4

DESTRUCTIVE PERSUASION

Materiality, Mediation, and Language in the Mission Encounter

In this chapter, which forms a bridge between the first and second part of the book, I shall move to the issues of materiality, mediation, and language, by discussing cases of burning Nenets’ sacred objects and the discourse that surrounds these actions. The acts of destruction are key events in the mission encounter, as they radically change relations among those involved, cutting earlier relations and forming new ones. The destruction of sacred objects—which Nenets call khekheq and Russians call idoly—as well as what precedes and follows constitutes a complex event. It is defined by dynamic and tense social relations between people, their words, and things and by different ontological assumptions. Do these things entail any power? If yes, are they dangerous? Which agents are linked to them? What are the consequences of destroying or leaving them behind? Who is responsible for these consequences? The questions and the answers to these questions are not the same for Christians, non-Christians, and those in-between, as they see things differently.

As Raymond Corbey (2003) admits, analyzing the destruction of images on the colonial Christian frontier is difficult because of the nature of the sources we have. By studying examples from diverse missionary contexts from various parts of the world, he tries to make sense of whose actions these actually were, and he insists that these were not only the missionaries’ but also, often mainly, Natives’ initiatives. Corbey (10) writes that “these various forms of agency were so entangled that it is difficult to sort them out, all the more so because of the scarcity, brevity and biased nature of source material, which usually has to be culled, with much effort, from missionary archives and periodicals” (cf. Rutherford 2006). Obviously, the past is a distant land, and it remains a challenge to make sense of the ontological and moral ambivalences inherent in these events, especially when mediated by written sources.

While agreeing with Corbey that these are instances of “entangled agency,” I suggest that we need a more nuanced understanding of these destructive events where words, feelings, and actions form multifaceted and dynamic relations with one another. Part of the complexity lies with different ideas about what things and signs do in the world. Discussing the case of the Dutch Calvinist missionization among the Sumbanese of Indonesia, Keane (1998, 2007, 2008b) shows that missionaries accuse the “fetishists” of being captives of the material objects to which they falsely attribute agency. This claim has its roots in the history of Christianity. Keane argues that agency and materiality have been central issues in the Euro-American semiotic ideologies since at least the Reformation. As a result, in Western modernity, people are pulled “between the desire for transcendence and abstraction on the one hand, and the persistence of material embodiment and social embeddedness on the other. Transcendence . . . haunts modernity in three unrealizable desires: for a self freed of its body, for meanings freed of semiotic mediation, and for agency freed of the press of other people” (Keane 2006, 309–10). Indeed, these desires are never fully realized, as I shall demonstrate below, despite the press of missionaries to free Nenets’ consciousness from the press of the material, the demonic, and the neighboring “pagans.” Although the Baptists and Pentecostals in Arctic Russia would agree with Calvinists in Indonesia that the source of idolatry is found in one’s heart, they yet argue that if a person owns an idol, the devil may act merely through the relationship of belonging, without the person knowing about it. In a way, Russian Protestants seem to share some ontological presuppositions with Nenets: for both, the khekheq and their “masters” have real power and a quality of distributedness over persons and things. Unlike the Dutch Calvinists, the Baptist and Pentecostal missionaries in the Russian North thus rely simultaneously on the modern ideology of representationalism and the nonmodern ideology of entangled persons and things.

How do Russian missionaries see things and words and their relationship to one another? While touring around in the Nenets tundra, the Baptist missionaries, in their first encounters, focus their attention equally on telling the “good news” and denouncing idols. They present a short account from Adam’s and Eve’s fall to the last judgment. After this “act of witnessing,” Nenets are asked two questions. The first is whether the person believes in God, and the second is whether the person possesses any idols. Receiving usually positive answers to both questions, the evangelists claim that there is an incompatibility between the two and declare that God wants them to destroy the idols, usually referring to 1 Corinthians 5:11.¹ In the tundra, missionaries find “true” idols, which they imagine to be especially dangerous because people are said to regard these as their gods in a literal sense. Therefore, idol destruction is central to the systematic cutting of earlier relationships with spirits but also with kin, friends, and one’s own past. As we shall see, the question remains whether such cutting is final.

The Baptists are not the only ones who argue along these lines. In this chapter, I shall also focus on the second most influential mission in the region, which is the Pentecostals. Although in many respects they are not as strict as the Unregistered Baptists, they are “literalists” who take seriously the biblical claims on the dangerousness of idols. Both Baptists and Pentecostals maintain that the hearts and minds of Nenets are transformed after they burn their idols, having thus been freed from the shackles of the devil. In an important sense, a person’s consciousness is seen to be bound or located “physically” in the idols (cf. Vagramenko 2017a, 157; 2018, 79). As a result, in accusations of idolatry, an ideology of automatic efficacy dominates, which goes against the idea of conscious choices based on the right Christian values.² If a person possesses idols and is thus possessed by these, the person cannot exercise free will as a Christian.

Before discussing the current situation, let me outline the historical background. Since the nineteenth century, in some areas even earlier, Nenets began to integrate Orthodox icons known as lutsa khekheq (“Russian spirits”) into their rituals, in which they are treated similarly to their other khekheq. Nowadays, Protestant missionaries hostile to any such images must decide what to do with these items, as these are part of ancient disputes over correct understandings on God and materiality. This is a continuation of an old fight over the issue of how the divine can be made present and how the demonic can be made absent, and what kind of objects (if any) can mediate sensuous engagement with the divine (e.g., in sacraments). Protestants have extensively accused one another of idolatry from the very beginning. For instance, Martin Luther cast out the image-smashers from Wittenberg, accusing them of attributing too much power to the images and warning them not to become idolatrous about the absence of material items (Eire 1986, 2; Michalski 1993; van Asselt 2007, 300).

Developing further the Byzantine iconodulic theology, Russia became a place where sacred images (and relics, holy water, incense, neck crosses, etc.) famously came to occupy the heart of not only religious but also various everyday practices (Hanganu 2010; Paxson 2005; Shevzov 2004; Tarasov 2002). Partly as a reaction to Eastern Christian image worship, Russian (many of them ethnic Ukrainian) Protestants grew into a significant religious movement in the nineteenth century. They argued that only the Word of God (accessible above all in the form of scriptures) is a true medium that acts directly on the heart and consciousness of a human being. From this stance, they addressed their accusations toward the Orthodox who venerated icons, wore crosses, and otherwise “wrongly” invested materiality with spiritual efficacy. Yet, for the Orthodox, Protestants seemed preposterous in their claims of being able to communicate directly with God, denying the possibility of representation of God who became incarnated (H. Coleman 2005; Michalski 1993; cf. Keane 2014).

As in the days of the Reformation, different strands of Russian Protestants today fiercely accuse one another of idolatry, even if they have very few ritual objects except for the printed or written letter. This accusation of idolatry comes from Paul’s claims of investing too much power in certain objects that should be invested into serving God instead (and recall Luther’s stance mentioned above). Furthermore, this is exacerbated by modernity. The Unregistered Baptists believe that other self-claimed Christians are engaged in idolatry, as they visit sports events, concerts, and the cinema, where worldly people do not hide the fact that they go to admire “their idols.” No member of the Unregistered Baptist church can have a TV set at home without being accused of idolatry. It is not only screened violence and obscenities that prove their case but also more fundamental “misrecognitions” in the matter of the right kind of mediation of the divine and the proper use of human senses (as exemplified in chap. 3).

As the Bible is silent on the new technologies, Russian Baptists resort to Paul’s teachings on the value of hearing and seeing. Like many times earlier in the history of Christianity, the concepts of visual and aural are perceived to be key issues here (Michalski 1993, 185). They emphasize that faith comes by hearing, referring to Romans 10:17.³ This takes place at the expense of the visual or tactile, which is distrusted. An Unregistered Baptist writes in Herald of Truth that even screening the film Jesus is not acceptable, as that “would close access to the true, saving blessed Word” (Chukhontsev 2000, 14). In the Baptists’ view, God rendered himself into flesh and after leaving his flesh; his work was made available through the readable text (i.e., the Bible, which is the source of valued orality, be it live or cassette sermons, hymn singing, poem reading, or artistic declamations in front of the congregation). “The repudiation of the material is a selective process,” as Matthew Engelke (2007, 224) has aptly commented. His own study shows how the members of the Friday Masowe Church in Zimbabwe reject the reading of the Bible to avoid any material mediation with God and let instead the Word of God to be experienced “live and direct” through the Holy Spirit.

The Russian missionaries in the tundra, however, admit that the Word of God requires some kind of visual media. Using elected humans, God had his word written down, which is replicated, usually on paper, in endless forms. Pavel encouraged Nenets converts to draw colorful banners with quotes from the Bible and decorate their tents with these (cf. Prokhorov 2013, 177). This was to imitate otherwise plain prayer houses in the city where behind the pulpit one could read a quotation, “God is love,” on a bare wall. In many Nenets families, I saw these banners hanging inside the tent (see fig. 4.1), in the pure part where earlier people used to have a shelf with Orthodox icons hanging above a box with a few Nenets sacred items (or a pike head attached to the central pole protecting against curses, see chap. 5). The “dead matter” was replaced by the “living word,” as missionaries put it.

One had to believe that the banner with biblical words was not an idol but the viva vox of God. In a sense, the text was supposed to render its material carrier invisible in a way comparable to how early ascetics did not look at the icon but looked past it (Buchli 2010, 192). However, there is a danger of misjudgment lurking in the background. This is especially the case with illiterate Nenets for whom the letters on the banners remain inscrutable. The same goes for the Bible that one carries along but is unable to read, while possibly assuming that the physical Bible offers divine protection.⁴ And even if one can read, it is not self-evident how to ensure the correct interpretation: How does fearing God, which one reads about on the banner, differ from fearing the demons against which missionaries warn in their harangues? As I shall demonstrate below, not only readable words but also spoken words may become vulnerable to misrecognition.

Figure 4.1. Interior of a tent in the Polar Urals, March 2007.

The text on the banner translates to: “And I will give them one heart, and one way, that they may fear me for ever, for the good of them, and of their children after them (Jeremiah 32:39).”

In the evangelicals’ view, reading words in the Bible or hearing these retold by someone is the only valid form for recognizing idolatry and dealing with the idolaters. Viktor, a visiting Baptist missionary, characterized idolatry among the Nenets to me like this: “This is exactly as written in the Bible—they make everyday items from wood, but from the leftover they make their idols. So do the Nenets. From the skins they make clothes and tent covers, and from the rest they make these dolls.” Like all authoritative statements, Viktor’s claim has its source in the Bible, in this case from Isaiah 44:15–17, which was frequently used in the very first disputes among Reformers (Karlstadt, Hätzer, and other so-called fanatics) but also later in Russia. As the art historian Sergiusz Michalski (1993, 165) writes, “Another Russian sectarian related that after reading Isaiah 44 about the idols made of wood he decided to destroy his idols by burning them to gain some warmth—since this is implied by the Bible passage,” and later he adds, “This passage served as an incentive for an iconoclastic act committed by a Russian Biblicist Stundist as late as 1900” (188). Present-day Russian Baptists who are descendants of the Stundists (Shtundists) allow us to move Michalski’s observation to the early twenty-first century.

Russian evangelicals are leading a third wave of iconoclasm in the High North today after the Russian Orthodox and the Soviets. From the 1820s onward, Orthodox missionaries destroyed Nenets spirit statues in the landscape and family spirit effigies in the herders’ camps for a hundred years. This was initiated by archimandrite Veniamin who led a baptismal campaign by burning and smashing wooden and stone spirit statues (with the help of freshly baptized but hesitant Nenets) at dozens of sacred sites scattered all over the tundra west to the Urals, including the most important one on Vaigach Island, called Vesako (“the old man”). Veniamin (1851, 25, 53; 1855, 117) boasts in the reports that he erected wooden “life-giving crosses of Christ” in these places instead. Other priests followed this example.⁵

In the late 1920s and 1930s, at the height of the anti-religious campaign, Soviet activists confiscated shamanic paraphernalia and other sacred items in reindeer herders’ camps (Glavatskaya 2006; Yadne 2006, 388; see also Skachkov 1934; Suslov 1931).⁶ From the Nenets’ point of view, these incidents, among others, produced stories about deaths of Communists whose attempts to destroy sacred items backfired—sometimes literally. I was told about a Communist who fired at a female spirit effigy, myad pukhutsya, but the bullet bounced back into his forehead. In the later Soviet period, the devastation was continued by extractive industry, which destroyed numerous sacred sites (CAFF 2004; Kharyuchi 2013, 98–101; Murashko 2004). In addition, many items ended up in museums, taken there by atheist agitators, ethnographers, archaeologists, and others. As one Nenets explained to me, when a famous seven-headed syadei of Vaigach Island was taken to Moscow by an expedition, the people who held it fell severely ill (cf. Kharyuchi 2013, 104; Murashko 2004, 11). Museums containing sacred items became places that were perceived to be loaded with spiritual agency. Against the intentionality of the Soviet regime, local people saw these places as either dangerous or attractive places to visit (Liarskaya 2011).⁷

The early twenty-first century offers a continuation to this account of destruction and displacement. While cultural activists and scholars are seeking to give legal protection to Indigenous sacred sites (Dudeck et al. 2017; Fedorova 2004; Kharyuchi 2001, 2004, 2013, 2018; Kharyuchi and Lipatova 1999; Murashko 2004), Protestant missionaries see the existence of these objects as a direct challenge to God’s will.⁸ Baptists and Pentecostals claim that among the Indigenous Siberians they have discovered the existence of idolatry in its quintessential or prototypical form as it is described in the Bible. Nenets’ household god images correspond to the scriptural “graven images” (see, e.g., Exodus 20:3–6). They argue that, knowingly or unknowingly, the “pagan” Nenets follow Satan, whose ambition is to obtain and destroy as many souls as he can—this link must be severed.

As mentioned, one of the first questions the missionaries ask in their initial visit to a reindeer herders’ camp is whether the family has any idols. Consider the following case that Baptist Pavel conveys in a mission report (that was circulated in the congregation) on his first visit to a Yamb-To family in 1997:

Missionaries believed that in idols, as in humans, the inner core entails the essence. This explains why Pavel did not object too much to Rita’s wish to protect what she regarded to be Nenets cultural heritage (cf. Liarskaya 2011, 19). Pavel let her take the rags from around spirit figures for the museum, as he did not see these being as relevant in Satan’s workings. He failed to understand that in the Nenets’ perception, the clothes set aside for the museum were powerful and as much a part of the relationality with spirits as the core of wood or stone. The whole “body” of the spirit, with its history, could not be divided into the core and a mere decorative outward addition. Furthermore, some khekheq had no “hard” core at all but only cloth or reindeer skin in layers. Together, these constitute both the biography and the essence of the figure (see below).⁹

In general, I was surprised how little open resistance there was to the missionaries who came to destroy Nenets spirit figures. In many cases (like the one of the Laptanders’ above) people burned their spirit effigies before they understood even the basics of the new message. They had just accepted that it was better to get rid of these items, but in a seemingly safe way through the missionaries.¹⁰ However, next I describe a case in which there is considerable resistance to burning of khekheq, even if it appears to be a voluntary act.

Baptists and Pentecostals Competing for Idolaters’ Souls

I did not see the burning of khekheq among the Baptists. Yet I saw one such event in the family being converted by Pentecostal missionaries, which I am going to describe and discuss in detail below. Although there are a few differences between the Baptist and Pentecostal take on idolatry, their main thrust and logic of divine and demonic agency and the dichotomous understanding of materiality and immateriality are similar. The case below also allows me to discuss the relations between Pentecostals and Baptists in the region as well and the choices of a denomination by potential converts.

In 2007, I lived for four months in a Ural Nenets family that was then being converted to Pentecostalism. Iriko and Pukhutsya, both nearly sixty years old, had four daughters and four sons, between eighteen and thirty-three. They were all living with their parents, except for the eldest daughter, who had married a Khanty reindeer herder. Others had not found partners. Tikynye, the second-oldest daughter, told me that this was because they lived most of the time on their own, and their parents did not visit other camps often enough to be able to arrange marriages. Recently, the prospect of finding a partner had become even slimmer, as they were Pentecostals and most others in the vicinity were Baptists or non-Christians. The borders of potential kin were being redrawn, and each person was compelled to make a careful choice whether to become a Baptist, a Pentecostal, or to remain outside these bounded groups. There were only two other Pentecostal Nenets families, although they were not eligible for marriage, as they belonged to the same patrilineage.¹¹ For part of the year, three Pentecostal families migrated close to one another. Sometimes they conducted lay services together; at other times, pastors from Vorkuta paid a visit to their small tundra flock.

One day before the end of my year-long fieldwork, my host mother, Pukhutsya, called me aside and gave me two items. She asked me not to tell the other members of her family, except for her daughter Tikynye, who was standing nearby. One gift was an old Orthodox neck cross that belonged to her husband, Iriko. He had inherited it from his great-grandfather, who probably received it from the Kolva Orthodox church in the nineteenth century. Iriko had not worn this cross around his neck for a couple of years from the time when the Pentecostal and Baptist missionaries had started to visit his family and when his daughters had been baptized in 2005. The other item Pukhutsya gave me was a curious piece of reindeer skin called a tarq pad. This is a special piece of fur that can be found, on rare occasions, on the inner side of the skin on the neck of a reindeer. When a reindeer is slaughtered and tarq pad is discovered, people say that this family has reindeer luck (ty yab) and that this luck will bring an increase in the number of reindeer in the herd. This luck is seen as the favor of spirits and gods (Khomich 1977, 14–15; see also Niglas 1997a).

Figure 4.2. Pukhutsya and Iriko, May 2007.

Iriko and Pukhutsya’s family luck was visible. They were called reindeer-rich (tesavei, teta) people and were seen as a success story, especially considering that many in the Urals lived in poverty. Their herd had grown to more than a thousand animals from a few reindeer when Pukhutsya and Iriko married thirty-five years earlier. They had managed to restore the herd to nearly the size of their grandparents’ day before the animals were confiscated by the Vorkuta sovkhoz and Gulag administration following the mandalada uprising of 1943. After the collapse of the Soviet state, Iriko’s family herd began to grow quickly. In his perception, this growth did not come so much from the altered economic situation and changes in legal environment but from care, luck, and a good relationship with the spirits. He told me that “there are many reindeer dedicated to god in my herd. These are reindeer I do not harness. Because of that, god pastures my reindeer well.” By “god” he meant Pe Mal Khada, “Grandmother of the Mountains’ End,” to whom he had dedicated twenty-five of his reindeer. These majestic, castrated bulls were called myenarui.¹² They were neither harnessed for everyday work nor earmarked, nor were their antlers cut, as they had to be kept in peace, because they were the nodal points between guardian spirits and the rest of the herd (Kostikov 1930a; Niglas 1997a). Until recently, Iriko made sacrifices to Pe Mal Khada by strangling a reindeer and feeding the khekheq with sacrificial blood and vodka. He asked Pe Mal Khada for protection from malevolent agents like diseases and Russians.

In summer 2007, when we arrived at the northernmost camp (myadyrma) of Iriko’s family, we could see on the horizon in the northeast three mountains called Ngutos Pe, Khadam Pe and Khabtam Pe. These formed the very end of the Ngarka Pe (“big stones”)—that is, the Ural Mountains. Iriko explained that in the middle, the mountain of Khadam Pe, was goddess Pe Mal Khada’s tent, north to this stood her sledge for tent poles (ngutos), and south to it was a lying bull reindeer (khabt). This sacred site is one of the major Nenets sacred sites, next to those in Vaigach and northernmost Yamal.¹³ When visiting these or other sacred mountains, men took stones from there for the inner part of the khekheq.¹⁴ In return, they sacrificed a reindeer and left some offering like a cloth ribbon or coin alongside the reindeer head and skin. The stones were clothed and they grew more voluminous every time when the deity was sewn a new miniature overcoat or a scarf was added as an offering. In Iriko’s family, the khekheq were Pe Mal Khada and her children. While Iriko had inherited three khekheq from his father, he had made himself two for which he collected stones from another sacred mountain in the Urals called Yabtam Pe. These, he said, were also daughters of Pe Mal Khada. Until recently, most people had similar anthropomorphic figures on their sacred sledges (khekhengan)^r15 but most, like Iriko, had gotten rid of theirs. As I was told, Pe Mal Khada helped with giving birth, healed, guarded reindeer, and kept away disease. One could see that among Iriko’s khekheq, Pe Mal Khada was most powerful, as she had the thickest layer of coats on her. In other words, all the sacred items were charged with power over the life of their existence: they had their biographies, which people considered when solving their problems. In Nenets thinking, a khekhe is thus not a mere representation of a deity—it is a deity, or rather, it is a relational being tied to the sacred site of its origin, being a person in person.

When Pukhutsya handed the cross and the tarq pad to me, I hesitated and said that they should stay in the family. Nevertheless, she insisted that I should take them, saying, “One day, these things would be thrown into the fire anyway.” She spoke of this as if it was unavoidable. Yet she did not sound too emotional. I suppose that one reason why these things had remained untouched so far was that these were not exactly “graven images” and thus not idols proper.

Three months earlier, I had witnessed why some things caused an acute problem. Vladislav, a Pentecostal missionary from Vorkuta, made Iriko burn spirit figures that were kept in his sacred sledge. A few years earlier another Pentecostal evangelist convinced Pukhutsya to set on fire her female helper, myad pukhutsya. This is the most “public” effigy, as it is kept in the tent separately from the other khekheq of the sacred sledge because of her relationship with the dangerous female power (Golovnev 2000b). Tikynye recalled that a big quarrel took place between her parents after that event. This is why Pukhutsya did not want me to tell Iriko that she had given these things away. It was a sensitive matter. While Tikynye and the other children were eager to burn the “devils” (yavolq), the parents were troubled and obstinate, Iriko more so than Pukhutsya. After some resistance, they relented.

Iriko, like some other Nenets, had visited the Vorkuta Baptist church once or twice in the early 1990s but did not stick with it. Toward the end of the 1990s, the family had gained contact with a Russian Pentecostal man who was working in the Sovetskiy Village Council near Vorkuta. He was helping the family and other paperless herders apply for documents and welfare payments. From that time, Iriko’s daughters paid occasional visits to a Pentecostal church in Vorkuta. However, it was only after they met Pentecostal pastor Vladislav that the girls became more seriously engaged with Christianity. As a result, in 2005, Vladislav baptized Iriko’s daughters Tikynye, Netyu, and Maranga. An energetic man in his early forties, he ran a Pentecostal congregation next to the Vorkuta railway station while also working as a railway inspector. His congregation was one of seven Pentecostal churches of the same union in the Vorkuta area.¹⁶

I met Vladislav in April 2007 in his home church during a service, in the basement of a block of flats. Iriko’s children took me there. During the service, his style of reading scriptures and sermonizing reminded me of what I had seen among the Baptists. Pentecostals and Baptists shared not only the basic evangelical tenets but also many other features (e.g., the same hymnals), which was partly the result of their shared Soviet history (Wanner 2007, 76). But when Vladislav started to sing a song to a pop tune with a guitar in front of a dozen congregants, it hit me that I had arrived in a rather different aesthetic space. The singing was followed by a prayer in which (unlike the Baptists) all the congregants were speaking in Russian simultaneously, and many of them were waving their raised hands. Vladislav led the rhythm of the prayer, gradually speeding up at the beginning and slowing down at the end in order that everybody could start and finish together. Although mostly I could understand Vladislav in a sea of chaotic sounds, as he was louder than the others, at one moment his inspired Russian transformed into glossolalia. Many Russian congregants followed, which reflected that they also had the Holy Spirit acting in them.

Vladislav was welcoming and encouraged me to do research in his church. He invited me to witness the rite of baptism of Iriko’s three sons (Pubta, Kolye, and Tyakalyu, who made a slower start compared to their sisters), which was to take place the next day (see fig. 4.3). Unlike Baptists, who baptized only in natural sites, the Pentecostal rite took place in a small pool in the church building. This time, though, in April, the parents were not invited to be baptized because they had not yet burned their idols. A week after the baptism of the three brothers, Vladislav had planned to visit Iriko’s family in the tundra to “prepare” others for water baptism as well. Basically, he came to convince Iriko and Pukhutsya to burn the spirit effigies kept in the family. Like Baptists, so the Pentecostals considered idol destruction as an essential step before one could become a member of the church. Two months later, in early June 2007, I attended the baptisms of Iriko and Pukhutsya (see fig. 4.4). With them was their son Ngelya, who had thought about joining the Baptists but finally decided to become a Pentecostal.

Figure 4.3. Before a baptism in the pool of the Pentecostal prayer house, April 2007.

From the right: Pubta, Kolye, Tyakalyu, and three Russian candidates; the texts on the wall translate to “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved. Mark 16:16” and “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. John 3:5.”

Figure 4.4. Baptism of Iriko, June 2007.

Despite the children’s rhetoric of commitment, one could not see much Christian activities in the tundra camp. There was almost never any prayer. After Vladislav had visited and convinced them that this was the most important thing to do, Iriko’s children prayed a few times, but after a couple of days, they stopped. Occasionally, Maranga and Netyu took out their Bibles and with great effort read a few words from it. They used to say it was a pity that Baptist Pavel had not sent anybody to their tent to teach them. Not denying the importance of Bible reading, Vladislav argued that illiteracy was not too big an obstacle, as the Holy Spirit gave wisdom and instructions directly. While Pavel would have agreed with Vladislav about God’s power in this respect, he regarded reading very important. Furthermore, there was a vital difference between the two in terms of creating dispositions: most Baptists were expected to carry out public acts of praise of God or confession under the pastor’s guidance, while the Pentecostals did this all simultaneously, erasing the position of a controller during services. Baptists were expected to scrutinize their inner life, to talk about it: they were more successful in introducing the mechanisms for bringing one’s—to use Charles Taylor’s (1989, 184) words—“thoughts and feelings into line with the grace-given dispositions of praise and gratitude to God.”

Pentecostals and Baptists were competing against each other in the tundra. Baptists had not only preceded everybody else in their white vehicle—serako masina, much admired by Nenets and Russians alike; however, missionaries avoided open admiration, as this would have qualified as a fetishistic act—preaching at places that remained inaccessible for the Pentecostals, but they had also dispatched young female teachers to instruct new Nenets believers. On the same day, when Vladislav was about to arrive, a Nenets family from a nearby camp came to visit Iriko. With them on the sledges sat Ira and Sveta, two Baptist female teachers from Ukraine in their early twenties. They were staying in the camp of illiterate Venu, who had been Baptist for nearly three years. They taught Venu and his family the Bible and Russian, reading, singing, and playing the accordion.

The guests entered Iriko’s tent. After an hour without much chatting, the Ukrainian girls proposed reading the Gospel. Although, as Baptists and Pentecostals stress, Paul had in his letters explicitly forbidden women from carrying out a service (“Let your women keep silence in the churches . . . ,” 1 Corinthians 14:34; see also 1 Timothy 2:12), they could still read and explain scriptures, if they were not doing it in a prayer house or as a formal service. Before taking the floor, they asked Venu, the only Baptist man present, to pray, to invoke the presence of the Holy Spirit. Then Ira started to read aloud a passage from the Bible. Her voice was full of victorious pathos, somewhat reminiscent of the scenes of Soviet pioneers performing inspired declamation (cf. Lane 1981).

Soon Vladislav arrived. Tyakalyu had met him in the railway station on a reindeer sledge. On a three-hour journey, Vladislav was clad in an extra-large thick reindeer fur costume specially sewn for him by Iriko’s daughters. He entered the tent and took off his coat, under which he had his dark blue railway inspector’s uniform with epaulets, adding an aura of authority to him. While the Baptist girls had a reserved and serious look, Vladislav was relaxed and busy cracking jokes.¹⁷ Behind the table, while eating, he took a boiled reindeer head in his hand and imitated Hamlet’s monologue (see fig. 4.5). The Baptist girls smiled with embarrassment. Venu’s wife, Lina, giggled. Feeling uncomfortable, the young Baptist instructors proposed to go back to Venu’s camp.

Figure 4.5. Pentecostal missionary Vladislav performing Hamlet’s monologue with a reindeer head in the presence of Baptist converts, April 2007.

In the competition between Baptists and Pentecostals for the souls, without any doubt, Baptists had been far more successful. Even Iriko’s children, especially Maranga and Ngelya, could not decide where to place their loyalty (partly because of not wanting to restrict their options for marriage). From time to time, they visited the Baptist prayer house as well. Surprisingly, Vladislav did not object to this. Instead, he encouraged Iriko’s family to carry out services together with Baptist families in the tundra because, as he said, “There is only one God. . . . I do not like when people draw lines between churches. There are Lutherans, Baptists, Pentecostals . . . but I am a Christian.” He liked to present himself as “tolerant.” As we have seen, Baptist Pavel was different, claiming that the Pentecostals were fake Christians possessed by Satan. So, after Pavel learned that Iriko’s daughters had been baptized by the Pentecostals, he stopped visiting Iriko’s tent, which disappointed the children. Pavel was convinced that there was no place for “ecumenism,” and he preferred to evangelize the remaining non-Christian population instead, who lived out of the Pentecostals’ reach.

The Persuasion of Iriko

After the Baptists had left, the floor was fully Vladislav’s. He filled the tent with fast speech, inspired prayers, and melodic songs from the hymnal The Song of Resurrection, which the female Baptists had used a few hours earlier. Like most Pentecostals, for Vladislav the force of the word lies in abundance and repetition (cf. S. Coleman 2006, 169). Vladislav related how he received his Spirit baptism and how powerful he felt when the power of the word came upon him. (From the Baptists’ point of view, not controlling what one was uttering was an unambiguous sign of demonic possession.) He recommended being open and waiting for a similar event in the lives of those who we were listening to him.

Vladislav then started a prayer in which he asked Jesus to increase and strengthen faith in Iriko’s family members and to give them Spirit baptism and the ability to speak in tongues. This time the foreign tongues did not engulf Vladislav, as often happened in the city. He finished his freely arranged prayer with a fixed rhythmic Lord’s Prayer (Otche Nash, “Our Father”). Until then, Iriko and others were muttering in a low voice; they now joined in louder, as they all knew the prayer by heart. In the background, the voices of Nenets echoed the minister’s words. As there are rarely individual prayers performed in front of others, Iriko’s family was less fluent in this genre than the Baptists, who were supposed to speak to God one by one. Yet I never heard any of the Pentecostal Nenets performing glossolalia either. Tikynye once admitted that a Russian sister taught it to her, but she gave it up, as she was not able “to get it right” (cf. Bialecki 2018, 212).

In the following sections, I analyze extended extracts of the speech event that took place after the service when Vladislav addressed Iriko. I suggest that the “act of persuasion” at the center took place in an inherent gap between different understandings about language, agency, and authority.

Iriko was apparently agreeing, although one could sense that he was disturbed by the whole event. Iriko’s children confirmed my impression but added that it was good that their father was made to accept the situation and disengage from the devils.¹⁸ After Vladislav had left, Iriko demonstrated his disagreement with much of what Vladislav had said, as I witnessed. Evidently, he was far from becoming a disbeliever in idols. Vladislav could not understand that, for Iriko, this had never been an issue of believing in the idols in a sense of loyalty as the concept of belief in that sense was not relevant in Nenets’ relations with the spirits (see chap. 6).

Although Vladislav talked of the need for changing values, it was not a matter of mere reevaluation. He placed individual consciousness at the heart of the fight between good and evil, which took place simultaneously on a cosmic and individual scale. Essentially, he argued that these doll-like objects displaced a “pagan’s” mind. The herders lying without consciousness after drinking reindeer blood and vodka were deprived of their own agency, hence their wretchedness and the absence of God’s protection. Along similar lines, the devils became visible, and people were living with fear because of their displaced minds. All this proved that these “pagans” were not free human subjects but distributed persons, hybrids of human substance and dangerous objects—a possible but illicit combination. The problem was that it was the wrong kind of distributedness. According to Pentecostal logic, one should become a hybrid of human and divine through Spirit baptism. However, this can take place only when the God-given freedom and agency proper to humans has been restored by stopping their enslavement to the devil.

After this near-monologic dialogue, Vladislav and all the others knelt on reindeer skins. Only Iriko remained seated on an empty bottle crate, just moving his lips from time to time, his look wandering back and forth from Vladislav to the floorboards. Others closed their eyes, and Vladislav started an inspired prayer, which was basically a continuation of his sermon, containing now direct addresses to God:

The next morning before the idol burning was to take place, Vladislav gave a long sermon (see fig. 4.6). Somewhat surprisingly, it was not about idolatry but about love. Eventually, he covered the core narrative of Christianity, from the Creation to the Last Day, in one hour. He spoke quickly. Iriko’s family, who (except for Pukhutsya) had a relatively good command of everyday Russian, struggled to understand. Vladislav used unfamiliar words and examples from the unknown world—for instance, he referred to TV programs, the heroism of the “Great Patriotic War” (Second World War), or the projects of industrialization (the kind of worldly references that Baptist missionaries almost never made).

Although much of the content must have slipped away, Iriko repeated Vladislav’s words from time to time. Vladislav was obviously taking these as an act of agreeing. What the missionary did not realize was that repeating was a part of Nenets communication pragmatics, something that many did as a sign of respect or participation. I observed several instances when people were as if agreeing by repeating missionaries’ words. Evangelists took this for propositional and not for performative value, which potentially had a subversive component to it. (I shall return to this point in chap. 5, where I discuss how silence replaces repetition in the mission encounter.)

Figure 4.6. Vladislav gives a sermon, April 2007.

From the left: Iriko, Tyakalyu, Vladislav, Iriko’s nephew, Pubta, Maranga.

Inspired by 1 John 4, Vladislav’s sermon was on three kinds of love: eros, philia, and agape. He explained that these were Greek words, and Iriko nodded, although this (including the word Greek) was Greek to him. At no moment did Vladislav seem to be troubled by whether the message reached the listeners. For Iriko and others, it was almost as if he was speaking in tongues. Lying on his back on reindeer hides, he was explaining. He said that while eros was restricted to marriage and having children, philia (in his version, philio) is a love between children and parents or between brothers and friends, which often triggers heroic deeds and even deaths. His example was from a Soviet propaganda text: “Especially during the Great Patriotic War, many heroes quickly emerged. People went and covered the embrasures with their bodies for the sake of their comrades.” He claimed that while this kind of self-sacrifice was good, this love was not yet perfect. The main problem with it was that it was based on the wrong ideas of exchange. He said that this love “depends on reciprocity—I love him because he loves me. This is so. But when he starts to do evil to me, my philio towards him fades away.” Vladislav then arrived at the culmination of his sermon by explaining that agape was the perfect love that was taught in the Bible. “This is the love,” he went on, “that does not depend on whether you do good to me or not.” It is a “free gift” that denies one’s profane self, the idea that flourishes in “ethicised salvation religion,” as Jonathan Parry (1986, 467–68) has characterized it (cf. Laidlaw 2000). Vladislav went on arguing that God loved people because they were his creation:

Vladislav then continued with a description of a TV documentary on how the Soviets were diverting rivers against their natural flow and thus destroyed nature in Central Asia and elsewhere. He brought an example closer to home, flirting with the concerns of the herders. These words triggered Iriko’s attention. Vladislav said:

A gas company was currently constructing a pipeline and dirt road right through Iriko’s summer pastures (see map 2). He had repeatedly complained to Vladislav that the gas people were destroying his pastures and that he was hopeful Vladislav would do something about it. However, the pastor recommended praying to God whose love and tolerance was almost unlimited. His message was that, in the end, the environmental or economic concerns were futile compared to those of the heart and mind.

Vladislav finished his sermon with a detailed description of what was going to happen at the end of time. “They make the fire under. . . . One cannot escape it. This goes on forever. One wants to drink. It is very hot. One cannot escape it. The major torment is going on in here [he put his finger on his head]. The person realizes, ‘I could have avoided it. I was offered salvation.’”

Vladislav had come to replace the fire of hell in the afterlife with the fire of idols here and now. Iriko’s reading of the evolving situation was something else, though.

Burning Iriko’s Sacred Images

Iriko was affirming, repeating, and quoting lots of what the missionary said. The sequence was only interrupted after the morning service ended, when Vladislav proposed, “Let us go to search for the idols where you have hidden them. Do they fit in the stove?” As usual, Iriko started affirmatively, saying absentmindedly, “They fit in the stove.” Then he quickly corrected himself, “No, not in the stove. They need to be . . . in the field.” As I understood later from children’s comments, Iriko feared that burning them in the stove would have caused the rage of the deities to come to his tenthold, his family (cf. Vagramenko 2014, 203–4). The fire spirit (tu yerv, tu khada) is known to safeguard the people in the tent. It could be fed with sacrificial meat and vodka but not with khekheq (see fig. 4.7).

Figure 4.7. Iriko’s khekheq and Orthodox icons known as lutsa khekheq, April 2007.

Everybody moved out of the tent. Vladislav gathered some firewood while Iriko went with Pukhutsya and Netyu to the sacred sledge behind the tent and took out a box with Nenets khekheq and another thin box with Orthodox icons (lutsa khekheq). Surprisingly, not so much the doll-like Nenets khekheq but the icons became a source of tension in subsequent moments.

Vladislav went ahead, carrying willow twigs on a low metal sledge that he pulled after himself with a rope. Every time he stopped and suggested making a fire, Iriko told him resolutely to move further away, until they reached a mountain slope outside the area where reindeer were lassoed. This was apparently to keep the reindeer away from the potential revenge of the spirits-to-be-rejected. The very same khekheq had helped him to increase his herd to such numbers as they were now. There Iriko put the box with the khekheq down. He looked around and asked where the box with the Orthodox icons was. Vladislav said that he had left them behind, for these could be given back to the Orthodox Church. Iriko was unyielding and said, “Of course, they have to be burned!” Pointing at Pukhutsya, he continued with an irritated voice, “The fool said, ‘We need these.’ I bought these in vain. It cost five hundred rubles each.” Vladislav was silent.

While Vladislav was not interested in the slightest what the Nenets spirit effigies were thought to do, because their true nature was explained in the Bible, the icons seemed to be a different case. Once the box with icons was brought, he opened it and started to explain:

Vladislav took an icon and kissed it while saying the word “kiss” to demonstrate how people misplace their devotion on a mere material item. Unlike with the idols, there was nothing “behind” these things. Iriko, who was bending over the shoulder of squatting Vladislav, took another icon in his hand, said another affirmative “yes,” and kissed the icon as well.

After a moment of confusion, Vladislav gave up the idea of returning the icons to their place of origin. He tried to salvage the frames of the icons, inspired probably by Iriko’s comment that he had paid money for the pictures in a church shop. Vladislav took it as a matter of rational calculation and an attempt to avoid wasting the investment in the frames as commodities. He proposed to Iriko, “Take out the pictures and put photos of your family in there.” Iriko said abruptly that this should not be done. For him, most likely, the magical efficacy of the icons was not only in their image-like representations but also in the objects as wholes (like the khekheq with their stones and clothes). Furthermore, placing their own photos in the frames of the Russian khekheq would have potentially set their own selves on a dangerous conjuncture of human and spirit worlds. As these khekheq are sometimes called sidyanggq, meaning “shadows” in Nenets, and as photos are also called sidyanggq, this move would have possibly caused a clash of perceptions (more on sidyanggq below).¹⁹ Despite Iriko’s protests, Vladislav took the icons out of the box, where they were placed above the khekheq to be burned all together. Iriko was once more overridden. As soon as the flames covered the box, he left in a hurry (see figs. 4.8 and 4.9).

After Iriko had moved away, Vladislav told me in front of the fire, holding under his arm the salvaged icons, “Thank God! You see how the person had been sinning. Many years he had resisted. His sons were worrying. They were saying that their dad was keeping idols there. Today the person made the last step on his path to God. I am pleased. It is written in the Bible that an idol is nothing in the world. Let this [fire] burn them up! Would it no longer bring misfortune!” Vladislav continued:

I asked Vladislav whether he still planned to give these pictures to an Orthodox church himself. He replied,

Figure 4.8. Vladislav saving the Orthodox icons from the fire, April 2007.

Vladislav did not make the same argument about the Nenets khekheq, which the flames had completely engulfed by that time (see fig. 4.9). He did not consider these as replaceable items, nor did he call them “pieces of art” that represented somebody’s work. As he had said the previous night, Nenets idols were not good for souvenirs (“a memory from ancestors”). Most importantly, they were not something one could just change an opinion about. They had to be destroyed to effect a physical transformation in their owners.

Figure 4.9. Iriko watching his khekheq burning, April 2007.

From Iriko’s perspective, obviously, there were too many asymmetries at play (as it must have happened in colonial or mission encounters so many times before in various parts of the world, see Latour 2010, 2–7; Masuzawa 2000, 251–52; Pietz 1985). For Iriko, it was difficult to understand why Vladislav was keen to preserve the icons or dismantle them, because this would not have changed the fact that these were related to the spirits, “the Russian spirits.” The question was obvious: Why did the Nenets images have to be destroyed, while the Russian ones did not?

In addition, with the tension over the Orthodox icons, the introduction of the ideology of immateriality threatened to fail. On the one hand, Vladislav seemed to be convinced that there were positive prototypes for the icons (e.g., Jesus, Our Lady) but he insisted that these could not mediate any divine power despite the expectations of those who kiss these (cf. Keane 2014; Luehrmann 2010). On the other hand, because of their link to devils or Satan, he was ready to claim that the idols mediated evil power (cf. Meyer 2010). As the Nenets images could not be reevaluated, they had to be destroyed because they made people drink, hang themselves, and drown, independent of people’s volition and thoughts. A mere verbal disavowal of the idols and keeping them as souvenirs would not have been enough because they carried in themselves automatic efficacy. Vladislav did not notice Iriko’s irritation over why Nenets khekheq needed to be burned while Russian khekheq did not. Like Baptist missionaries, Vladislav was not interested in how the Nenets economy of the sacred was working.

The whole scene was thus taking place in a gap where the two sides had different understandings, sensibilities, and motives at play. Their intentions never seemed really to match. Vladislav was never quite able—and as we saw, he was not really trying—to control what and with which intentions Iriko was quoting and imitating him. The moment of kissing alongside Iriko’s quotations (e.g., “There is no God!”) encapsulates the floating quality of the whole dialogic event. Like things, words did not submit themselves to one interpretation. Seemingly overdetermined spoken words like the affirmatives of Iriko were in fact heavily underdetermined, as they eluded control and worked against the semantic context that Vladislav was trying to impose. In a way, one can say that Iriko was recycling Vladislav’s words while Vladislav was recycling icon frames, both sides departing from their own cosmological and ontological assumptions.

When I later asked Iriko if he was afraid of any consequences, he said, “I do not know what is going to happen.” After a pause he said, “Vladislav—not I—wanted to burn them. The spirits will take revenge not on me but on Vladislav. You see, he already got divorced from his wife.” Tikynye interrupted, “His wife was a drunkard. That is why he left her.” From time to time, the daughters kept on at their father because he had not abandoned his “old ways.” After the khekheq were burned, a week before Iriko’s baptism, I heard him saying to Netyu, “You think that you will go to God after your death. Who will want you over there? This is a deception made up by people. I have not yet seen Jesus. If he sat just next to me here, I would believe then.”²⁰

For Iriko, this was a matter of visible evidence. I asked him whether he had seen Pe Mal Khada. He replied, “Of course, I have seen her many times in my dreams!” Iriko continued talking about Christians with a burst of irritation, “This is all Communist shit. The Communists will come again. Vladislav is a prick. They all lie. You think that God is here. Where is he?” Tikynye said, “In one’s heart.” Iriko reacted, “This is all bullshit [khambanziq].” Netyu interrupted, “I am going to fly to heaven anyway.” Iriko replied, “When I see you flying, then I shall really believe in God. But I have not seen it yet.” Netyu started to sing an evangelical hymn quietly in Nenets, and at the same time her father continued in an agitated voice, “This is all deceit. The believers are weak. If they were strong, then the pastures would open up more quickly.” (It was late spring and because of the deep snow, the reindeer cows with newborn calves were struggling.) After a while, he said (despite having just called Vladislav “Communist”), “I recently dreamed that the Communists would come, and the believers would be imprisoned first. Then my dream stopped.” As laid out in chapter 1, the trope of destructive Russians (lutsaq) was still very strong.

Another time, Iriko made a remark to his daughters that one did not need the khekheq right now, but once one fell ill, then one might need them again. Tikynye, on the other hand, said to me that when they had the idols, they were frequently ailing. She described a case when she had fallen seriously ill. Her father went to Vorkuta and bought a scarf and a bottle of vodka. He poured vodka on the mouth of the effigy of Pe Mal Khada and tied the red scarf around her khekhe. I asked whether this helped. Tikynye did not deny that the offering might have helped with her recovery, although she still called it “devil feeding.” She also recalled how she and her sisters, in their childhood, secretly took these images (calling these vandako myu, “the internals of the cargo sledge”) and unwrapped their many layers to see what was inside. They discovered stones in there. At the time of our conversation, these stones were already on the mountain slope blackened in the fire.

Although I never directly asked Iriko about this matter, I think he might have considered it the least disruptive way to disengage from the spirits by leaving the stones in an undisturbed place, “where feet do not tread,” as he characterized such areas (cf. Lehtisalo 1924, 116). He seemed to be cautious about the impact of these stones that came from sacred sites and were thus still connected to their spirit masters (like his special reindeer, who belonged to Pe Mal Khada, still sustained a connection with the deity).

Spiritual and Linguistic Dissonance

In general, most Nenets, both Christian and non-Christian, were not ready to engage too much in discussing spirits. This topic did not belong to the realm of verbal discourse (although some people like Iriko or Vata talked about it more freely than others). In the eyes of the devout Yamb-To Baptists, one should not know too much about idolatry; because of that, they told their children virtually nothing about their firsthand experiences with spirits. This kind of talk or knowledge was by its nature an engagement with the spirits. Yegor and others insisted that it was dangerous even to verbalize the names of the spirits, as this was unpleasant to God and attracted Satan’s attention (as his “pagan” mother Granny Marina did, see chap. 2). Also, writing about these matters could be damaging, as Yegor once warned me, “Don’t you think that those who will read your book may come to believe in these spirits?” By “believing” he did not mean to deny the reality of the spirits or devils but rather to avoid engagement with them, as they were utterly dangerous.

In Yamb-To, the longest conversation on the spirits (or rather “demons”) I had was with Ivan, who must have felt that, as an experienced believer, he could give the right biblical explanations on the matter (see chap. 2). Ivan explained to me that, according to the Bible, there were only two options for how the idols could be discarded: by burning or burying them. As digging through the permafrost was too daunting a task, only the first option from this recipe was practiced. Everyone agreed—non-Christians, converts, and missionaries—that the idols could not just be left behind in a campsite. Both Christians and non-Christians argued that they still had power over their owners or that they could cause harm to those who accidentally found them. Yegor’s eldest son once explained to me that an idol left behind could be picked up by somebody, and thus that person could become a victim of the idol and the person who left it behind would be responsible.

Both Baptists and Pentecostals were convinced that destruction of the material form was the key to change, as it freed people from the shackles and kept them from returning to Satanism. Baptist Pavel writes in his mission report:

Nyeteta was possessed by Satan through her father-in-law’s—that is, her husband’s family’s—possession of the idols. Nobody questioned the personal, “inner” condition of Nyeteta because the mere existence of an idol in the family—even if absent from its usual location in the camp—served as a source of her problems (cf. Vagramenko 2017, 157). Nobody discussed whether she “believed in” or worshipped Satan. From the Baptist perspective, there was no need for that, as her possession was a symptom of her sinful condition, not being really concerned at that moment about the question of whether the sin comes from inside or outside the person (cf. Robbins 2020, 61).

Pavel explained that for Satan, everything was possible in order to hold people back from burning the idols, and that Satan became especially active when he realized that somebody was about to convert. He told me that some Nenets would not convert because they had heard about people who had lost their reindeer after conversion. A specific example he gave me was about a herder who had converted, but afterward could not find any of his reindeer in the communal herd. Despite the missionaries’ promise of powerful protection from the Christian God, many were not convinced. One Yamb-To herder told me that soon after an old woman had burned her female spirit effigy, myad pukhutsya, she died. Reindeer herders who decide to eliminate their khekheq dare not do it by themselves but wait for the missionaries. The idea is to avoid possible retaliation of the angered spirits, and to transfer it onto missionaries.

Missionaries say that the destruction of idols is solely a decision of the reindeer herders and not in the least theirs. They only assist; they never burn the idols themselves with their own hands. As Pavel put it, “I have never even touched any idol in my life. The only thing we do is to reveal the true nature of these idols; it is up to the herders to decide what to do next.” Missionaries whose hands were “clean” insisted (somewhat inconsistently) that it was entirely an outcome of an individual’s changed mind and heart (cf. Jorgensen 2005, 454). Yet at times Protestant individualist rhetoric was blurred, as we saw when Nyeteta’s mind and heart could not change because her family had not completely severed the link with their idols.

Before moving to Iriko’s camp, I briefly lived with another Independent family in the Urals. Vasnyu’s family had been Baptists for three years by then. Vasnyu complained that his reindeer had been dying since baptism. He argued that this was because of the overgrazing of the fragile mountain slopes he was pushed to because of the growing density of people and reindeer. When I moved to Iriko’s camp, I heard an alternative explanation. Pubta and Tyakalyu said that when deciding to become a Baptist, Vasnyu had left his sacred sledge in the Khadam Pe sacred place, Pe Mal Khada’s home.²¹ In the following three years, he lost hundreds of his reindeer: he had had over one thousand reindeer but now only a few hundred were left. Pubta gave his theory of severance by saying:

Pubta’s brother Tyakalyu, who stood next to us, added to this what was behind the sacrificial logic in this particular case: “Look, the one who took care of the reindeer, he is hungry now and comes and takes revenge by eating the reindeer.” Pubta added to this, “You see, the spirits of the dead [khal’myer ngylyekaq] cooperate with one another. That is why his reindeer are dying.”

According to Iriko’s sons, just as with any other human or nonhuman person, a khekhe has a shadow soul and a breath-soul, the image that copies a living person who consists of three parts: sidyangg, yindq, and ngaya (“body”) (cf. Lar 2003, 64; Lehtisalo 1924, 115). In Pubta’s and Tyakalyu’s view, idols do the same things as recently deceased humans whose shadows wander around for forty days (the number is borrowed from Orthodox Russians or Komi) before they finally move to the hereafter and cease to be overtly dangerous. It also seems that once the idol’s breath-soul has gone to the sky through burning, its sidyangg would not be able to take revenge. At another time, Tikynye explained to me that spirit figures cannot be stored on a sledge with other items or left alone and not fed over the winter or summer “because the sidyangg would then leave the body of the khekhe.” Although there are many overlapping and contradicting claims about “part-persons”²² and the names and shapes they come with, what is significant here is that the biggest changes in the lives of human and nonhuman persons alike take place when one or another part is gained or lost.

Furthermore, what escapes missionaries is the nature of temporality and locality of sacred objects and sacred sites. Among Yamal Nenets, as Vera Skvirskaja (2012, 159n4) comments, khekheq belong to a sacred place: “Those things that have, in fact, been taken from sacred places in the tundra tend to be considered ‘borrowed’ and should, ideally, one day be returned” (see also Lehtisalo 1924, 65, 102, 104). Yevladov, on his expedition to the Yamal Peninsula in 1928–29, asked Pudynasi, a Nenets guardian of the Khaen-Sale sacred place, to give him a wooden spirit statue (syadei). Pudynasi gave it to him but warned Yevladov that he should return this statue in three years’ time and that if he or his son would not be able to do that, then the idol should be burned, as then “the spirit of this syadei [dukh etogo syadaya] will come to its own place” (Yevladov 1992, 150).²³

As we see, the burning of items can be an alternative to returning them, as it frees the soul of the khekhe who is able to return to its home place. While Christian missionaries took burning idols as total destructions, Nenets could consider it as a phase in a larger cycle.²⁴ Even if Iriko burned his khekheq and had himself baptized—what he saw as Pentecostal Vladislav’s acts—he had not necessarily passed the point of no return. As he was not counting on the protection of Jesus, he could only shift the responsibility to Vladislav to avoid possible dire consequences from the spirits. Having destroyed the khekheq, which had so far helped him raise his herd as well as protect against all kinds of malevolent agents, including Russians, Iriko could only hope that the relationship with missionaries would not make things worse. In this ongoing mission encounter, finality was obviously not understood in the same way by all sides.

As I have shown above, a mission encounter can produce moments of collision and collusion where different cosmological assumptions and ontological sensibilities meet. While the evangelists argued that the tundra dwellers were “persuaded,” Nenets who lived in settlements (like teacher-trainee Rita) were convinced that the missionized tundra dwellers were “coerced” into burning their sacred images (also they hinted that the missionaries were interested only in the reindeer meat that congregants must give to them as a tithe, cf. Kibenko et al. 2017; Vagramenko 2014); the reindeer herders themselves used neither persuasion nor coercion in their explanations. Analytically speaking, I would align myself with the reindeer herders and suggest that, in some cases, “becoming a Christian” is not necessarily best described as a result of “coercion” or “persuasion” but rather a result of a complex interaction in a gap between different understandings about words and agents. It is thus not solely a matter of the intentionality of individual actors but situational relationships that emerge between people, be they missionaries or missionized, converted or nonconverted family members. Iriko and Pukhutsya (unlike their daughters) were not convinced that their lives should be changed in any radical manner. Neither were they actively seeking to be agentive toward their own thoughts and feelings: they did not become subjects in a comparable sense like many converts around them (see chap. 7). And yet, the hope for protection from the powerful Russians (e.g., the gas people, a state farm boss) and relations with their children and neighbors played a vital part in their public acceptance of Christianity. But, like many other elderly people, their acceptance was less enthusiastic and was set against a general background of dislike toward Russians and their projects.

To sum up, both the wider context and particular communicative acts should be taken into account to better understand why people burned their sacred things.²⁵ First, stories of failures and successes matter. Herders in the tundra observe and discuss the lives of those who burned their sacred objects first. Since missionaries have arrived, the reindeer herds of most converts have grown steadily, especially in the Yamb-To (but remember the case of Vasnyu’s family in the Polar Urals), and the number of violent deaths, virtually all alcohol related, has decreased. Many agreed that there was not much to fear from cutting relations with the local spirits, as “the Christian God was more powerful” (cf. Wiget and Balalaeva 2011, 169). Second, the idea of burning or discarding the khekheq is not necessarily incommensurable with local practice and cosmology (as we saw in Yevladov’s description). In the end, sacred objects could always be replaced. Third, despite the evangelists’ claim that destruction is an individual decision of a convert, people might not see those as their own actions but that of the missionary. These images are thus destroyed in a complex communicative situation with its inherent imbalance of authority, verbal power, and assumptions of responsibility. As we shall see in the next chapter, evangelists’ verbal intensity and intrusiveness into personal autonomy make Nenets sense their vulnerability.