want to give his daughter away. When a matchmaker or the father of the potential groom comes to negotiate a future marriage, the father of a potential bride (piribtya) may remain silent, which means that there will be no easy deal or no deal at all. (The piribtya is usually silent anyway, as she goes out or hides under fur coats.) When the girl’s father is not ready to negotiate at all, he remains silent throughout the stay of the matchmaker. He may even extinguish the fire and go to sleep. However, matchmakers who are known as good speakers are sometimes able to break resistance with their tenacity by rekindling the fire and remaining in the tent overnight (Kostikov 1930b, 14–15). The Russian ethnographer Leonid Kostikov, who visited the Gyda Nenets in the 1920s, notes that if the father of a girl remains silent three times when he is asked about his willingness to allow his daughter to marry, then this is taken as a firm refusal.⁸ This kind of silent resistance in the marriage arrangements is also a widespread motif in oral poetry: “The stew in the cauldron can be brewed; Lamdo is still silent” (Kupriyanova 1965, 201, see also 35, 206; Lar 2001, 95). In a way, Pavel’s pressure and Vata’s silence parallels the situation of matchmaking. Vata is resisting Pavel’s efforts to make him a member of the church, what Pavel would call the Bride of Christ (cf. Prokhorov 2013, 144). Unlike Iriko, Vata tried to avoid creating a shared field of words with missionaries and thus avoid engagement in a potentially binding exchange.

In Baptist language ideology, as mentioned, a silent response in a mission encounter is a sign of a refusal to accept God’s words. The missionaries regarded this as a severe hindrance to salvation and stressed that one needed to accept the Word (prinyat’ Slovo). As believing starts with speaking to God, the soul can be saved not by silence (as an explicit restraint from responding to the call) but by articulate speech. In contrast to the Nenets model, among evangelicals this is above all a moral issue that is thought to reflect one’s inner state.⁹ For Pavel, Vata’s falling silent and keeping it recalcitrantly was the silence of a sinner. It was not a random silence; rather he was specifically not responding to the Lord’s call mediated by God’s authoritative workers.

Vata’s unresponsive silence act was not idiosyncratic (cf. Khristoforova 2006, 90). Missionary Pavel described how they were welcomed with silence in another Yamb-To family, the one of Ulyana and Vasili. “We evangelized in the name of Jesus Christ, his substitutive death for our sins. The hosts’ tense silence descended. Ulyana did not consider herself a sinner. Vasili was silent [promolchal] for the whole night. Later we learned that this family was bogged down in the sin of drinking and other sins. It is a pity that our witnessing was only for the sake of witnessing and not for the sake of saving.”

While Ulyana somewhat protested, Vasili preferred to remain silent. In trying to break the silence and create a spiritual kin relationship, missionaries use “direct” addresses. Once when Pavel and Vasili met, I heard the missionary asking, “Vasili, when will the day come when I can call you ‘my brother’?” Vasili, who was standing next to me, did not say anything and looked elsewhere. Pavel was certainly aware that using personal names (“Vasili”) and a kin term (“my brother”) had power to bring about relations, although I am not sure that he ever understood how sensitive this was among Nenets compared to Russians or Ukrainians who use personal names extensively in communication. Among Nenets, addressing adults by name is disrespectful and sometimes outright injurious (Baklund 1911, 100–102; Lapsui et al. 2023: 26; cf. Fleming and Slotta 2018; Viveiros de Castro 1998, 476). Juniors are not supposed to pronounce the name of a senior person in the person’s presence. As among the Mongols, the ideal among Nenets is not to have their names pronounced in their presence, or as Humphrey (2006, 173) puts it, “In this way, one can escape from being compelled by one’s name” (cf. Stasch 2009, 86; 2011). As I shall argue below, it is not only using personal names but also singing another person’s song in the person’s presence that is believed to make the owner of the song vulnerable, suffering severe consequences, even death.

Drawing on Louis Althusser (1971) and Judith Butler (1997a, 1997b), one could suggest that naming as a form of address subjectivates and potentially injures. This takes place through hailing or, in Althusser’s vocabulary, “interpellation.” He invites us to imagine a situation in which the police call to someone “Hey, you there!” on the street and the person turns around and responds to the call. According to Althusser, this is the moment when the person becomes a subject of the dominant ideology (1971, 174).¹⁰ A person is thus interpellated into a subject from outside by a powerful other as by a divine performative when God addresses Moses by his name or Jesus names Simon as Peter (177–79). While following Althusser’s sinister version of subjectivation, Butler (1997a) nevertheless proposes that name-calling, despite it being violent, a kind of linguistic injury, can also empower a person and enable a different response. She writes: “By being called a name, one is also, paradoxically, given a certain possibility for social existence, initiated into a temporal life of language that exceeds the prior purposes that animate that call. Thus the injurious address may appear to fix or paralyze the one it hails, but it may also produce an unexpected and enabling response. If to be addressed is to be interpellated, then the offensive call runs the risk of inaugurating a subject in speech who comes to use language to counter the offensive call” (2).

Even if Butler’s version presents subjectivation as a primarily violent and largely unreflective process (see Laidlaw 2014, 101), it nevertheless entails some freedom of action. In the scenes described above, subjectivation does not occur, despite missionaries’ attempts to mediate God’s call (who in Althusser’s account is the Subject par excellence, see 1971, 179). Some of their addressees may respond at the beginning, even if somewhat formally, but stop talking back at some point. Vasili and Vata use silence for self-protection as well as protecting others around them (recall what Vata said: “If I became a Baptist, everybody would become a Baptist”). Interpellation thus does not automatically predict the result (also considering other aspects such as that missionaries do not operate as state agents who have tools for violence). Furthermore, Nenets’ understanding of how words work is different from that of the evangelists—and this is a crucial point. In her critical engagement with Butler’s theory of naming, Humphrey (2006) notes that Butler’s “work cannot fully answer to an anthropological analysis, because it ignores the presence of different ‘linguistic ideologies’” (see also Bodenhorn and vom Bruck 2006, 17). Indeed, we need an interpretation that considers Nenets’ and Russian evangelicals’ assumptions about language, personhood, and sociality.

In Excitable Speech, Butler (1997a) uses a concept of hate speech as an example of injurious address and consequent subjectivation. In both the Baptist and Nenets worlds, I would suggest, it would be more appropriate to talk in similar contexts of “love speech.” Evangelicals approach Nenets with “the message of love” (“God loves you”). Yet, as with hate speech, love speech may have undesired consequences in the reindeer herders’ eyes. This has roots in the Nenets understanding of binding words that work through quarrel and affection. Sometimes the two are hard to disengage from one another, but as I shall argue below, what really matters is the strength or weakness of a person as well as the intensity of a relationship between the persons involved in relation-making. So it is a question not only of “which words wound, which representations offend” (Butler 1997a, 2) but also of whose words injure in which kind of relations.

As Butler (1997a, 34) claims, in hate speech, as in subjectivating acts of naming, speakers are to some extent responsible for hate speech, but they are not necessarily “the originators of the discourse,” in a sense that the words uttered exceed one’s self and the moment of utterance. This understanding echoes with the Nenets model of agency and responsibility. As I shall discuss further below, influencing others with words is related to the idea not only of language as representation (as Butler’s model has it) but of words as agents that form relations through being extensions of persons—words can thus be seen to function as part-persons (see chap. 4).

Pavel failed to subjectivate Vasili or Vata, at least in the way he would have wished. The missionary attempted to prompt his targets into speaking with the aim of silencing their earlier ways of speaking in the long run. Only then does it become possible to break a person away from his or her “pagan” past. On the one hand, missionaries believed that communication enables persuasion (as we saw with Vladislav in the previous chapter). Even if there were any verbal resistance, it would be still better, as this can be a fruitful way for a discussion in which propositional arguments can lead to “an understanding” (ponimanie) and a consequent conversion. Without revealing in speech what is inside of a person, what the person thinks and feels, it is impossible for an evangelist (and the targeted individual) to access, let alone remedy, the self. As in a confession, sinful thoughts must be uttered, made explicit, to suppress them (Foucault 1978; see chap. 7).¹¹

On the other hand, speech is necessary, for the divine could start acting in one’s life. Once a person utters words of repentance, there is a chance for a heart to be transformed from outside by the divine Other. I was told a story of an old Nenets woman who was about to say a prayer of repentance, but somehow the words “forgive me” did not come to her lips. A Baptist preacher told her word by word how to repent, so she could repeat it. She still failed. The missionary later realized that the reason behind this was that her mouth was full of chewing tobacco, which did not let her speak. For the insiders, it was apparent that tobacco was a devil’s tool because it did not release the soul of the woman from his sphere of influence.

Sometimes missionaries read the silence of reindeer herders as an act of attentive listening and reflection. In contrast to Nenets, who tend not to speculate openly about what others are thinking or feeling (as in so many other places in the world, see Danziger and Rumsey 2013), missionaries believe that others’ minds are accessible (even if they say that only God sees in the heart of another person), as they do not hold back from discussing what others think. Pavel described how on an evangelistic trip, Sem (Vata’s older brother) traveled with missionaries who gave him a lift to Amderma to check on his weakening health: “He listened to all our conversations silently. Although he likes to drink, now he was ruminating and pensive.” Pavel’s act of mind reading in taking Sem’s silence as positive pensiveness was, however, premature, as it turned out that the next time they met him was on his deathbed in the hospital. Sem, who was in the final stages of cancer, did not show much interest in the missionary’s attempts to save his soul. According to his Baptist son Andrei, his father became very bitter at the end of his life: “When he was in hospital in Amderma, the preachers paid him a visit and asked whether he knew what was going to happen with him after his death. Sem replied that he was not going to die yet.”

The more the Nenets were silent, the more power had to be invested in the message of love, even if it took the form of a threat. I once overheard a conversation between Pavel and Andrei; they talked about old Mitro (Andrei’s neighbor in the winter pasture), who had recently died without showing any interest in the Christian faith. Pavel reprimanded Andrei that he had not made enough visits to the old man though it was evident that he was going to die: “You could have saved him. You should have told him directly what was going to happen to him—that he was going to hell.” Andrei agreed. He looked like a scolded schoolboy for a moment, maybe thinking about his father, whom he could not save either. As others in the tundra, he had grown up with a disposition or sensitivity that challenging one’s parent, and elderly people in general, was unthinkable.

Personal Songs and Epic Songs

The contrast between Christian and Nenets singing is vast. Not only are Christian hymns sung in Russian (except for a few translated hymns) with the specific quality of Russian singing tradition (yanggerts’), but there is a different kind of ideology behind them as well. Christian songs are essentially praise to the divine: they must be sung to keep up one’s relationship with God. In the eyes of Nenets converts, singing Nenets songs in the old way (khynots’) is “bad” (veva). I was given various reasons for calling Nenets songs sinful. For instance, Ivan, who believed only in the fixed texts (i.e., scriptures), once told me that when people sing songs they have heard from somebody, they add new bits and some other bits are left out: “These songs are not correct anymore.” However, a more pervasive understanding among converts was that these songs invoked sins, and this was a far more serious issue. Ivan told me that it is not good to sing old songs, as “these are all related to shamanism and Satanism.” Furthermore, they were often sung during drinking parties, thereby adding one sin to another. In short, people singing Nenets songs are imagined to lose control and give themselves over to dark forces.

Indeed, drinking and singing often go together, especially when singing personal songs called yabye syo.¹² The word yabye means “drunk,” although its root is related to “luck” and “happiness” (yab, yabda). The genre of personal songs is intimate, as it is the main way for expressing one’s emotions, including love and pain, in the otherwise restrained emotionality of everyday life. These songs may depict an important scene of one’s life or they can be a condensed version of one’s life story (Laptander 2020a, 49–52). The usual motifs are finding a partner, raising many children, becoming an owner of a big herd, or similar. “It is a song of one’s fate,” as a Nenets woman, Anastasia Lapsui, characterized it to the ethnomusicologist Jarkko Niemi (Niemi and Lapsui 2004, 79).

On the one hand, this is the only format in which expressing what we might call “feelings” becomes possible and morally acceptable. Lapsui explained, “For example, if a man says that he loves some woman, it is not decent and not according to the etiquette, but if he sings it (in his yabye syo), then the people may learn about it. . . . Actually, it is possible to reconstruct a person’s character through his song. . . . Only through one’s yabye syo can I know everything; it has all the information” (79–80, italics in original). On the other hand, this is also an act of self-exposure that might have dangerous consequences. There are certain rules while performing these songs. A person who has created the yabye syo usually does not sing the song in the presence of others, except among a few close people. I never actually heard anybody singing their own personal song. However, I heard numerous yabye syo that belonged to somebody who was not present but whose songs were sung by others. Each song had its own specific tune, and songs circulated like quotations. They were discussed a lot, felt empathy for, or laughed at. Nobody sang these songs in the presence of the creator and owner of the song. Even the songs of the recently deceased were not sung.

A yabye syo might convey the most intimate feelings (e.g., secret love) of a person, and through that it makes the person vulnerable to gossip. Then again, presenting somebody else’s song itself is dangerous for the owner of the song, because the words and tune of the song are part of one’s personhood. In some cases, the trajectories of personhood and relationality become even more complicated. Lapsui’s mother refused to sing her deceased husband’s song to her daughter, saying, “How could I sing his song? He is a part of me! I shall not pronounce his name any more aloud, after he died. It would cause pain to my soul. I remember him only in my thoughts” (Niemi and Lapsui 2004, 83–84).¹³ It appears that personal songs, like personal names, make vulnerable not only those who own the songs or bear the names but also those close to them who have survived.

However, it is possible to sing the song of someone who is long dead. Vata’s father Mikul had died thirty years before, so there were no threats involved in singing his song. By that time, one’s name can be called, while the name of a recently deceased person is forbidden (as in many other places in Siberia and beyond, see, e.g., Vitebsky 2005, 125; cf. Frazer 1911, 349–74). The relationship of the yabye syo and the name is more than coincidental, as each song contains the person’s name. And the yabye syo itself belongs to the person like a “true name” (nyeney nyum), which is known only to the closest of persons (Liarskaya 2002; Pushkareva 2007, 2019).

There is a widely shared taboo against singing a yabye syo of a family member who is alive. Not yet knowing about the prohibition, I asked Tikynye to sing her mother’s or father’s song. She refused by saying that “something bad could happen” if she did this. “Father or mother could fall ill or even die,” she said. What I also learned was that if somebody sang another’s song in the presence of the person, the potential harm depended on the relation with the person and the singer’s power. Tikynye recalled that when her brother Kolye was little, he sang his father’s yabye syo in his father’s presence but surprisingly their father did not interrupt him. She guessed that he was too small to do any harm to their father with singing his song. This shows that the power of one’s words is tightly related to the power of one’s personhood, as we shall see below.

Singing epic songs is not as intimate an act as singing one’s own yabye syo. Yet they have a different kind of power to take the person on a journey into a different world (not unlike shamanic singing). Yegor told me that he could not tell me an old story or sing an epic song because there was a danger that it would damage our souls. He said that “before” he did believe in these stories as being actual, but not anymore. Now he knew that these do not belong to the truth and are Satanic deceptions or human inventions. But he could not trust himself entirely because the song and his past self could take him over against his will, as I witnessed (cf. Rosaldo 1980, 57–60; Vitebsky 2008, 2017a).

One night in March 2004, Yegor, then a third-year convert, agreed to sing a yarabts and tell a couple of mythic tales (lakhanako) for me. He sang a long yarabts called “Pilyu Sev Nyu” (“The Son of Gadfly’s Eye”) for the whole evening. He was unusually merry after that (like Vata when he was singing). Next morning, he woke and said that he dreamed all night about having a drinking party and being in an overwhelmingly cheerful mood. Now overwhelmed by the feeling of guilt, he was upset about his merriness and partially blamed me, as I had asked him to sing. He ardently prayed to God for the sin we had committed, which was singing old songs and telling tales. On another occasion, he said that every time he dreamed about drinking, he fell ill.

Significantly, it turned out to be not a mere representation but an actual return despite his earlier statements that he “did not believe in these songs.” By singing an old-style song, he seemed to have moved away from his current Christian self: he became the old-time person he used to be before conversion. My fault was that I had asked him to present something as a token of his past life, and I listened to the song with this attitude. However, I failed to predict that for Yegor there could not be representation of his past self, but there was only an actual journey into the song that was also Yegor’s past life. This was an unwanted ontological shift for him: it was impossible to take a different perspective without a risk, even if—or especially because—this was a perspective of his own past self that was “pagan.” When singing and dreaming, he lost the perspective that he knew to be right in the eyes of God.¹⁴ As we shall see later in chapter 7, as sliding into the perspective of one’s past self is the biggest threat of all, believers try to be anchored to the present—that is, bound to the promise of future salvation.

For Nenets, singing is thus just not a mere representation of faraway times but a continuation of past relationships into the present. Furthermore, it is building a relationship with the song and its characters—sometimes in a rather intimate and dangerous way (cf. Niemi 1998).¹⁵ This was so especially “in the time of the shamans” (tadyebya yol’ts’) when tadyebyaq made their journeys to the realm of spirits through singing and thus invoking their presence. Moreover, not only a tadyebya was seen as singing himself, but he could also lend his voice to various otherworldly agents, thus acting as a human animator for words of spirits.¹⁶

Harmful Words and Vulnerable Affection

In Nenets language ideology, words not only express one’s thoughts and feelings but also, in some social contexts, are understood to constitute personhood and so they carry forward a person’s qualities. The underlying principle is that once words are spoken out loud, they become partly independent from their originator, as a person who has uttered words is no longer their full master. In certain situations, words are imagined to be containable and can even be turned against the person, as in the case of curses, gossip, or incautious use of words. Therefore, the effects one’s words create in the world are not necessarily related to one’s intentions (as this is commonly thought to be the case among Russian Christians).

When I lived in Iriko’s tent (see chap. 4), there was lots of talk about various words, both benevolent and malevolent. In this unusually verbal family, whose members were being converted to Pentecostalism at the time, I understood better how this relatively silent Nenets environment actually swarmed with various kinds of powerful words, from sacrificial prayers, curses, and spells to words that are harmful because they are extensions of personhood. Earlier, Iriko made short verbal requests during sacrifices or offerings through sacrificial words (khan vadi, cf. Lehtisalo 1947, 547–50; Stammler 2005, 173). For instance, when pouring vodka into the water, Iriko said (using a flattering diminutive), “Dear Grandfather-Master of waters, give us fish” [yid yervkotsya, khalyamda yeremdei]. Most of the prayers were short, rather colloquial, in otherwise almost wordless sets of actions.

Tikynye recited one prayer—slightly more poetic than the others—for me. As she said, this was a prayer her father most often used when strangling a reindeer to Pe Mal Khada (her khekhe was put on the back of the reindeer for the ritual). The same incantation roughly in similar wording was said among the Independent herders in the Urals, as I had been told by some others. Tikynye recited, “Pe Mal Khada, let my reindeer hooves tread the hills by turning them bare. Protect us from the harmful word of the Russians [lutsa vevako vada], Pe Mal Khada, you are stronger. Let the words of the Russians fall down on the land [yan khaqmorngaq]. Let the Russians become powerless [nykhysyalma].”¹⁷

Iriko and others were convinced that the lutsaq were using a curse-like “evil word” (vevako vada) to harm their families and reindeer. This was seen as a kind of collective witchcraft performed by those who targeted their reindeer, such as state officials or poachers who once and while shot and stole their animals. This was why one needed to get protection from the Russians’ words, because they were always planning something against reindeer herders. The historical experience of the Nenets had proved how the lutsaq used words as weapons, either on paper or orally. People say that the Russians have always come and referred to the words of some “masters” (yerv) like the tsar, God, or Lenin. For instance, when the Communists came, they showed their papers with words written down, to confiscate reindeer or take their children away to school (cf. Perevalova 2019, 119–20).

The vevako vada Iriko referred to in his prayers worked as a projectile. The word vada itself is linked to an image of an arrow, as in an expression ngyn vada yangu, which means “the bow does not work,” while its literal translation would be “the bow does not give a word” (Tereshchenko 2003, 31; cf. Pushkareva 2004, 2007, 2019). The projectile-like qualities of words are revealed best in witchcraft (Siikala 1978, 204), which is an important although largely hidden topic. For example, much dangerous word traffic takes place during or after marriage negotiations. As noted above, when the father of a bride candidate remains silent, this is understood as a refusal to give his daughter away. This silence act contains a great risk for the daughter, as she becomes most likely the target of witchcraft. Among the Ural Nenets, I heard of several cases in which somebody died or fell ill or lost her fortune because of this kind of witchcraft after rejecting a candidate. For instance, Tikynye’s mother Pukhutsya admitted that she had not wanted to marry Iriko (who had been her husband for nearly forty years by then), but her grandmother warned that she would die from a curse if she refused.

In the Nenets tundra, shamans were often involved in harmful magic. Nowadays parents of the rejected groom (usually the mother) are still accused of putting spells and cursing the girl. According to Tikynye, one of the spells used in these cases is “Let Nga eat . . . [the name of the intended bride would be said here, as Tikynye explained]. We would feel no pity for her.” Nga is the master of the underworld who “eats people” and “pulls the breath-soul out of the body.” To my question how dangerous it was if somebody says these words, Tikynye said, “Of course, Nga would eat, if one says [the spell].” I thought this was Tikynye’s Pentecostal “self” that featured Nga as an absolute evil having an agenda to destroy people. But Nga seems to have been a powerful agent long before the appearance of the Protestant missionaries. He is a death-maker himself, and mentioning his name was perceived as utterly dangerous (as with the taboo word kholera mentioned in chap. 2; see also Fleming and Lempert 2011).¹⁸ This reminded me of Ivan’s explanations of the actions of Satan, who would take on the job whenever a person addressed him.

Young women are not defenseless against the charms that are made after a failed matchmaking, as curses can be deflected. Tikynye’s mother told her daughter to take precautions after suitors had left (ngevtana sita portingu, “the matchmaker may bewitch you”).¹⁹ Pukhutsya taught her a technique to catch and redirect the vevako vada. After the rejected suitor leaves in the evening with his parents, the girl must wake up before dawn and put a bag of female boots (syaqmei pad) across the entrance. This bag is usually kept just next to the door, the farthest end from the pure part of the tent, as it is polluting (syaqmei) for men (more on that in chap. 7). She must ensure that nobody notices the procedure. Then she opens the mouth of the bag, catches the vevako vada, and closes it by tying up the bag’s mouth firmly again. She must be very quiet and careful, as the evil word can easily become frightened (vada ngapra ni tara, “don’t frighten the word”). Then she puts it back to its place and says with a low voice: “Evil word, go back [vevako vada punya kheya] from where you came and catch the ones who sent you. Let you do harm [khebyakha]²⁰ to them.” The syaqmei pad acts as a gateway that serves here as a path to the world of spirits where the evil word finds its way back to the originator (cf. Lepekhin 1805, 117). Such ritual deflections are not public but secret.

Tikynye also used another technique. Once after the family of the groom candidate had left, Pukhutsya told her to throw salt in the direction of the camp of the suitors. Salt helps against the spells of harming (porti). While throwing it, she said a formula: “The evil words do not come across the salt” (vevako vadiq ser tyakha niq tutaq).²¹ When I asked Tikynye whether she was afraid of being cursed, she said no: “Let them curse me, if they like.” There was not only resignation but also bitterness in her voice. Tikynye then told me that the mother of the first hopeful groom candidate, Tarko Khada, had said that the girl who would not accept her son would suffer. “One girl died soon after she was not given to Tarko Khada’s son,” said Tikynye. Tikynye herself had managed to avoid the worst consequences of curses. Yet she had not succeeded in securing a partner.

Evil words thus have some kind of corporeality, as they are containable and deflectable. When somebody releases evil words, they carry harming potential. However, they can be freed from the link with their originator (and thus from the initial intention) and given a new direction by a new verbal command and by manipulation of substances. The words become thus a force independent from their source and recyclable and reversible by others. One can spell out the vevako vada, but not claim final power over it.

Various other steps can be taken to intercept evil words. Catching them by putting up a trap of syaqmei pad or throwing salt are active measures when one knows to expect a curse. However, there are also means that work like apotropaic “standing” traps. Once, when visiting the tent of Khasavaku (her relatives with the same clan name), Tikynye was surprised to see a dried pike’s head (pyrya ngeva), mouth full open, tied to the central vertical pole (symzy). As she later learned, the pike’s head was supposed to catch all the evil words sent by other people and neutralize the curses and gossip that reached the family. Tikynye explained, “Khasavaku’s wife is afraid of people; she fears porti. In that area, people are talking a lot of one another with the vevako vada. Ngelku also dried a pike’s head and put it up.” The location of the pike’s head is not incidental: a pike on the sacred pole that connects the lower and upper worlds has the power to protect, as it is a predator that can catch all kinds of malicious agents from the lower world. Shamans had their spirit helpers in the form of a pike, which is also the master of waters (yid yerv). I also once saw pike heads in the boxes of spirit items on a sacred sledge in the camp of a non-Christian Nenets.²²

The border between curses and gossip is fluid. Tikynye said that she felt it physically when somebody was speaking ill of her. After she had a quarrel with her sister Netyu, she complained of a headache and explained that Netyu was saying bad things about her. Tikynye also noted that “in some camps, when you have hardly left the tent, you can feel that they are talking of you behind your back.” People are anxious about gossip for various reasons. Certainly, to avoid gossip, reindeer herders guard their behavior, including words, as these can be used against them and damage their reputation in the form of abusive information. However, as we can deduce from the incident above, there is more at stake than merely “a good name” or following conventions.

To block the vevako vada, spirits and wolves planning to attack the herd or the family, it is possible to carry out purification (nibtyeva) through fire (see chap. 7). Tikynye explained that when there was a danger lurking around, the fire sometimes spoke: “Earlier, when the fire said ‘tuuu,’ we used to take a piece of a burning coal [moryo] and throw it to the two sides of the symzy, one toward the door side [nyo], the other toward the back end [si], and say, ‘Old man, old woman, do not cut across the fire’s face’ [yiriko, khadako, tu syadm nyon madaq].”²³ Tikynye’s mother used to “throw fire” (tu mos’), but for the last couple of years she had stopped doing it, as her Pentecostal daughters always scolded her and accused her of feeding demons. The last time Pukhutsya threw pieces of burning coal to the symzy area, the next day a bear killed a reindeer from their herd. Her daughters then had a good reason to nag their mother that she had invoked a demon to come to the herd instead of warding it off.

During my fieldwork, I witnessed only some rare moments of confrontation in Nenets families that escalated into verbal intensity. Depending on the dynamics of intrafamilial relations, verbal outbursts of irritation took place either between siblings or between parents and children. Like many others, Iriko’s tent included unmarried sisters and brothers that had a special relationship of mutual assistance. A sister makes and maintains clothes for one of her brothers while the brother takes care of her draft reindeer and fixes her sledge. Iriko’s youngest son, Kolye (then eighteen years old), a tempestuous person, was the loudest and enjoyed verbal assaults on his sister Netyu. He scolded her for not mending his reindeer parka (mal’tsya) or for not serving food in time. Netyu did not answer Kolye’s attacks loudly but instead went around nagging in a low voice at Kolye and occasionally others. The rest of the family called her “a nagger” (tedorik). Usually nobody paid this much attention.

I was told that constant verbal disputes in the family can be dangerous, as this potentially creates bonds that last beyond one’s lifetime and can become perilous for the surviving family members. These bonds were not of hatred but of affection, as Tikynye explained. To illustrate the point, she told me how her mother’s father, Stepan, and her father’s mother, Katya (who were brother and sister), died after each other (in 1983) because of this kind of affectionate relationship. Stepan died drunk at the Serakonabts feast (which marks the first time the sun rises above the horizon in January) on his way back to the tundra from Sovetskiy village. After her brother’s death, grandmother Katya put out cards every day to learn her future. “Grandmother sensed that she was going to die. She wanted to see when and where she was going to die, as she did not want to be buried far from her brother and mother,” said Tikynye. After four months, in May, Grandmother Katya went to visit her relative Khasavaku. In the middle of a drinking party, she passed away there. I asked why she expected that she was going to die. Tikynye said, “She knew that her brother would pull her to his place sooner or later. They often quarreled [pyoda] with each other. They felt pity [syanz’] for each other. People say that if somebody quarrels a lot with another, they are going to die together.” It is not unusual that such ambivalent relationships cross the border of this and the afterlife, and the emotions of the dead can be threatening for the living (cf. Vitebsky 1993, 2017a).

I also heard of another kind of love speech that can have fatal consequences, as it entails a hazardous combination of vulnerability and force. Tikynye told me of her little brother Yepim, who died when he was five months old. She first said to me that an old woman, Nasta, had killed him through witchcraft. Another time, she said that an old man called Nyaku did it, a wealthy reindeer herder who I understood to be on friendly terms with Tikynye’s family. Nyaku also bore the same surname as Tikynye, being thus a distant relative (yarq nya) from a parallel lineage. This time she did not mention Nasta at all, and I did not ask either (by the time I knew that she was blamed for some other misfortunes in the family).

I was surprised by the change in Tikynye’s explanation of Yepim’s death, but I did not want to counter her previous explanation. She said, “Yepim was five months old, in his cradle. My mother swung the cradle on her knees. Nyaku was there, visiting us. He looked at Yepim, and smiling himself, he said, ‘This is my grandchild. How nicely he plays with his little hands.’ Yepim got scared and started to cry. He cried and cried and cried. He was just inconsolable. When he stopped, in the end, Nyaku Vesako said something again, and Yepim cried again, loud and long. Right after the old man’s visit, he fell ill, and after a couple of weeks, he died.”

“Did he want to do anything bad with what he said?” I asked.

“No,” said Tikynye. “He has just got a heavy word [sanggovo vada]. The heavy word found its way to Yepim. When one has a heavy word, a child falls ill. . . . He did not want to make him ill. . . . Later, my mother met Nyudyaku Nye Khada [an old woman, also a Ural Independent], who said that she should have not shown her child to Nyaku.”

Himself a father of thirteen children, Nyaku is known for having killed or afflicted others’ children merely by verbally addressing them. Tikynye inferred that he was unaware of the “heaviness” of his own words. She also added that people said that the only one who could calm the child down was the same person who had made the child ill. Tikynye could not, however, explain how undoing the harm worked. Instead, she said that it is like “when a shaman harmed someone and he fell ill, the doctor could not help this person. Only the one who harmed could help. You had to go to the one who had afflicted you.” So, in a sense, the person from whom the heavy words emanated remains connected with them.

I later learned that this was not an isolated case: there were some others who had a “heavy word” that children could not bear. Tikynye gave another example—surprisingly—from her own family. Once she said, “I have also told my sister Netyu not to address small children, as they usually start to cry when she is speaking to them.” Although I had seen Netyu having arguments not only with Kolye but also with Tikynye—often they fought indirectly by ridiculing and harassing each other’s puppy—it was not an attribution of evil intentions or even a moral condemnation of her character but rather an assertion that children are vulnerable to her sanggovo vada. As Tikynye said, the words found their way to make harm through certain people. She did not suggest that Nyaku or Netyu meant to cause any harm to children (being thus not a question whether they did it on purpose, by accident, by mistake, involuntarily, and so on, see Austin 1961). My explicit question about Nyaku’s and Netyu’s objectives did not make Tikynye comment on their possible motives: it was not so much their intentions or responsibility that mattered but a causal link that emerged between an adult who has a sanggovo vada and a small child who is vulnerable to a forceful adult.²⁴

What role has the semantic content of the sentences that Nyaku said (“This is my grandchild. How nicely he plays with his little hands.”)? Naming the child as his grandchild could be seen as a kind of intrusion in the mother’s eyes, either injurious or establishing a relation, as Butler would argue (similar to Pavel using names in the hope of winning a person over). However, from Nyaku’s point of view, he had a reason to call Yepim his “grandchild,” as Yepim did indeed belong to the same kin group. When discussing the case, Tikynye did not attach any significance to the semantic side of the utterance. She emphasized instead that the old man’s words were too heavy and that they got stuck to Yepim. Yet Nyaku gave his words a direction—there was an act but not malevolent intention.

For Tikynye (and her mother), it was important to be alert to both Nasta and Nyaku, as real effects mattered more than people’s hidden thoughts and motives (complicated by the fact that it is often impossible to know who carries malevolent words in themselves).²⁵ Although Tikynye had been exposed to the strong intentionalistic concept of words through her engagement with Pentecostalism, she still did not present this case as a moral issue in the Christian sense in which a purported inner state of the person would play a role. This is not to argue that she might have not pondered over others’ intentions (as this is part of being human everywhere, see Duranti 2015) or not made personal accusations in other cases, but it is not necessarily always part of the local ways of explaining each instance of witchcraft (which, as we see, may take the form of “negative kinship”; see Sahlins 2013, 59). So, this was not so much a matter of ability to read others’ intentions or hide her own thoughts about others’ intentions than as a choice Tikynye made to explicate in retrospect this particular social situation that had grave consequences.

Although most of the time people are seen as sources of their deeds and words, now and again they as persons may not control what departs from them, as the person is multiple, relational, and extendable rather than a sovereign individual committing only voluntary acts. This does not mean that Nenets would argue that there are no hidden thoughts or feelings involved, or that people would not try to get access to these. But unlike among Christians, thoughts and feelings need not be located inside the person and then imagined to be expressed. Hidden feelings can be revealed through personal songs and through the things and animals that circulate between people, in a way that the person may not realize that his or her feelings are disclosed. For example, when somebody receives a reindeer as a gift (this reindeer is called padarak, from podarok in Russian), kills the animal for meat, and boils the heart, if the heart remains hard to chew, it is said to mirror the giver’s greed and negative attitude toward the recipient. Herders say that the donor keeps thinking of this gift-reindeer in terms of pity or regret.²⁶ As an illness in a child triggered by an adult reflects who has heaviness in his or her words, so the heart of the gift-reindeer reflects hidden feelings or the attitude of the donor. In either case, people saying words or making gifts might not know and might never learn about what they have done, as the effects of their acts and the traits of character are discussed without their presence, often in hindsight, when the following events make others think on these particular instances in the new light.

The cases above reveal that in Nenets ideology of language and personhood, words do not only communicate but also carry force and effects outside the semantic content and ordinary meaningful communication. Words have a capacity to reach targets and produce destructive consequences. Old-timers who are reluctant to convert seem to attribute Russian missionaries’ words a similar capacity to harm. Some choose to respond with silence acts. Those who have declared their loyalty to the Christian God and committed themselves to the new teachings, however, believe themselves to be unharmable by evil words.

Embodied and Disembodied Speech

The evangelicals believe in the power of God’s Word. This is a creative entity, capable of changing one’s fate completely. Yet one needs faith in God for the Word to act in one’s life. Although there are moments when Baptists imagine God’s Word to create effects in one’s life without a person necessarily understanding this, they yet stress that one needs to understand what God wants to say. Unlike divine words (which have the power to create a world), for Baptists, human spoken words cannot have any automatic efficacy (with some exceptions though, see chap. 6).²⁷ If any such thing appears to take place, the effects of words are said to be mediated by Satan. As we shall see in the next chapter, one must mean what one says. In Christian language ideology, there is an assumption that, when speaking, people express intentions that come from their insides, as if one’s intentions could always exist before an act of expression.

I would suggest that non-Christian Nenets do not always see words as having intentions behind them coming from inside a person. It seems that the moments are not rare when intentionality is not lodged in an individual thought but emerges in a constellation of relations and acts in which power and vulnerability have a constitutive role to play (cf. Gell 1998). This can be described as a dispersed or collaborative intentionality, which is played out not in an abstract context but in situated relations. To put it another way, words in various contexts are seen not as signifiers but as part-persons that participate in relational complexities. In this sense, words are not that different from the things, puppies, or reindeer that people have, as, like words, these have the capacity to act as part of distributed persons and constitute embodied relations.

We could argue that all acts of speech have potentially extra effects that are not necessarily meant by the speaker. In the framework of speech act theory, this phenomenon could be classified as words being performatives, with effects coming from convention and context and not from an immediate meaning of the saying as such (Austin 1962).²⁸ In her Derrida-inspired speech act theory, Butler (1997a) moves toward acknowledging some sort of materiality to the language (cf. Derrida 1982). For her, a speech act is not only a linguistic but also a bodily act. She writes: “In speaking, the act that the body is performing is never fully understood; the body is the blindspot of speech, that which acts in excess of what is said, but which also acts in and through what is said. That the speech act is a bodily act means that the act is redoubled in the moment of speech: there is what is said, and then there is a kind of saying that the bodily ‘instrument’ of the utterance performs” (11). Butler describes the relationship between language and body as chiasmus. She refers to Shoshana Felman (1983), who argues that speech and body are incongruous but inseparable, which is a “scandal” that “consists in the fact that the act cannot know what it is doing” (96, Felman’s italics).

How different, then, is Nenets ideology of language and personhood from that of Austin’s or Butler’s universal theories? Even if Butler, in her too gloomy courtroom-like account, goes as far as to say that calling “an injurious name is embodied” and that “the words enter the limbs, craft the gesture, bend the spine” (1997a, 159), she is yet mainly concerned with “meanings” and “signification.”²⁹ For instance, when Yegor slid back into his past self for a moment, this happened to him possibly because the new ideology of signification had failed to eradicate his old dispositions. His earlier habitus, with a whole set of linguistic and extralinguistic features (e.g., singing, merriness, drinking, and dreaming), worked—perhaps unconsciously or as visceral “moral moods” (Throop 2014)—against the formation of his new self, even if in other moments he consciously tried hard to surpass his past self (see chap. 7). As Nenets language ideology also attributes effects of words outside the sphere of signification and human inner intentionality, words wound not as representations but independently of the ordinary meanings because they are parts of personhood and of relations. Speaking and cursing can thus gain an extralinguistic (extrasemantic) dimension as the words act semi-independently, get stuck to the person as substance, and influence life outside the usual understanding of intentional speech. This creates an entirely different kind of a blind spot.

Part of my argument builds on Tim Ingold’s (2000, 103) criticism of the Western understanding of person. He suggests that human speech among non-Westerners is not about representing inner thoughts or expressing mental states outwardly. Following Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ingold argues that human speech is a way of being alive: “And the dichotomy between interior mental states and their outward physical or behavioural expression that underwrites this conception of the distinctiveness of speech also applies to the way we tend to think about other aspects of personhood—sentience, volition, memory. Thus volition implies the intentionality of action, but Western thought sees intentionality as residing not in the action itself but in a thought or plan that the mind places before the action and which the latter is supposed to execute” (103–4).

Furthermore, non-Western people often do not conceptualize others as intentional individuals who convey in their speech what they mean “from inside” (Duranti 2015; Du Bois 1993; Rosaldo 1982). Alessandro Duranti (1993) shows that the words of Samoan orators who represent politicians as their spokesmen are not taken as personally “intending”; yet they take personal responsibility for the words spoken. In her analysis of Ilongot linguistic practices, Michelle Rosaldo (1982) has argued that reading one another’s personal intentions is not primary in communication in this community because subjective meanings do not fully define social relations. She writes, “For Ilongots, I think, it is relations, not intentions, that come first” (210). Words are thus linked to the practices of personhood that are different in different ontological regimes.

This does not mean that, in some settings, various kinds of intention are not imputed to others or to oneself. But in general, as discussed, Nenets usually avoid talking not only about their own but also about others’ thoughts, feelings, intentions, and future plans.³⁰ The consequences of action and known properties of a person constitute the focal concern and not one’s intentions per se. Therefore, Tikynye’s family members did not stop engaging with more powerful people around them; for example, they did not cut relations with Nyaku. Or take the person who receives a gift that reveals the giver’s greed would still need to return a gift-reindeer. Nenets’ economy of words—understood both as a concise use of words and as the ways words act among and upon speech-enabled agents, such as humans, animals, and spirits—has deep roots in the local concepts of personhood and social relations.

What this chapter has tried to show is that missionaries’ attempts to subjectivate old-timers, such as Vata, do not always succeed because words’ and silences’ performative effects only occur when they are seen as changing the world in the same way by everyone involved. As I shall argue in the next chapter, among Christians the concept of sincere speaking becomes dominant. At least as an ideal. As we have seen, for non-Christian Nenets, the notions of representation and intentions do not operate in the same manner as they do for Baptists or Pentecostals. I shall suggest that there is an important shift toward a model of representationalism and intentionalism, although this shift itself is not as smooth and unproblematic as one might expect.