2

TRAJECTORIES OF CONVERSION

Prologue: A Service in a Nenets Mya

On a cold Sunday toward the end of 2006, in the dull half-light of a late morning during the months of polar night, a few families arrived on their reindeer sledges to attend a service in the camp of Andrei, the Nenets presbyter of the Baptist church. Among those who arrived from nearby camps—at a distance of a few dozen kilometers—was Andrei’s brother Yegor, with whom I had recently completed the autumn migration. By December, all the Yamb-To Nenets had made their way from the coast of the Kara Sea to the winter pastures after two months of isolated travel southward, being once again capable of trips to one another’s myaq and to the city to sell and buy. This was also the time when the missionaries paid occasional visits to the camps. Most of the church life still took place in the tundra, as people found their way to the city prayer house not more than a couple of times a year. Missionaries did not like this infrequency. I heard Pavel, the presbyter of the Baptist church in the city, reproaching herders now and again, saying that “the brethren from the tundra” came to Vorkuta without attending services in his prayer house. As usual, the Nenets were silent when admonished. However, since Andrei had been ordained a presbyter, some said that they no longer needed to visit the city church that often. Although they did not cast doubt on the need for utmost commitment to the teachings introduced by Pavel and other missionaries, this was one of the signs that the Nenets converts were trying to carve out their own cultural space and style of being punryodaq, “believers.”

In most ways, in the morning before the Sunday service, except for a prayer before and after eating, nothing would betray that these herders were different from non-Christian herders. Neither their outfits nor the way they spoke marked the distinctiveness of the day of repose or the Christianity of their “inner lives.” Indeed, until recently, Sunday (khekhe yalya, “sacred day”) visits were accompanied by vodka, tobacco, and cards, these now being taboo. In addition, Nenets songs, wrestling, reindeer races, and drinking of raw blood after butchering a reindeer for guests were no longer part of social life. While some of these activities, such as wrestling, were claimed to be just vanity and a potential source of unhealthy rivalry, drinking blood was said to conflict with God’s Word, which banned it outright. Singing personal or epic songs had been outlawed because of the perceived danger that this would pull a person back into the old way of being, and so was somewhere between vanity and “paganism” (yazychestvo) (see chap. 5).

After eating, some casual chat, and occasional laughter, Andrei declared that it was time to start with the service. Sitting on reindeer hides, congregants became somewhat more serious, and everybody’s gaze turned to the pastor who was about to lead the service from where he was, sitting near the pure part of the mya under the kerosene lamp (si, i.e., the part where foodstuff is stored, and, before conversion, sacred items). Rather than the spatial structure of the confrontational pulpit and pews—segregated by gender—in the prayer house, people stayed where they usually were (by a loose principle, the most honorable male guests are closer to the si). Andrei gave an introductory prayer, with a deep and measured voice, in which he called for the Holy Spirit to come among them. Then, he took out his Russian Bible from the leather case and read slowly but firmly a preselected passage from Matthew, translating it sentence by sentence into Nenets and further explaining the message with his own words in the vernacular. After finishing the passage, he continued with a short sermon using examples from everyday life and thus shifting listeners’ imagination between the doings of Jesus and of the “we” here and now. The written word unfolded into a spoken word of instruction, transferring some of the authority hidden in the text to the one who voiced it. People were listening, fiddling, and looking at one another. From time to time, the hostess of the mya, Lyuba, added long willow branches to the metal stove. The fire was crackling, and a stew was boiling.

Just as the spatiotemporal configurations were not fixed, so the language of Andrei oscillated between the two idioms. Although he mainly spoke Nenets, some Russian words had found their way into Nenets, like “be alert” (bodrstvuyte). Some Nenets words were also struggling to free themselves from their history—for instance, the word for “Satan,” ngylyeka, “an underworld spirit” that carried a whole gamut of experiences from the “pagan” past, especially for the older generation who had engaged with local and ancestral spirits during their lifetime. As always, Andrei harangued—although considerably more mildly than the Russian missionaries—the congregants about the need to try harder to study the Bible, follow what it prescribed, and pray to God more often. As he said, without these actions, there was no hope of God’s protection here on earth or thereafter. His language was based on “a grammar of desire and fear” (Kulick and Schieffelin 2004, 363; cf. Luhrmann 2018, 314–15), reminding listeners how their fates were tightly related to rewards and punishment.

In his sermon, Andrei also quoted Bible passages by heart, a skill that only a few Nenets commanded. His greater ability subtly hinted at his greater holiness and authority at that moment in an otherwise egalitarian community of brethren and sisters. As Yegor’s wife, Lida, told me after, “We all pray for him, and so God must have given him more than others.” Lida referred to a fundamental point that has its source in Christian understanding that ordained presbyters like Andrei acted as a composite agent entailing both human and divine components. Whereas “ordinary” believers were also composites, the overall sense was that the Holy Spirit was acting more powerfully in Andrei, Pavel, and other pastors whose greater skills were a sign of God’s greater investment in them.

Closing the Bible, Andrei called for prayers in Russian: “Let us pray” (davayte pomolimsya). This had become an evocative phrase that the missionaries repeated again and again. After a short silence, Andrei’s sister’s husband, Yevgeni, was the first to start. Fluent in Nenets, Komi, and Russian, as are many youngsters, he began the first sentence of his prayer in Russian but finished it in Nenets: “Great God, glory and gratitude is yours!” (Velikiy Bog, slava i blagodarnost’ pydar nyand!). Others kneeling nearby were attentively listening; a few were moving their lips in silence accompanying Yevgeni’s prayer, which was interspersed with his sighs suggesting that the words were coming from the heart and were deeply felt. Then Yevgeni’s wife, Ksenya, performed her prayer, which was barely audible, like the ones from other female converts. The prayers contained, as usual, a thanksgiving for how things are, no matter whether good or bad, followed by an admission of one’s sinfulness, a request for forgiveness and purification, petitions of a general or particular order (the well-being of one’s family and reindeer, a safe journey, etc.), all these elements bracketed with phrases praising God and with repeating of “Not my will but thine be done.” The short prayer session, in which nearly all present made their petitions in Nenets, was finalized by Andrei, who prayed louder and more fluently than the others who were unable to speak with similar authority.

Without leaving too long a pause, Andrei said the number “seventy-four,” which marked a song called “Oh, I Am a Poor Sinner! Truly I Am One” (O! Ya Greshnik Bednyy! Pravda, Ya Takov) from the Baptist hymnal in Russian (Pesn’ 2004). This melancholy hymn speaking of Christ’s gift to sinful humans had become one of the favorites among the church members (alongside a hymn on Vorkuta; see chap. 3). All who were able to read, even if not that well, opened the hymnal. Others who were illiterate sang along with the parts they had memorized. Now and again, the tune slowed, as if on an old record player. Following the principle of the priesthood of all believers—or more precisely, “the priesthood of all male believers,” as women were not allowed to sermonize—in the next round, Yevgeni did the reading. The cycle of reading and singing intermingled with prayers was repeated twice more.

As in the city church, individual believers were encouraged to sing or read a poem they knew by heart in front of the congregation. Yegor, who struggled with reading and whose ability to sing Russian songs (yanggerts’) was modest (in contrast with his masterful performances of epic songs, see chap. 5), moved with his literate daughter Alla to the door area, which offered a square meter for a stage. Alla started singing, her father following her with evident lack of self-confidence, yet performing until the end. As Andrei commented afterward, God must have been very pleased to see Yegor taking the stage despite his inability to stay in tune. His comment characterizes the overall expectation and pressure among the Baptists: one must do more than one thinks is possible as the Holy Spirit helps out. The service ended with men and women shaking hands and with brotherly or sisterly kisses on the lips among people of the same gender. The Baptists stressed that kissing reinforces brotherhood and peace, taking a lead from Romans 16:16 (“Salute one another with an holy kiss. The churches of Christ salute you”). After the service, Lyuba served tea, meat, and fish. Then, in the complete darkness of afternoon polar night, the guests left toward their camps.

Modernity and the Urge for Change

Non-Christian Nenets say that the Baptist services with prayers, singing in Russian, and kisses look strange. Yet converts argue that the new behavior, with this kind of touch, is vital to enjoy God’s protection and future salvation. In this chapter, I shall ask how the scene described above has come to be an intrinsic part of many families’ lives across the camps of the Nenets tundra. In other words, what has motivated more than half of the Independents to become converts and to change radically their personal and social lives? What kind of self-transformation has become imaginable for the reindeer herders, and how is it related to becoming “modern”? My ethnographic focus will stay with the Veli family.

In the last chapter, we saw how contact with the Russian world—education, state offices, the market economy—have led to substantial changes in the lives of the Independents. The state started to model the yedinolichniki through the process of passportization (i.e., granting citizenship), clan-community forming, and schooling. The missionaries joined the scene a few years later (in 1994, see Bjørklund 1995) than the state officials, yet they were to have a considerably more profound impact. Even if they strove from different rhetoric and ideologies, the two conversions—conversion to modernity and conversion to Christianity—gradually converged.

I would argue that the appeal of modernity and the message of Christianity have become inseparable in the conversion of Independents. What many ethnographic accounts reveal is that what is called “modernity” (often pluralized as “modernities”) is rather diffuse, variable, and does not presume the same forces or outcomes everywhere (Asad 2003, 12–16; see also van der Veer 1996). Modernity is a confusing concept being a source of numerous heated debates, including on the danger of smuggling a metanarrative of modernity into anthropological analyses (Englund and Leach 2000). While modernity remains hard to pin down, it is undeniable that in colonial contexts, some versions of modernity and Christianity have often arrived together.

Following Talal Asad (1996) and Keane (2007), I would suggest that modernity becomes a site of imagination, and this becoming is by itself part of a significant transformation. Keane has described modernity as a metanarrative of a moral character that has developed hand in hand with Protestant ideas and Enlightenment, “a story of human liberation from a host of false beliefs and fetishisms that undermine freedom” (5). Emancipation and self-mastery lie at the heart of this narrative, which usually includes “rupture from a traditional past, and progress into a better future” (48). Becoming preoccupied with oneself as my “self” that needs remolding shifts perspective to a more global plane in which conceiving of an identity of a new kind is a common way of thinking (Cannell 2006). But as Keane (2007, 42) stresses, “it is not merely a matter of imagination” but also a matter of material medium as new kinds of idea, value, skill, disposition, and relationship emerge through engagement with mass media, formal education, literacy, medicine, global market, various technologies, and means of transport.

But how then can modernity and religion—usually depicted as direct opposites to each other—be seen interacting in conversion? Asad (1996) argues that there is a certain convergence between becoming modern and becoming a religious convert, as they are both shaped by a new defining logic: “Religious conversion is usually thought of as ‘irrational,’ because it happens to people rather than being something that they choose to become after careful thought. And yet most individuals enter modernity rather as converts enter a new religion—as a consequence of forces beyond their control. Modernity, like the convert’s religion, defines new choices; it is rarely the result of an entirely ‘free choice.’ And like the convert’s religion, it annihilates old possibilities and puts others in their place” (263, his italics).

The Christians I know would agree with Asad in this respect that this is not purely one’s “free choice”: it is God who defines one’s choices. Yet they would also say that one needs to wish to be chosen as a child of God in the first place (even if this wish is put in the heart by God, see chap. 7). So, the determinism of modernity like religion is a matter of definition as there is always a component of self-reflection involved (Laidlaw 2014); these can be described rather as “affordances” that can be picked up but do not necessarily determine the outcome (Keane 2016). Obviously, there are many ways in which a new religion is entered, and in some cases, it may take place without the defining power of the teachings of the new religion. What is important to stress, however, is that when one engages with it more deeply, it starts to define one’s choices more forcefully. This is why we should not assess the initial decisions to be the same as the ethical deliberations taking place in renewed circumstances of further learning. Old possibilities are annihilated, as Asad says.

Evangelical logic requires a rupture (in practices, ideals, and rhetoric) from the old life and the fraudulent traditions now doomed to belong to “the past” (Robbins 2007a, 2020; cf. Freeman 2017; Holbraad et al. 2019). As this move takes away one kind of possibility from people, it offers them other kinds for constituting themselves as new persons or groups through connection and disconnection, both imaginary and real. Fundamentally, this is a shift in ethics, as one must ask what it means to be a good person or a good community (Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2015a; Zigon 2010). Furthermore, this introduces new understandings of society and temporality, as hopeful new Christians understand that they become connected to wider worlds and a better future (Englund 2003; Robbins 2004; 2009, 234; Wanner 2007, 207, 253). It happens as if people had suddenly become claustrophobic in their own world, although this sense is not the same for everyone. I suggest that differences in the case of Nenets converts are generational, as is often the case in revolutionary projects in which youth find themselves more at stake personally than older people. While parents are worried, their children feel liberated as they give up old ways (cf. Vitebsky 2012, 186; 2017a).

For many converts, there is certain ambivalence in their attitudes toward modernity. On the one hand, as with the Ewe Christians in Ghana who demonize modernity and yet are attracted to it (Meyer 1999), Nenets are trying to find their way through both the maze of Christian prescriptions and the appeal of secular modernity that has a shadow of dangerous Russian, lutsa, in it. On the other hand, they have joined a church that regards itself as thoroughly “antimodern,” an aspect they must adapt to in their modernist desires (see chap. 3).¹ Being antimodern is especially relevant when it comes to distancing oneself not only from “modern people” (sovremennye lyudi) or “people from this world” (lyudi etogo mira) but also from mainstream Protestant churches (which is less a concern for Nenets).

To return to Asad (1996, 265) once again, one could argue with him that “the changed epistemic structure” brought about by conversion has given Nenets “new possibilities for constituting themselves,” or in other words, self-formation becomes available through the “politics of consciousness.” Without doubt, for Independents this is a radically new experience in which new ideas play a significant role. Nenets converts claim they have the truth, which they did not have before, and which the nonconverts still do not have. Andrei once explained to me that he truly comprehended what it meant to be a Christian only when he understood what happened to Jesus, that he gave his own blood for the sake of saving sinful humanity. He presented this as an event in which he realized that he and Jesus were intimately linked through the most important event in human history, the resurrection of Christ.

Conversion is thus aligning personal and cosmic events. Here, I would like to briefly touch upon Caroline Humphrey’s (2008) discussion—inspired from Alain Badiou—on subject and event (see also Bialecki 2009; Engelke 2010; Laidlaw et al. 2018; Robbins 2010). Humphrey suggests that the subject potentially emerges in this situation when enmeshed in the new logic through a disruptive event. According to Badiou (2001), the event is an extraordinary happening that changes the whole sense of oneself by abolishing previous knowledge and by offering a radically new truth. He presents a discussion of how subjects emerge in an event and the truth of the event by examining Saul’s (Paul’s) conversion on the road to Damascus (Badiou 2003). There are two aspects in this Badouian formal scheme I wish to stress, as I see these as having some benefit in thinking about religious conversion. First, the event is not an event for everyone but only for those who decide to declare it, pledge themselves to the event, and thus emerge as subjects(-in-becoming) in their fidelity to the declared event. Second, the event—despite being subjectively acclaimed—is universally addressed to everybody, as in Paul’s call to repentance for Jews and non-Jews alike.

I would describe the conversion of Nenets (at least some of them) as what Humphrey (2008, 364) calls a “decision-event” in which “a new truth” is acclaimed or “a new position by leaping across what is not known” is chosen or discovered in a new setting. Humphrey rejects Badiou’s theory of ordinary people as incapable of understanding the situation they live in (in Badiou’s version they resemble animals) and argues that many are capable of acclaiming the event. She writes that we “need some further ideas to explain how people ordinarily attain individuality, how they track through, gather together, or sort out the multiplicities of their being, and how indeed someone is (or becomes) the kind of person capable of acclaiming the event when others around them do not. It is necessary, therefore, to have a theory of actors who are not subjects in Badiou’s sense, but have the potential to become so” (363).

I would suggest that some Baptist converts among the Nenets had this kind of potential of becoming a subject, seeing themselves in a new light and declaring their fidelity to the event in the new language. According to Badiou, as an archetypal convert, Paul was unprecedented in history, since his claims were universalizing by their nature. The resurrection of Christ was the most important truth-event (“the Christ-event,” Badiou 2003, 73) in Paul’s eyes. Remaining faithful to this truth-event was at the center. Furthermore, the event must be declared, narrativized, and explained to oneself as to others. So, the emergence of the subject is inseparable from becoming a new kind of linguistic agent who has made a long journey from a different language world (see chaps. 6 and 7).

In the following section, I shall describe Ivan’s conversion, which entails elements from both a Pauline and a shamanic self-transformation. My sense is that Ivan’s shamanic quest partly paved the way to him becoming a Christian, as both can be seen as particular—although qualitatively rather different—kinds of self-fashioning. I shall then move on to the main “utilitarian” motivation, shared by nearly all converts in the tundra, which is the frequently expressed wish to abandon drinking alcohol and improve one’s (family’s) economic situation. I would propose that abstaining creates a path for an enhanced self-control, an exercise that modernity and Christianity both exploit to a significant extent (Weber 2001). In the second part of the chapter, I shall move to the unintended consequences of conversion, as families are threatened with a split along generational lines (something that many went through elsewhere during the Soviet period, as discussed in chap. 1). On the one hand, non-Christian parents have been distanced from their Christian children, while on the other hand middle-aged converts face their children’s desire to leave the tundra, causing their parents great anxiety.

Ivan: From Prospective Shaman to Evangelical Entrepreneur

Sociologically speaking, I agree with Mathijs Pelkmans (2009a, 2) when he argued that “dislocations wrought by postsocialist change and the advance of free-market capitalism” have set the scene for conversions in Russia, through “the messages of hope and the sense of community offered by new religious movements.” However, in the case of Nenets Independents, post-socialist dislocations alone can hardly explain the recent wave of conversion. The Independents did not enjoy services from the state and did not see in church-based infrastructure and humanitarian aid a substitute for state sources (even if some aid was received). There are other dynamics at play that are not only sociological but also ideational, affective, and rhetorical.

Christian conversions in small-scale communities often take place through one or two key local persons who trigger conversions of larger communities (Engelke 2007; Vitebsky 2017a). Without doubt, in the case of Nenets Independents, Ivan has become a nodal point in a network of new emergent connections, not only with state officials and business people but also with missionaries. As with many kinds of cultural change, this was one that was elicited from outside and inside simultaneously through a person being on the border of the two worlds. Acting as both an assistant for the missionaries and an independent lay preacher (later ordained as an evangelist, blagovestnik) himself, Ivan inspired a series of conversions. Without his assistance with navigation, translation, and social relations, the Russian missionaries would have found it much harder if not impossible to convert a substantial part of the Yamb-To and the Ural Nenets to Christianity.

Importantly, Ivan’s quest to become different, and the missionaries’ quest to make others different, converged. Ivan became especially suitable for an evangelistic project (see chap. 3). When he went to the Baptist prayer house, presbyter Pavel saw in him a God-given challenge that could not be ignored. He was not, however, the first Nenets to step over the threshold of the Vorkuta prayer house in the quarter of old wooden houses on the outskirts of the city. For instance, his brother Tyepan, who had settled in Vorkuta, had visited it a couple of times, but he did not like it there. Yet Ivan was different from his brother and the other Nenets who had come to the prayer house a few times, sitting there silently and never reappearing again. He was more curious and less taciturn than others, being skillful in talk, including the everyday Russian that he acquired at school and while doing business. Most importantly, he was willing to take missionaries to the tundra when Pavel declared that God wanted him to do that. This let him act as a mediator between the herders and lutsaq, something at which he felt himself to be expert. He introduced untypically “friendly” Russians (such non-Nenets acquaintances are called yuryo) to Nenets in the tundra and offered knowledge about reindeer herders’ families and their movement patterns on the land to the missionaries.

When I met Ivan for the first time in late 2000, he surprised me with his ambition, assertiveness, and eagerness for reform. As we saw in the last chapter, this was reflected in his entrepreneurial endeavors. He hoped to harness external knowledge and power to become a part of the “modern” world. He ceaselessly dreamed of engineering nearly every aspect of tundra life. In our conversations, Ivan often spoke of his latest ideas of technological innovations, such as bringing a washing machine to the tundra tentholds or developing floating sledges to cross dangerous rivers during spring and autumn migrations, though none of his plans was realized over the years. Rather, he spent much of his energy and reindeer buying the consumer goods that the recently emerged market economy had to offer. Most significantly, he became the first Independent herder to own a snowmobile and an electric generator in the mid-1990s introducing fast travel and cold urban light into the tundra. Snowmobiles particularly gathered enormous popularity among herders. Russian missionaries readily gave advice on which snowmobiles to buy and how to repair them when they failed, as they often did.² Yet Pavel repeatedly warned them not to make idols for themselves out of these things (see chap. 4).

Figure 2.1. Snowmobiles increasingly replace reindeer for long-distance winter travel, March 2004.

Like many other youngsters in the community, Ivan sensed that his parents’ life in the tundra was far too different from the Russian world. More exciting things and ideas seemed to go past, leaving out the reindeer herders. Ivan often complained that his parents were illiterate and had a poor understanding of the “Russians and their things.” However, the sense of embarrassment was turned into empowerment. He once told me of an incident around the table when his grandfather Mikul told a Russian man that one had to behave kruto (“cool”). Ivan explained that he meant kul’turno (“in a civilized manner”), adding that meanings of both words remained vague for his grandfather. When he told this story, other converts laughed at the matter. This laughter echoed both embarrassment for the grandfather and pride in being different. Unlike their parents, the younger generation sensed they had become knowledgeable in the new vocabulary and had acquired new skills in their suddenly enlarged world.

Ivan had become a kind of a supernomad moving beyond the Nenets areas, once even flying to the United States with Pavel to visit Russian diaspora congregations. He made occasional trips to Naryan-Mar to discuss matters of clan-community-in-formation with regional officials, who urged him to travel from one camp to another and explain the benefits of setting up a clan-community of reindeer herders. These events became ideal opportunities for Christian proselytization. During these meetings, he made introductions and conclusions with references to the Bible and evidence of God’s will. In a scene in a TV documentary Ivan gives a speech at such a meeting: “Today God has gathered us here so we can live. So I think. This gathering takes place for us to go forward and not to look back. Also, we need not to quarrel with each other. It is written in the Holy Book: ‘I sent God’s son.’ We have to live according to this book. So we can go forward. Then God will give us goods. And these children will start to live. We need to look at our own lives. When there is an old dispute, then forget it” (Barayev 1997).

“Living” has not only a spiritual but also a material and social aspect to it, as in a cargo cult. Acquiring goods was important for Ivan and many others. Ivan earned his living as a middleman. He bought products like reindeer meat, antlers, or fish and sold goods like spare parts for snowmobiles. Although many were happy with his role, others were increasingly uncomfortable that Ivan made a profit out of his brothers in faith.

However, Ivan’s desire was to be a mediator in a positive way. He presented himself as a seeker, stretching his aspirations back into his early childhood when he wanted to become a shaman. He once told me, “Since my childhood I have wished to learn, to achieve something and to become a spiritual person, a healer or a shaman.” To put this into a correct perspective, he promptly added that his shamanic endeavor was just something that was never to be realized because God had already fixed his eye on him. Thus, the rupture had a prelude, as it is often the case with a conversion. He continued, “In my childhood—after the age of six—I was afraid of something, and I started to pray inwardly. Nobody taught me, but I already had the fear of God. . . . I thought about going to town to get the Bible, the book I had heard about from my grandfather.”

Nevertheless, this did not happen. Instead of becoming a shaman or a healer, he became an active Christian when he was twenty-six years old. It was evident that he was one of those who had his own aspirations long before missionaries came. Based on that, I would suggest that the image of shamanic transformation had a significant role to play in his conversion, maybe more than meets the eye at first. The discursive space he used to live in before conversion acknowledged the potential for a radical transformation of a person. But an event was to be awaited to turn him into a committed believer, the event that realizes itself through a narrative and a gaze from elsewhere (divine, missionary) and from elsewhen (in retrospect and through imagining a better future).

Ivan’s conversion narrative is dramatic. Starting with his drunken arrival in a bus station in Vorkuta, he is literally stripped down to awaken to a new reality (like in a shamanic initiation, see below), as he tells it in the same documentary that was shot a couple of years after the experience: “I felt a great fear. I had never experienced such a fear. In a bus station I saw a woman whose face appeared to me like that of the devil. I called out to God and said, ‘Lord, you see me; save me!’ After that I took off my clothes and started to freeze. The temperature was minus thirty degrees. I undressed completely. The police and an ambulance were called. I was taken by them. I found myself in the psychiatric hospital. Then, I thought, I must follow the way of the truth” (Barayev 1997).

The situation required an interpretation in order to become a decision-event (Humphrey 2008). This took place when he went (“God sent me”) to the prayer house, met Baptist presbyter Pavel, and repented. Only then he could understand the agencies at play: how he was acting and how he was acted upon at the same time, caught between divine and demonic forces.

For Pavel, meeting Ivan was also a life-changing moment. Years later, on visits to other churches, he told Ivan’s conversion story from his own perspective. As he put it, before meeting Ivan, he sometimes found himself thinking that God had forgotten the reindeer herders who lay drunk in the snow on the streets of Vorkuta. Ivan’s arrival at the prayer house changed the way he saw the reindeer herders. Pavel once narrated this at a gathering:

Pavel argued that the hallucinations were the work of the devil. Ivan agreed. He learned that God loved him and wanted him to reject his past life. Only when the new language became available was he made aware through this language that he was going through a crisis of a specific kind (cf. Harding 2000, 38). Now Ivan had a truth. From his newly gained perspective and language, this frightening monster could qualify only as Satan and not a shaman’s spirit helper (tadyebtso).³ As he explained, the enemy lured him to drink to the point of delirium and then appeared to him. He was convinced that he had to suffer the attack by the devil to become aware of his sinfulness and of the need to ask Jesus’s forgiveness. In his words, this dramatic moment in his life was not a coincidence but God’s plan to save him from his “past life,” as he called it, which consisted of drinking, playing cards, cheating, and stealing others’ reindeer. Speaking of his sinful life and the radical change were constitutive for sustaining a sense of being a true Christian who had left the past behind.

In another version of Ivan’s conversion story written by Pavel (in 2002, for circulation in the church), he paints a detailed picture of Ivan’s hallucination at the bus stop—a more detailed account than I ever heard from Ivan himself: “Suddenly this woman began to turn into a monster, ready to devour the young reindeer herder. Around him dark beings with horns and tails appeared, and all this filth [nechist’] took him hostage [brala ego v kol’tso].” Pavel then quotes Ivan’s thought during his nightmare in the hospital: “Satan wanted to destroy me. He was about to do it.”

After meeting Ivan, the first task for Pavel was to cleanse the lost person. Not only his soul but also his body needed purification from “the filth.” Pavel continued his talk in the same gathering: “Ivan was invited into a Christian family, where he later acquired kin, friends, and blood [obrel i rodnykh, i druzey, i krov’]. His clothes with worn appearance were washed; his long hair cut; his head, covered with lice, was carefully worked on with a special shampoo and combed. A person from the tundra learned to believe in the Bible and learned urban life—how to use the toilet, bath, and other things.” This “Christian family” in the quote was Pavel’s own family. (The anonymity marks his instrumentality as a tool of God.) Initially the pastor’s wife forbade him to take Ivan into their home because he was full of lice, but then she relented, as Ivan agreed to have his long hair washed and cut. Pavel taught Ivan that apostle Paul instructed the Corinthians that it was shameful for men to have long hair.⁴ He argued that this was obeying God’s will: it was the Law that had to be followed on the outside to enable a person to become different in his interiority.

Significantly, Pavel described Ivan not only as an uncivilized person but also as somebody who lacked family, saying that the church was to become his true family. Like Soviet and post-Soviet officials, Pavel was putting a stress both on cleanliness and on the new “family” replacing actual kin ties. In the 1930s and later, Nenets children were washed and their hair cut against their will when they were taken to school (Kharyuchi 2001, 151; King 2011; Leete 2014, 212–15; Liarskaya 2003; Yadne 1995, 23). In the 1990s, the state was doing that again with the children of the Ural Independents at the Sovetskiy boarding school, quarantining all the tundra children for a couple of months before any teaching started. This was like a new kind of initiation rite. In addition, in the state ideology, boarding schools (like reindeer brigades or other similar collectives, kollektivy) were thought to be a worthy substitute for one’s family (Khlinovskaya Rockhill 2010; Rethmann 2001, 30). Now the church was doing something similar. Independents were supposed to become a family, cleansed and civilized, in a way that many collective farmers had experienced before, but that was rather different from Independents’ earlier experience (cf. Vagramenko 2014, 2017a).

Ivan’s long hair had been part of his spiritual aspirations. For Nenets, human hair contains a person’s shadow soul (sidyangg), and a shaman’s long hair is a site of extra power (Kharyuchi 2001, 151; Lapsui et al. 2023, 29; Lar et al. 2003, 83; Yadne 2006, 168). I witnessed how people used to take great care not to leave their cut hair behind in a campsite when moving to the next. The fear was that malevolent spirits in the form of small birds (venzyoy leqmorq) would take this hair and make the owner fall ill. As one non-Christian herder explained to me, you would “lose your shadow soul” (sidyangg syalmde) and then with that you would lose the ability to do any work. He told me of a man to whom this had happened recently. To avoid misfortune, some even gathered their hair and nails throughout their lives. For instance, before his death in 1999, Ivan’s “pagan” father asked his children to place his nails and hair in his coffin to retain his soul force in one place. However, this never happened because he was buried by his children who had already distanced themselves from what they called, in Russian, “ritual” (ritual) and “superstition” (suyeverie). In a way, cutting off his hair was no less a profound change for Ivan than learning to use the bath and the Bible. Instead of becoming a composite of shamanic spirits gained from outside, he was equipped with a different kind of power—the unambiguously good Holy Spirit.

Even if this was ideologically downplayed by missionaries, this transformation was thus not only spiritual but also bodily (cf. Vilaça 2016). In Ivan’s change, aspects like bodily suffering, social role, and source of agency paralleled the ideas that can be loosely related to a shamanic experience. In both shamanic and evangelical initiations, there is a complex interplay of submission in which an exterior agent plays a significant role. Both Saul/Paul and Ivan are deeply frightened during their conversion experience. Saul encountered the resurrected Christ, was blinded by him, and heard his voice asking why he was persecuting the Lord. Once he gets his sight, Saul discovers that he is Christian and that his name is Paul. His identity and volition were changed from outside.

Anxiety and fear are a common state when becoming a shaman. Ivan’s own experience at the bus stop would have qualified for an encounter with spirit helpers, although now they were just ngylyekaq, a general name for evil spirits. Ivan explained to me that spirit helpers were frightening by telling me a story of one of his ancestors who desired to become a shaman. He went to Yamal, where an initiated shaman blindfolded him and told him to run around the tent. Suddenly, spirits appeared to him and he was frightened half to death. “Playing with spirits” was utterly dangerous, in Ivan’s words, something that he knew firsthand. Remarkably, in the literature, one can find similar initiation stories ending with a frightened person becoming a Christian instead. In the early 1840s, the Finnish linguist Matthias Castrén traveled among Nenets who were recently missionized by the Orthodox Church. An ex-apprentice of a shaman told him how he had started learning the art when he was fifteen years old. Two teaching shamans blindfolded the initiate and told him to beat a drum. The shamans hit the novice on his head and back. Suddenly the boy saw a crowd of spirit helpers (tadyebtsoq) dancing on his hands and feet. Being very frightened, he fled to the local Orthodox priest and had himself baptized. After that he stopped seeing tadyebtsoq (Castrén 1853, 191–92).⁵

Instead of becoming a shaman, Ivan became an evangelical preacher under the influence of an external agent, taking on the role of leader in the community, which historically in Nenets society was thought to require shamanic abilities (Golovnev and Osherenko 1999, 58). Although there were no shamans left by the end of the Soviet period who would carry out once-elaborate ritual seances with a drum, pendants, or other instruments, the idea of the possibility of going through a personal transformation remained. The emergence of Christian priests in the post-Soviet period seemed to offer a less demanding path to dealing with spirits.

Others’ conversion narratives I heard were not as dramatic as Ivan’s. After Ivan’s conversion and baptism in early 1995, there was for a couple of years a gap before others followed his example. Ivan’s brother Andrei and his wife, Lyuba, were the next in the tundra to be baptized. On their second meeting, Andrei made an impression on Pavel by having thoroughly read parts of the Bible and having begun to act like “a true Christian” by giving away clothes or other personal belongings to others. Enthralled by “the work of God’s Word,” Pavel performed the rite of baptism in a tundra lake in 1997. Lyuba was the first Nenets woman to be baptized by Pavel. Because of the lack of common language and the gender barrier, she was baptized rather as an extension of her husband and not as an individual who had her relationship with God properly validated as viable. As I shall discuss later, this happened not only among Baptists but also similarly among the few Pentecostals alike (see chap. 4).

Andrei was convinced that God decided who was saved and who was not. Although God performed his “saving work” person by person, Andrei believed there was a collective dimension to it as well (see Vallikivi 2009, 69–73). Comparing the Yamb-To and the Ural Independents, he summarized the process like this:

Andrei’s unusually deep faith expressed in the new language appealed to Pavel. As a result, he proposed to the Nenets converts that they elect Andrei as their presbyter. In 2004, when Andrei was ordained in the Vorkuta prayer house, “the Nenets church” was founded with thirty-four members (unbaptized believers not included).⁶ This was a year of abundant harvest for Pavel, as a revival took place among the Ural Nenets as well. That year adult members of the Vorkuta church from among Independents reached well over a hundred, outnumbering the Russian membership twice over.

Figure 2.2. A moment of prayer in front of the box for food and teacups after having lunch on the way, August 2002.

Alcoholic Hiccup Worms

For the new believers, punryodaq, this was not only a break with sacrifices, offerings, sacred items, old-style singing, and the consumption of raw blood but also—perhaps most importantly—a break with vodka (syarka). Alcohol played a significant role in Ivan’s conversion. For him, it was a radical movement away from alcohol, and this has been the case with nearly all herders, whatever the variations in their personal stories. Making a complete break with alcohol played a pivotal role as both a practice and a narrative for the Independents. An acute perception of the destructiveness of alcohol consumption has made people susceptible to the new promising temperance program that Christianity has turned out to be.⁷

Discussing conversion in different parts of the post-Soviet space, scholars have pointed out that the anti-alcohol stance of evangelical churches has been very attractive.⁸ Undoubtedly, becoming an evangelical Christian offers a chance to quit the habit of excessive drinking. Furthermore, I would like to suggest that rigorous abstaining practices are the first steps toward introducing the new ethics of self-control. Among the tundra dwellers, drinking sessions take place only occasionally, as vodka or its surrogates are not available all the time (Lukin 2011, 122–26; Yoshida 1997, 123–25). Among non-Christians, social drinking is common during visits to other tentholds, especially on Orthodox Church calendar holidays, if there is any vodka available. When herders go and barter with their trading partners (usually every head of a family has one) in settlements, they expect to be served tea, something to eat, and a shot or two as a sign of hospitality. After having a taste of vodka in the mouth, a day or two of binge drinking might follow in the village. Unlike many Russians who drink in the privacy of four walls, Nenets often drink in public places, which has turned them into an easy target for contemptuous remarks by Russians.

Alcohol has the capacity to unleash rage among herders who otherwise value restraint. Examples of the destructiveness of alcohol need not to be sought from afar. When tracing genealogies, I learned that in the post-Soviet period alone more than a dozen Independents were killed during drinking sessions or were frozen to death in the snow when drunk. In one case, all four participants of a drunken binge died, as they consumed suspicious ethanol sold to them by local Russian traders (kommersanty). This problem was not specific to the Independents but also to the villagers and collective farmers who drank a lot, especially from the late Soviet period. For instance, the neighboring Ust-Kara collective farm was said to have collapsed in the 1990s from the curse of drink, as herders exchanged most of the communal reindeer for vodka.

For the Independents, there are no communal reindeer to barter for vodka; instead, one’s family herd (or racing reindeer, as with Ivan) may disappear. In the late 1990s, a young Yamb-To family lost its entire herd, three hundred strong, as the reindeer ran astray during a month-long drinking party near Vorkuta. Since then, the family has been “sitting” on a lakeshore living from fishing. Alcohol has meant occasional hunger for many. A few herders described how from time to time in their childhood they suffered empty stomachs because their parents spent all their cash on vodka. However, often children were given vodka by their parents. Yegor recalled how when he was a child, grandfather Mikul used to give him a shot. “When I was eleven, I did not want to drink anymore,” he once proudly said. Yet later he returned to the habit.

Missionaries have banned drinking for good among converts, and the ban has been strictly followed. From the perspective of Nenets, becoming teetotal probably marks the biggest challenge in their lives. The first time I met Yegor I asked him how many years he had been Christian. He replied, “I have not been drinking for two years now.” Significantly, he took the true change from the day he abandoned drink. Before that Yegor had another two-year period when he slid back into drinking from time to time, even if he was willing to become a Christian in his own words. Among converts, such abstinence is the clearest statement of genuine transformation one could ever give to oneself and others.⁹

When asking about his way of finding God, another young reindeer herder called Khriska told me a story about how God stopped him drinking. He had bought vodka in the village of Amderma as usual. When he came out onto the street, the plastic bag gave way under the weight and all the bottles fell on the concrete pavement (betonka) and smashed to pieces. As he said, this was God’s hand protecting him from the actions that were about to destroy his life, both here and in the hereafter. I heard numerous times from many converts that if they had not converted and given up drink, they would have been dead by the time we met. Even if the new discourse gave the option to somewhat overplay it, many, including non-Christians, saw in drinking a risk to their lives and well-being.

Pavel often blamed drinking as the reason why there were no more conversions among the Yamb-To Nenets. He said that Satan kept people back through alcohol, and as such whole families were in danger of being deprived of salvation. He argued that nobody other than Jesus was able to free the Nenets from their addiction. For example, Pavel talked of Poru (the same man who told me he was an “atheist” taught by “Uncle Brezhnev,” see chap. 1), “Poru has heard the Word many times. Today he listened to it like for the first time and remained very pensive. Sandra [Poru’s wife] was inclined toward God for some time. But without their husbands, women don’t do anything. A woman waits for the husband’s decision. But Poru loves to drink. Yet our Jesus is able to make his heart receptive.”

Pavel’s remark about gender relations mirrors above all his own inability to communicate directly with the women. Despite some public male dominance, Nenets women in many families have significant authority. I happened to witness how husbands and wives made important decisions together concerning migration, trade, and schooling their children (cf. Niglas 1997b). It is true that some women are more interested in conversion and in influencing their men to become sober by getting their husbands to accept conversion. Other anthropologists make similar observations elsewhere: for instance, Colombian women who, as Elizabeth Brusco (1995, 5) argues, “domesticate” their husbands through conversion to evangelical Christianity. As she describes, the 20 to 40 percent of the family’s budget was spent on alcohol by the husband, which was saved after conversion.¹⁰

Vodka has an important place in rituals. Older people who have not converted and have not demonized the Nenets spirits say that alcohol (and tobacco) help to hold back and appease certain spirits. Non-Christian Nenets keep some reserves of vodka to feed spirits by pouring “spirit water” (khekhe yi) into an upper recess of spirit figures, onto stones and trees, or into the rivers and lakes in which spirits are known to live. For the missionaries, this is living proof of Satan’s workings. However, there is also a category of agent that lives inside a person and demands vodka. Ikota khalyq, or “hiccup worms” (known in the wider area as well, see Il’ina 2008, 74–78; Khristoforova 2016; Napolskikh et al. 2003, 300–302), are said to demand alcohol through their host’s voice by hiccupping and shrieking. Once Yegor explained that when drinking together with his “pagan” uncle Vata on a Sunday, he nearly caught ikota khalyq from him. Yegor described how a few times an unwanted hiccup came out of his mouth asking for drink. When he was relating this story, I could see from his face how horrified he was merely by the thought of being possessed by ikota khalyq.

While I was staying with Vata in September 2006, he often complained to me that ikota khalyq were giving him hard times when he had no vodka at hand. Indeed, most of the time the old man was just lying on reindeer hides and suffering in pain. As he said, the hiccup worms were moving in his body and making his arms and legs painful (cf. Khomich 1976, 25; Kvashnin 2018, 27; Lepekhin 1805, 266; Schrenk 1848, 549–50; Yevladov 2010, 164). Yegor had stopped visiting his “pagan” uncle, like most punryodaq who—if they had not completely severed the bonds of kinship with non-Christians—avoided kin who were drinkers. Once he went to see Vata to tell him that ikota was Satan, who was making him drink, and that only Jesus could heal him from his possession. Despite a promise that Jesus would heal him, Vata avoided missionaries. Like some other older people, he preferred to give vodka to his hiccup worms, as he could be certain that in these moments his limbs stopped aching (see chap. 5 for more detail).

Another person who was said to have an ikota was Yegor’s mother Granny Marina. As she lived with her daughter Ksenya and son-in-law Yevgeni, both Baptists, she heard Bible readings and prayers every day. Like most people, she did not object to the need to pray to God. Now and then, when there was a communal prayer, she went onto her knees; at other times she just sat and sometimes fell asleep during the service. To my question at the beginning of my fieldwork, whether Granny Marina was a believer, Yevgeni said that she was possessed by an ikota demon and because of that “her head is not well, and she does not understand what has been said.” I lived in the same camp for many weeks over the years and my impression was that she was just silently ignoring what her children were doing, disguising it with madness. She had old ideas about how to relate to the spirit realm. Sometimes she said that this or that thing should not be done because it was taboo. When I once mentioned the word “cholera” (kholera, referring to spirits that cause anthrax or other epidemics) during a conversation when sitting around the table, she abruptly told me not to say the word again, as it would attract the spirit of the illness. Baptist children somewhat nervously laughed at her and told me not to pay attention to what she had said.

Becoming Russian: Tensions between Old and Young

For the non-Christian older generation, the young people had gone too far in their dealings with lutsaq. Paradoxically, the oldest among the converts, like Yegor or Andrei, found themselves with the same problem, which they did not expect when they initially became members of the church. The single biggest problem was that their children wanted to leave the tundra. This new economy of desire had reached the Independents with a significant delay compared to many collective farmers whose children had for years preferred to abandon the nomadic lifestyle (see Rozanova 2019).

This was a source of anxiety for Christian parents, who thought one should remain in the tundra and live with the reindeer, whether one is Christian or not. The young generation of Independents, born after the 1980s, was generally willing to convert, having witnessed little of the old Nenets religion. There were a few exceptions though, as with a young herder who told me that he “was not going to believe” because he wanted to have a big herd. He had heard that Christians should give away their reindeer and live a life of poverty in order to be saved. Some others had not converted because they wanted to avoid conflict with their nonbelieving kin. But in general, one could sense among the youngsters a fervor to become Christian that was related to the imagined future trajectories of adult life.

I realized this most clearly when talking to Andrei’s daughter Vera. Eighteen years old (in 2007), disciplined, and hardworking, Vera confessed to me, “There is only one thing that makes me sad. I do not like living in the tundra anymore.” She added, “Almost every young person wants to leave the tundra.” City life appeals to Vera for various reasons. Life is hard and dull in the tundra, she argued. The coal-mining city Vorkuta, which was the image everybody bore in mind, was what was seen as full of life and intensity, compared to the repetitious life in the tundra where there were never enough socially entertaining events. Vera attended school for seven years, longer than most others in the community, and she wished to go to Naryan-Mar to obtain secondary education in order to get out of the tundra (cf. Vladimirova 2018, 11).¹¹ Moreover, for Vera there was a question of whom to marry in the new era when alongside “arranged marriages” the first “love marriages” took place. She declared that she did not wish to marry anybody from the tundra. “My parents should not choose a husband for me,” she said. Vera then recalled with excitement her first trip to Saint Petersburg to a church youth gathering where she met a nice Russian lad who expressed his interest in her. When I asked Andrei what he made of his daughter’s wish, he sighed and said with resignation that God would take care of it (Bog usmotrit). He could not say much against it, especially when Vera argued that living in the city would allow her to be in tighter communion with her sisters and brothers in faith.

Pavel supported her wish to leave the tundra, as Vera said. Although missionaries do not make overly forceful attempts to make reindeer herders sedentary, they implicitly share the view of wider Russian society that a nomadic lifestyle is unnatural in the current period. Unknowingly, they had adopted a view according to which nomadism is “a sociological cul-de-sac,” something that Soviet evolutionist ideologues believed in as well (Gellner 1988, 106; cf. Sneath 2007, 121–56; Stammler 2005, 21). Even though Pavel admitted that there was a greater concentration of devilish dangers in the settled world, he told me another time matter-of-factly that “sooner or later, they [the Nenets] are going to be tired of this way of life in the tundra and move to the settlements” (cf. Vagramenko 2018, 73). Some converts like Ivan had already proved the case, as he had finally moved to Vorkuta in 2005. He was a pathbreaker for the youngsters. However, when visiting Andrei’s family in 2012, Vera had been married to a Ural Nenets and become a mother. Her worst fear of moving to an unknown family had not realized, as her groom moved to Vera’s parents’ tent. This was an exceptional arrangement in a patrilocal society (Vera’s father had followed the same rare pattern). Vera was not the only one who stayed, as most other young adults who had enthusiastically told me about their wish to leave still lived in the tundra.

For Yegor, too, becoming lutsa was an issue that touched his family acutely. Although he said that he belonged to God’s people (nuv khibyariq in Nenets, narod bozhiy in Russian) in which different ethnic groups were involved and would be united as one in heaven, he did not like the prospect of his children moving into a settlement and becoming Russian. Yegor’s children, who were the first converts in the family, convinced him to become a punryoda. Now, most of the children dreamed of moving to the city like the pastor’s daughter Vera once had.

From Yegor’s perspective, his brother Ivan, who had moved to the city recently but still owned reindeer and often visited his brothers in the tundra, was in an ambiguous position. “My brother Ivan is lutsa,” Yegor once declared. Then he paused for a second and continued, “All right, maybe he is still a Nenets [nyenets’], but his daughter will be a Russian woman [khabyenye] for sure.” The fact that Ivan’s family was Nenets-speaking did not make them Nenets, nyeneyq nyenetsyaq (“real people”). Those who live or do things like Russians and who do not have reindeer are lutsaq, was Yegor’s diagnosis. The fact that Ivan did business like a Russian businessman (kommersant) only confirmed that he should be called lutsa. Many did not regard Ivan as a true believer anymore because, as mentioned above, he was now acting more as a middleman for his own greed and not for God.¹² Tellingly, another nickname he had was Monkey (ngayatarq), which referred to his Russianness (see chap. 1), although nobody told him this directly (cf. Ssorin-Chaikov 2003, 160). Again, Ivan wore a Russian suit with a homemade reindeer skin tie with antler-motifs on it, showing that he still valued his “Nenetsness,” while his Russian suit made it possible literally to blend into the Russian Baptist world.

For Yegor, this boundary between the nomadic and settled way was neither impermeable nor final. He argued that if Ivan returned to the tundra, he would be a nyeney nyenets’ again. However, what he feared more was that the metamorphosis of his children could become irreversible. Thus, his practice of naming (e.g., lutsa) was not so much classifying for the sake of classification but a production of performatives that were about trying to maintain a certain togetherness of his family. In other words, labeling somebody lutsa served as a ridiculing discourse that fought against the epidemic wish of the youngsters to leave the tundra—a move that would cause them to lose their skills and bonds. Despite competing Christian concepts, these abilities and connections were still considered essential for being human (nyeney). Youngsters moving out of the tundra and living without reindeer would thus mean, in the eyes of their parents, losing the part of their personhood that was tightly entangled with reindeer and the land. And yet, Yegor’s and Andrei’s attempts to fight against their children’s wish to—as they saw it—become lutsa would go against the Christian logic of the insignificance of one’s “ethnicity” or “culture” in one’s life. They said that faith was not a matter of Russianness or Nenetsness—what mattered was serving God. Therefore, Yegor and Andrei were caught by the evangelical ideology crafted by Russian Baptists they loyally followed.

Figure 2.3. Literate youth reading the Baptist journal Herald of Truth, February 2007.

In this chapter, I pointed to a link between Ivan’s conversion and the Nenets shamanic cosmology where there is a place for a radical self-transformation. This is not to argue that a shamanic self-transformation was replaced by a Christian one, and as such, would just be the continuation of the old mode of existence under the guise of Christianity (like the Nenets “Christian shaman” that one encounters in a report from early Orthodox missionization, see Znamenski 2003, 47–50). Ivan went through a rupture in a very different sense than would have been the case if he had become a shaman. He becomes thinkable for himself in a radically new manner, as a subject in a Badiouan sense, helped by the newly acquired Baptist language. As I shall discuss in chapter 7, this involves an ideal of fixation of God’s gaze on oneself accompanied by an inevitable threat of sliding back to one’s former sinful self.

New relations with Russians, becoming sober, and acquiring modern technologies were all part of Ivan’s journey to Christianity. However, his path to Christianity is not to be understood only by the drive to become modern. As Cannell, Harding, Robbins, and others have pointed out, Christianity has its own compelling logic that makes people become Christian. On the one hand, it seems that in the case of Ivan, Christian logic arrived late—as it often does—and that the initial impetus lay somewhere else. On the other hand, it was not only his desire and decision to become a mediator, a businessman, or a shaman but also new relations and events that made him into a Christian subject.

My wider point is that evangelical Christianity offers tools for transforming one’s ideas about available and expected transformations over the course of an extended future. In this respect, it must be stressed that Christian logic with its message starts to work on its own; as it sinks in, other trajectories emerge through daily engagements with disciplinary practices of a linguistic, emotional, and cognitive nature. Missionaries taught the converts to reject their desires for “mundane” or “material” and instead to focus on their new “spiritual,” a church-based interiorist identity with a Russian tint to it. This is directly related to the endless work that missionaries do all over the world by separating “religion” and “culture,” being an example of a constant “work of purification,” as Bruno Latour (1993) would characterize it (cf. Keane 2007). The result is that the relationship with God and his community makes any other senses of belonging irrelevant because relevance lies only with the divine and persons filled by the Holy Spirit and living as the Body of Christ.

Unexpectedly, the new “life-giving God” makes youngsters wish to leave the tundra and live a life that old people compare to a kind of death. As one herder told me, there was not much difference when somebody stayed to live in the city or died. Remarkably, the Baptist parents have been actively repudiating their past ritual engagements, while their children have not had much to repudiate in these terms. Yet as if they felt a need to repudiate something, they are ready to cast off their tundra life altogether. Being pulled by various forces of modernity, Nenets converts have joined a movement that sees itself as thoroughly “antimodern,” which is what I shall look at next.