INTRODUCTION

A NENETS REINDEER HERDERS’ SUMMER CAMP NEAR THE coast of the Arctic Ocean. Two conical tents are erected next to each other on a sandy rise with a few dozen sledges standing in lines. Between the tents is a big white all-terrain vehicle. Aided by GPS and backed up by a satellite phone in case of emergency, three white middle-aged Baptist missionaries have arrived at this herders’ camp after making a three-hundred-kilometer journey across the roadless Great Land (Bolshezemelskaya) tundra from the former Gulag city of Vorkuta, which is their home base. Scattered around the white vehicle are the sledges of Nenets guests who have come from nearby camps. About thirty Nenets, adults and children, have gathered. Many of them burned their spirit figures and were baptized a few years earlier. They have come to witness the water baptism of Yegor and Lida, a middle-aged Nenets couple. This is to take place in a nearby lake through full immersion in bone-chilling water.

Words abound at this meeting, as the rite is accompanied by long prayers, readings, sermons, and hymn singing. Not knowing any Nenets, the proselytizers are speaking Russian with the tundra dwellers, relying on Ivan, the first Nenets convert, to interpret their words. Although most Nenets men and a few women understand some Russian, biblical language remains largely impenetrable. After prayers have been said on the shore, missionary Pavel goes into the water up to his chest and Yegor soon follows him. In response to the missionary’s question whether he believes that Jesus is the Son of God, Yegor says, “I believe” (ya veryu). Then the missionary immerses him backward into the water. Next it is Lida’s turn. During the following service in the tent, the missionary stresses that a few sincere words can save a person. He reminds those present that praying, reading the Bible, listening to sermons live or from audiocassettes, and discussing passages are the best sacrifice to God. The Nenets listen to Pavel in silence (see chap. 6 for more detail).

This scene gives a glimpse of a mission encounter in the Nenets tundra that can be characterized as a negotiation with and over words. Reindeer herders’ responses to these outsiders’ visits vary, from becoming Christian speakers to repeating imitatively to remaining silent in refusal. Some become engaged in pious self-transformation by carefully choosing their words and gestures, as well as shaping their habits of body and voice through kneeling, reading, singing, and other practices that come from a foreign world. In the long run, missionaries’ words inform ways of marriage, raising children, burying the dead, and engaging—or not engaging—in gift exchange. However, many converts struggle to learn the new belief language with its specific qualities of emotionality and movement. This may be due to their poor knowledge of Russian, insufficient motivation, or embodied habits from the past. Furthermore, there are stubborn “old-timers” for whom the missionaries’ words seem to be intrusive and intense, their demands insensitive and damaging, as these transform beyond recognition older patterns of sociality with kin, animals, and spirits. They gauge missionaries’ words against their earlier experiences with Russians (lutsaq), whose dangerous words they and their ancestors have been able to dodge more or less efficiently over the last centuries. They know that the outsiders’ words can be binding and make them vulnerable to undesired consequences.

In this book, there are Nenets animists on one side and Slavic conservative Baptists and Pentecostals on the other.¹ Both sides have had a long history of tension with the Soviet state, which desires to control every citizen’s mind and property, and both have managed to avoid that control for the most part. This is then, among other things, a story of a striking failure of one of the most invasive and controlling states in the world. Under socialism, two small groups of Nenets in focus here managed to live outside Soviet society, as they were not registered by the state institutions. They avoided engagement with the collective farms, the boarding schools, and the army that so thoroughly shaped the fate of virtually everyone else in the Soviet North. Among those few outsiders who knew of their existence, they were called Independents (yedinolichniki), a term for not-(yet)-collectivized peasants from the Stalinist period. Since the mid-1990s, however, they have been gradually integrated into the life of the post-Soviet Russian state. Today these two reindeer-herding communities are known as the Yamb-To Nenets and the Ural Nenets.²

Many Soviet Protestants also tried to avoid state intrusion into their lives, although in a different manner. The branch of Baptists whose representatives baptized Yegor and Lida has never been registered with the authorities; as an illegal organization it has carefully concealed its religious activities from the authorities throughout the Soviet period. Others, including their fellow Baptists who abided by state law, called these underground believers “Unregistered Baptists” (nezaregistrirovannye baptisty). Even if most of them fulfilled their civic duties as Soviet citizens, members of these congregations were targets of various repressions. Today these Unregistered Baptists still manage to avoid the authorities, who are once again stepping up persecution of minority Christians in Russia.

Even with these similarities between the Independent nomads and the underground Protestants, it is hard to imagine two more dissimilar social groups in Russia. Their differences in their ways of living, thinking, and believing are vast. And yet despite this cultural gap, since the mid-1990s, more than half of Nenets Independents have converted to either Baptist or Pentecostal Christianity. While these two Protestant denominations are bitter competitors for souls in the region today, the more conservative Baptists have been far more successful in their evangelization campaign, having won over a couple of hundred converts compared to a few dozen by the Pentecostals. Furthermore, these conversions within the poorly integrated part of the Indigenous population are especially surprising when compared to earlier, not very fruitful attempts at conversion by Russian Orthodox priests and Communist Party activists.

Ethics and Language in Conversion

The encounter between missionaries and Nenets at the baptism of Yegor and Lida is not an isolated case. Similar scenes of baptism have become increasingly common in remote places across post-Soviet Arctic Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet state and the disappearance of active anti-religious policies, these isolated communities, like many in other former Soviet areas, have seen a significant growth of new forms of Protestant Christianity, both home based and foreign (Pelkmans 2009a). Although Protestant missionaries are only recent newcomers to this part of the world, they have transformed the life of many Indigenous communities on an unprecedented scale.³

There is no single answer to the question of why Nenets convert to evangelical Christianity, only multiple interpretations, as this is a story of particular people in specific places that furthermore takes place at a certain juncture of history. Any such interpretation depends on whether one starts the analysis from historical structures, cosmologies, social relations, or individual lives (Hefner 1993a; Robbins 2011). For instance, why have less austere Pentecostals been less successful proselytizers in Nenets nomadic camps than the stricter Baptists? Is the reason in the content of the teachings, the difference of communicative style, the frequency of visits, favorable cultural patterns, or something else? As I shall demonstrate, specific techniques of proselytization and modes of interaction matter more than initially meets the eye. Furthermore, these encounters are shaped by personalities, as well as by vastly different cosmologies, ontologies, and moralities.

In one or another way, I suggest, conversion is related to an ethical question of how I, or we, should live. What kind of person should I become? Or what kind of community should we be? What are the decisions taken and choices made on this path? When should I speak or stay silent? And so on. These questions implicitly address degrees of freedom and constraint. Michael Lambek (2015a, 6) has written that “people, both collectively and individually, often freely and deliberately submit to specific kinds of discipline in order to cultivate an ethical disposition in themselves or their children, as though the ordinary social rules or conventional cultural ends were not enough, but equally as though sheer freedom was at least as dangerous an alternative.” As he notes, rules and freedom should not be treated as a simple opposition though, as life is replete with situations where people must decide “among several competing or incommensurable conventional commitments or obligations” (ibid.), requiring constant practical judgment. It seems reasonable to accept the idea that some freedom, which is realized while reflectively “standing back,” is also part and parcel of ethical life, as James Laidlaw (2018, 188) proposes (see also 2014). We shall see that the Nenets converts’ everyday ways, with their tacit assumptions and habits, many of these coming from the past, exist side by side with the newly introduced Christian ways that require constant self-reflection. These two ways of being sometimes operate separately, with limited interaction; at other times, they are sources of unbearable tensions.

What the current ethnography hopes to demonstrate is that ethical decision-making and self-reflection are of a highly varied nature, historically situated and socially entangled. For instance, promise-making and promise-keeping in the mission encounter can bind a person in ways that are unexpected and in hindsight undesired, and yet the person might find him or herself taking the course of action as promised. I suggest that commitments emerge through participation in shared language (e.g., prayers), texts (e.g., the Bible), rituals (e.g., baptism), bodily techniques (e.g., kneeling), institutions (e.g., church), rules (e.g., decalogue), and acts (e.g., helping a brother or sister in faith) that are explicit and can be judged by others. Although various clearly expressed ethical principles have been part of Nenets’ lives before, what is truly new with the coming of Christianity is the encounter with its highly systematized and orchestrated nature and its ambition to be a total morality system.

As Christianity comes to challenge that which was earlier, it raises many questions: How do the new ideas, emotions, and practices on offer relate to existing ontological realities and cultural values? What about earlier relationships—bearing in mind that conversion not only creates new relations between human and divine entities but also cuts the old ones (Chua 2012; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 254–56; Robbins 2015; Vitebsky 2017a)? What are the benefits of Christianity for now and for the future, considering the promise of paradise or the threat of hell, or the promise of modernity versus the sense of being marginal? What is to be gained and what is to be lost are not only matters of rational calculation; they also require an imagining of what kind of person one wants to be in one’s own and others’ eyes. On the one hand, ethical judgments and choices are related to one’s past experiences, current contingencies, and future aspirations. On the other hand, ethical questions are not only individual but also deeply socially embedded as they emerge in interaction with others.

When discussing religious conversion, it is often assumed that minds are changed from the outside and against the person’s will. Jean and John Comaroff (1991) have argued in their account of the conversion of Tswana in South Africa that in the mission encounter “the colonization of consciousness” takes place. The Comaroffs draw on the Gramscian model of hegemony in which dominant ideology comes “to be taken-for-granted” and is, in the end, “habit forming” (23). They think through Pierre Bourdieu’s uses of the tacit and explicit and suggest that Tswana had to accept “unspoken conventions” (26) without fully understanding their effects. However, the concept of colonization of consciousness has its analytical limits: it tends to portray converts as passive victims of power and thus eclipses the particular logic of ethical subject formation in Christianity (Cannell 2006; Robbins 2007a; Roberts 2012). As Joel Robbins (2007a, 6) notes, the Comaroffs “manage to a great extent to write Christianity as a culture out of their discussion.” Instead, he calls for the logic of Christianity and peoples’ freedom to act within it to be taken seriously.

Suppose for a moment we entertain the concept of a colonization of consciousness, mind, knowledge, or imagination—it is “never total, never as expected” (Engelke 2013, 233). In both Christian and Communist rhetoric, “converts” are argued to have gone through a total transformation. However, even the most pious or politically committed person’s lived life is far more complex, contradictory, and situated compared to what the governing moral rules would prescribe. Talking of social imaginary in Mongolia, David Sneath (2009) has argued that the colonization of imagination rarely succeeds, as imagining is always open to creative possibilities. He discusses Soviet-style modernism in Mongolia, in which the project of electrification coexisted with divinatory practices such as scapulimancy (foretelling future by reading marks on a burnt shoulder blade of a sheep), “practices that would appear senseless or meaningless if Soviet-style modernism had successfully colonized the imaginations of state subjects” (74; cf. Arzyutov 2019). While electric light and similar technical solutions were “meant to be read as metonymic emblems of a single grand narrative—modernity” (Sneath 2009, 87), local people kept their ancient divinatory practices and generated “an infinite number of narratives in answer to particular questions” (ibid.). Sneath, like many others before him, rightly points out that divination, like shamanic practices, represent not a rigid ideology or belief system but “a set of magical techniques requiring no personal commitment to any single religious cosmology or political ideology” (2009, 87; see also Balzer 2011; Humphrey 1998, 409–17; 2018; Pedersen 2011; Ssorin-Chaikov 2001; Vitebsky 1992, 239; Willerslev 2007). As we shall see, people in these remote settings have been involved in institutionalized projects of self-fashioning in rather limited capacities, if at all.

Similar discrepancies are visible all over Russia where the people have adopted certain Soviet values and rhetoric yet continue to engage with “backward” (otstalye) ideologies and activities full of “remnants” (perezhitki, “survivals”) from the past. These are typical situations when the exclusionary logic of “either/or” is unable to fully eliminate the pluralist logic of “both/and” (Lambek 2015b, 2021).⁴ For instance, I was told that among collective farm Nenets, at one moment, a Soviet-period Nenets brigadier (the head of a reindeer-herding unit in a state farm) could preach the Communist values of the planned economy, and the next moment he could carry out a reindeer sacrifice (khan) to protect his herd and family. Arguably, there was no tension around these practices, even if an outsider could have taken this as a scandalous contradiction.

As we shall see below, the church and the state both offer rule-based morality systems and ethical procedures. How these are taken up varies considerably, as each system has its own particular history. Compared to evangelical missionaries, authoritarian states like the Soviet Union could use far more coercive disciplinary power in their attempts to transform their citizens. Across the Russian North before the 1990s, Indigenous peoples were involved in the Soviet ideological system and workings of power through various explicit policies (Grant 1995; Gray 2005; Slezkine 1994; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003; Vitebsky 2005). At that time, both individual and collective consciousness (constructs such as “class consciousness,” klassovoe soznanie) were key categories in the Marxist ideology that the Soviets used widely (Kharkhordin 1999; Vladimirova 2006, 114–26). Obviously, they did not talk about colonizing the consciousness but rather “working on” or “raising” it. Or as the ethnographer Yevgenia Alekseyenko (1981, 91) writes in her paper on shamanism among the Kets, “The main means of fighting the remnants in the consciousness [perezhitki v soznanii] was via the gradual introduction of culture, knowledge, and medical care into the life of the Indigenous population.” Soviet Marxists argued that, the right ideas could not be introduced without changing the material base, which required a radical transformation of local economies and social organization. Indeed, with sedentarization and other social reforms, the Soviets managed to reorder many of the existing social and cultural patterns in the North.

However, despite the pervasiveness of atheism in Soviet society (Luehrmann 2012; Smolkin 2018), people were able to find ways to transmit their religion to the next generation through everyday actions that remained largely invisible to outsiders. In the case of persecuted Christian groups, this required spatial or temporal separation of religion from state institutions. For instance, Douglas Rogers (2009) shows in his account on Priestless Old Believers in the Perm Territory (a thousand kilometers south from the Nenets areas) how these Christians, historically persecuted by both the Russian Orthodox Church and by the state, became religiously active only when they retired from their occupational activity in the collective farm. Working-age adults kept their religiosity latent while carrying on certain Old Believer values and sensibilities in everyday practices that outsiders did not easily notice. The Russian Unregistered Baptists under focus in this book chose a different strategy, as they hid their activities by carrying out religious services in home churches where the youth were present and active (Panych 2012a). This was a protest culture that was pushed underground; when discovered, they risked their children and houses being taken away.

Obviously, nomadic Nenets were better placed to hide their rituals compared to Old Believers or Unregistered Baptists. However, what makes them different from these Christian communities is that Nenets lacked a comparable kind of moral activism, strict dogmas, formal religious institutions and projects of self-cultivation. Instead, animist reindeer herders interacted with the sentient environment through disparate knowledge originating from personal experiences combined with others’ stories of more or less distant origins. One of the central tasks of this book is to tackle this kind of moral and ethical complexity of the mission encounter in which an explicit and systematic set of norms meets more fluid and tacit assumptions.

Although morality and ethics overlap and interact with each other, Laidlaw (2014, 111) insists, following Michel Foucault, that it is useful to keep them separate in an inquiry: “Moral codes and ethics must be distinguished analytically, because they may change independently” (see also Mattingly and Throop 2018). “Morality systems” are recognizable by their explicit rules, texts, disciplines, rituals, and institutions.⁵ The way they are taken up varies considerably in different places and at different times. This is related to ethics—the way one acts on oneself, with the aim of becoming a particular kind of person. Without taking the philosophical distinctions to the letter (see Faubion 2011), I follow this rough division of morality and ethics, as it helps to interpret ethnographically some of the most puzzling moments relating to the question of why and how people take on a radical self-transformation such as conversion from an animist world of relatively tacit workings (most principles cannot be easily expressed in words and yet they work) to an evangelical religion of a rather explicit character (each act can and should be interpreted, for instance, through reference to some passage in the Bible). My question is then—to borrow from Laidlaw (2018, 186)—“What happens to ethical life when it is subjected to self-conscious and institutionalized reflexive [reflective] systematization”?

The book shows that with conversion to Protestantism, for the first time in their history, Independents participate in a systematic objectifying discourse on themselves and their community. Instead of using the metaphor of colonization of consciousness, one could then ask what new notions, words, and gestures are offered to people for looking at themselves, others, and the world around them after they have become members of a Christian congregation. Most of those who have agreed to take on the identity of believers enter a regime in which people are supposed to participate in “purposeful efforts at ethical transformation” (Keane 2016, 178). Webb Keane argues that “scriptural monotheisms tend to objectify ethics, exerting pressure on them to become more consistent and cognitively explicit. But objectification also tends to separate ethics from everyday habits and foster the taking up of a third-person perspective on ethical life” (208). In his view, Christian ethical practices rely on seeing oneself from “the third person perspective,” which takes the form of “the God’s-eye view” (205). Living from God’s perspective is also how Nenets converts themselves characterize their strivings for a pious life (see chap. 7).

It is not only a private relationship with God; accepting a new religion changes one’s status publicly, as living up to one’s promise to God is expected to become a visible commitment. In conversion to evangelical Christianity, a person makes a ritual promise (by a prayer of repentance, baptism, or some other ritual action) and thus marks a new performative relationship with the morality system that is to be followed. This is a strong oath to a particular kind of way of life, principles, and one’s community that from now on evaluates the oath taker’s behavior in the light of relevant criteria. Catherine Wanner (2007) emphasizes in her analysis on Ukrainian evangelicals—some of them belonging to the church unions that are active in Arctic Russia—that at “the core of morality is commitment to particular practices and beliefs” (10, her italics); furthermore morality “also embodies commitment to a group that helps uphold them through shared discourses and disciplining practices, which, in turn, reflect certain understandings of good and evil, of virtue and vice” (11). Wanner’s Durkheimian analysis shows how a religious community is primarily a moral community that follows a transcendent moral code and surveils its members’ acts and words. Any such community, on Sundays and beyond, also activates itself as a temporal speech community (Gumperz 1968) with specific ways of speaking (Hymes 1974) that rely on newly learned words and notions. As “older” words, topics, and rhetorical styles are shunned, it also produces new ways of being silent, as we shall see below.

A public commitment to a morality system creates a situation in which ethical consistency in one’s life must be demonstrated now and again. Even if the lived life (or the “everyday,” see Das 2015) is chaotic, ambiguous, and multifaceted and no morality system can guarantee that it is followed in its entirety, striving for coherence as a self-conscious aspirational project is common to piety movements (Keane 2016, 200; see also Laidlaw 2018; Lambek 2015a, 3; Strhan 2015). On the one hand, there are many narratives that suggest coherence can be achieved, and these motivate converts to purposefully transform themselves. For instance, there are exemplary stories of particularly pious persons one can hear during sermons or read about in church journals. On the other hand, even the diagnoses of failure that are signs of incoherence can be used for the same purpose, as when a pastor reiterates that God saves those who are aware of their sins and who are willing to ask for forgiveness.

We should not forget that converts live in larger communities that have intricate webs of existing relationships already in place. Occasionally, one can hear among unconverted Nenets that Christians do not live up to the moral rules they preach—for instance, when believers’ (punryodaq) reindeer trample non-Christians’ pastures. When these accusations reach converts, it can lead to counteraccusations instead of rectifying behavior and searching for forgiveness. What has not changed with the introduction of evangelical Christianity in tundra society is that one’s words are measured against one’s deeds; only the ways of justification have changed.

This mission encounter in the tundra is significantly about the ethical nature of interaction and of language more specifically. Veena Das (2012, 133) finds that humans are “embodied creatures and beings who have a life in language,” as this enables evaluation of oneself and others in their everyday vulnerability. Or as Lambek (2010b, 49) notes, “Language is central to the ethical and the ethical to language.” Both Das and Lambek develop their arguments from ordinary language philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell, who offer a fruitful path for thinking about how language shapes human sociality and ethical becoming through evaluative practices. Indeed, among evangelical converts, a great deal of the work on selves and others takes place more in language than anywhere else. My focus on language—and I include here silences—is the way into the main problematics, as speaking, and refraining from it, is one of the most contested sites in the mission encounter.

Of course, one should be careful when presenting Christianity in its various forms as an overwhelmingly linguistic project. While this is especially true with Catholic and Orthodox denominations, which do not regard language to be necessarily central in religious experience (see, e.g., Hann 2007; Hann and Goltz 2010; Norget et al. 2017), Protestants have been consciously and explicitly focused on language in their doings. The world the converts enter is a highly verbalized one, revolving around the quest for meaning and learning right intention (imagined as individual and internal) through the right form of self-expression (Bialecki 2011; Handman 2018; Tomlinson 2009a; Tomlinson and Engelke 2006). For instance, Simon Coleman (2000, 117) describes how Swedish charismatics, Word of Life members, are “akin to a verbal factory, responsible for the production of many millions of words a year in the form of taped sermons, books and magazines.” Robbins’s (2001a, 904–5) interlocutors in Papua New Guinea, playing with mixed messages regarding values, argue that “God is nothing but talk.” Susan Harding (2000, 33–34), in her study on evangelicals in the United States, demonstrates that conversion takes place through “a process of acquiring a specific religious language,” which starts from having been “inhabited by the fundamental Baptist tongue” and moves to the next stage when “the listener becomes a speaker.” At the end of this process, the person learns to take responsibility for the words uttered and assumes the identity of believer.

In this book, the concept of language surpasses its purely representational (i.e., propositional, referential, denotational, constative, etc.) dimension and concentrates on its link to personhood, body, and emotion in ethical practices. Obviously, there are several ways in which language and body interact (see, e.g., Butler 1997a). For instance, Tanya Luhrmann (2004) argues that more and more people in the United States are leaving mainstream churches seeking “intense spiritual experience,” and an intimate God, as “it is not words alone that convert” (518, her italics; see also 2012, 2020; Jenkins 2018; Webster 2013, 107). Luhrmann charts the religious transformation through which a person acquires a certain emotionality and specific skills and aptitudes in apprenticeship, calling this process “metakinesis,” a term borrowed from dance theory (2004, 519). Luhrmann is correct that learning is a multifaceted process that is not only about getting concepts and words right but is also about acquiring and cultivating certain sensibilities. Indeed, speaking is not just a matter of sounds and meanings; it is also a deeply embodied practice, often specific to a social group in which one learns to speak with authority supported by “a certain posture, poise, tone of voice and manner” (Jenkins 2013, 72). And yet as Luhrmann (2004, 522) herself demonstrates, among evangelicals, “learning to have these experiences” requires lots of words.⁶

As I shall argue, in evangelical Christianity, words not only are effective means for self-transformation but also constitute a core ethical value, as one’s salvation is imagined to be in one’s words, and as such they prevail over all other aspects of life. This is not only an abstract ideal but also a value in practice or, as Lambek (2017, 146) would argue after Aristotle, an issue of practical judgment when “distinct intentions or commitments are specified and clarified” (see also 2010b; 2015a, 34). Furthermore—
unlike gestures and other nonverbal communicative means—words have the capacity to make things explicit and thus readily available for reflection.

The Unregistered Baptists I am mainly concerned with in this book impute a huge role to words they imagine to be the source of divine wisdom as well as a path to salvation. As they say, they use the “plain” and “nourishing” word as the main way of being truly religious, and distrust other forms as “mere” emotional behavior. The crux of the whole change is in believing: this needs to be demonstrated to others (and oneself). To put it another way, one’s faith (vera) cannot be mute; it must be represented loud and clear, in words of repentance, prayer, or discussion of the scriptures. I once heard a Baptist minister preaching that church members should not rely too much on emotions. He went on to say that emotional forms of worship like singing, reading poems, and declamations should give more space to direct communication with the divine, but also to reading, discussing, and hearing the actual Word of God (Slovo Bozh’e). As he phrased it, “Songs and poems are just sweets or condensed milk that are additional but not directly necessary.”

Nenets converts perceive Russian Baptists’ emotionality—even if claimed to be relatively restrained—to be challenging to deal with. Sometimes missionaries reprimand those who pray barely audibly, saying they are not articulate enough. As several Nenets admitted to me and as I could observe myself, this was a highly demanding task, especially for those who have grown up without an extensive practice of explaining oneself to others and—not less significantly—to oneself as well. For a formally uneducated Nenets, becoming a believer requires swearing an oath, learning both oral and written Russian (the language of both missionaries and the Bible, as there is no Nenets translation of the full Bible yet), acquiring propositional knowledge in the form of teachings, and getting “spontaneous” prayer right (in either Nenets or—even better—in Russian) and complete with humble tones and deep sighs (see chap. 6).⁷

There is a specific ideology of personhood and agency embedded in this. In evangelical Christianity, spoken words are taken to reflect the “inner state” of a person as an expression of sincerity, transparency, and truthfulness, which is a crucial precondition for giving the spoken words efficacy in communication with God. The notion of sincerity as a match between inner thoughts and feelings and outer expressions in words and acts does not exist as a cultural concept among Nenets, as is also the case in many other non-Christian societies (Jenkins 2013; Keane 2007; Robbins 2007b; Robbins et al. 2014, 585; Schieffelin 2007; Vitebsky 2017a). Missionaries have thus been introducing a new understanding of personhood through the pairing of interiority and exteriority.

Figure 0.2. Nenets converts reading the Bible, August 2002.

In evangelical logic, human spoken words can have impact only as far as they are sincerely willed by a speaker whose decision and desire is to submit to God. In these situations, evangelicals assume that sincerity is not only expressed but also produced, as the ethical world of the self is shaped by the divine. Compelling words of repentance (a “yes” from a “pagan”⁸ Nenets) are seen as a victory, proof of a seed engendered by the Holy Spirit. As we shall see, in some instances of formalized speech, the demand for sincerity tends to wear off and all attention is on the act of speaking in a right way and taking public responsibility for the words articulated. For instance, this can be noticed when a Baptist preacher interrogates a candidate for baptism in the water (as with Yegor and Lida at the beginning of this chapter) or cajoles a reluctant old man to utter a few “saving words” (see chap. 5).

Conversion thus changes language ideology—that is, the way people think of how language and communication work (Kroskrity 2004), and even more broadly how various signs work in the world. When discussing the conversion of Sumbanese to Reformed Christianity through the concept of “semiotic ideology” (a particular set of assumptions about the relationship between words, things, and persons), Keane (2007, 18) writes that “it is a matter of semiotic ideology whether speakers even consider words to be radically distinct from things in the first place” (see also Engelke 2007; Keane 1997; Robbins 2007b). As I shall demonstrate, Christian missionaries in the tundra would regard putting words, things, and persons in the same category as scandalous (see chap. 4). And yet, for Nenets, the idea of language as solely representational is thoroughly alien because words in many cases (e.g., curses, names, and songs) are thought to act as things or (part-)persons able to produce profound social and ontological effects—it is not thoughts and feelings that are externalized but rather certain connections that are created and embodied effects that are transmitted to others (see chap. 5).

The evangelicals’ highly verbal culture relies on an understanding that representation stays in the center, as it is tied to a particular concept of agency. In their view, human words can do nothing more than represent and mediate the power of more powerful agents. The only morally approved source of agency, and thus of meaningful change, is the Christian God. However, as a saved person becomes suffused with the divine, his or her words come to be—to use Austin’s (1962) speech act theory loosely—performatives that change oneself (e.g., through prayers) and others (e.g., through witnessing and preaching) and commit oneself to a specific identity as a believer that initiates one way of living among other alternatives.

I do not regard speech act theory as a universal theory here (cf. Fleming and Lempert 2014), even if I agree that some performativity is inherent in all speech acts, as Austin (1962, 138, 146) claims. Performativity is an especially useful concept when thinking through particular cultural contexts and language ideologies. Words are deeds in their relations to local concepts of language, personhood, and agency. Starting from ethnographic observations, I look at the local understandings of language and sociality by thinking with speech act theory and seeing how various local theories of words, intentions, and relations might illuminate ethical (un)becoming in this ethnographic scene. My main concern here is with what Austin (1962, 101) calls “perlocutionary”—“saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons”—and how this aspect is shaped by local epistemological assumptions and ontological sensibilities.

Also, the kind of wordscape to which the evangelical language is introduced matters significantly, as the efficiency of evangelical language depends on how much the cultural worlds that meet each other overlap in the mission encounter. When starting one’s journey from a noisy Russian settlement nearby, what one notices straight away is that the Nenets pattern of communication in the tundra is far less verbose. If one stays longer, one realizes that this is a matter not only of style, which differs considerably between Nenets and Russians, but also underlying assumptions of what words do and how one can manage them. For instance, acquiring practical knowledge (e.g., how to tame a lead reindeer at the harness; how to castrate a bull reindeer using one’s teeth) goes with little verbal explanation but rather by example, observation, and repeated engagement (see also Ingold 2000; Kwon 1993; Willerslev 2007). Even if practical knowledge remains all-important among Nenets converts, there is a tendency to ethicize words in the light of the new Christian morality system, as learning to become a Baptist or Pentecostal is significantly more dependent on propositional statements and explicit moral rules than any form of practical learning in the tundra.

Both missionaries and Nenets treat various kinds of words as powerful, although their understandings about the origins and economies of word force differ considerably from each other. While Nenets often see humans’ words as extensions of personhood or semi-independent agents that transform relations in the world, missionaries believe that only the divine word is a true deed, as it takes place in the Creation. However, they are convinced that they mediate these powerful words of the Christian God and so assume some of his power. Now, those Nenets who meet the missionaries might choose silence—or “silence acts” as I call them—for their response, as this cuts intrusive engagement and makes the missionaries’ attempts at change more difficult, if not impossible (see chap. 5). I hope that my concept of a silence act, and its close ethnographic documentation of how to do things with silences, offers a corrective to some of the key assumptions in speech act theory with its logocentric approach to communication and portrayal of silence as being primarily an absence.

Figure 0.3. A reindeer-herding camp in Polar Urals, March 2007.

The Nenets, Their Reindeer, and Their Others

In many ways, this mission encounter is shaped by the geography and history of the area, which I shall discuss in this section. Nenets live in the vast treeless plains and mountains north of the Arctic Circle. On the west-east axis, their area covers two thousand kilometers from the Kanin Peninsula to the Yenisei River and is divided by the Ural Mountains—the range that splits Eurasia into Europe and Asia. In addition to conspicuous natural borders, there are inner administrative divisions inside the Russian Federation that have considerable influence on these nomads’ lives. Most Nenets live in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region (hereafter “Yamalo-Nenets Region”), the Nenets Autonomous Region (hereafter “Nenets Region”), and in parts of the Komi Republic and the Krasnoyarsk Territory (see map 1). Throughout their history, despite centralized state policies, the nomadic pastoralists in each region have experienced a slightly different fate due to different physical geographies, ethnic compositions, and styles of administration (see chap. 1). With a population of around fifty thousand, Nenets are the biggest of the forty-odd “small-numbered Indigenous peoples,” an official category providing certain privileges in the Russian legal system (Donahoe et al. 2008).⁹ However, inside these officially designated ethnic groups, those living by traditional livelihoods, such as nomadic reindeer herding and hunting, now constitute a minority. This includes Nenets, among whom nomads are not more than a third (Klokov and Khrushchev 2006, 26; Ravna 2021, 2; Tishkov 2016, 85; Volzhanina 2010, 89–90). Those who live in the tundra (vy) consider reindeer herding to be one of the main markers of being Nenets (nyenetsyaq, “people”), which is probably more important for Nenets self-identification than, for example, speaking the Nenets language.¹⁰

The Yamb-To and Ural reindeer nomads stand in contrast to other Nenets due to their poor knowledge of the Russian world and language.¹¹ The main reason for this is that they successfully avoided collectivization. In the brutal Stalinist period, virtually all northern nomads were forced into collective farms (Forsyth 1992; Slezkine 1994). Being a member of a kolkhoz or sovkhoz defined most relations with the state—as the farms functioned as “total social institutions” (Humphrey 1998).¹² Despite widespread resistance to the collectivization and flight across the North in the 1930s and 1940s, only a few reindeer-herding families managed to evade state pressure for more than a decade or two. Practically all Nenets pastoralists became herders of reindeer they no longer owned (except for a number of personal reindeer mixed into the cooperative herd) and lived on land managed by the collective farm administrations that followed the regulations of the central authorities (Golovnev and Osherenko 1999; Stammler 2005; Tuisku 1999).

The Soviet state presented collectivization as essential to an unavoidable fight of the poor against wealthy reindeer pastoralists known as kulaks (kulaki)—that is, better-off herders regarded as exploiters. The reality was that the owners of smaller herds—like many among the ancestors of Independents—were as likely to flee the state’s pressure as the owners of larger herds. Those who resisted Sovietization were repressed: their animals were confiscated, and when they did not comply with the new laws and refused to work in cooperative farms, they were ostracized and eventually imprisoned. Not only kulaks but also a number of others found themselves in the category of “class enemy,” such as shamans¹³ and elders, who were typically blamed for working against collectivization.¹⁴ The vast majority of the tundra population was against the violent Soviet reforms, and this led to various acts of resistance, such as the mandalada uprising in the Polar Urals in 1943, which was severely suppressed, and, as a result, dozens of Nenets men were taken away never to return. This was the atmosphere that pushed many pastoralists to hide from the gaze of the state. By and large, throughout the Soviet period, the families in these informal communities of the Bolshezemelskaya (Ngarka Ya, “Great Land”) tundra and Polar Urals (Ngarka Pe, “Great Rock”) continued to live an independent life in the way their ancestors had before collectivization (see chap. 1).

Map 1. Tundra Nenets areas in Arctic Russia.

Figure 0.4. A reindeer herd of a thousand animals enables a decent life in the tundra, July 2007.

The Ural Mountains are in the background.

If we look at the last few centuries, the Nenets Independents’ evasion of the authorities in the Soviet period is just the latest phase in a long history of the tundra dwellers’ cautious relations with outsiders. Depending on the area, the intensity of contact varied significantly. Even if some large rivers (such as Pechora) and islands (such as Vaigach) were first visited more than five hundred years ago by Russian Pomors and, from the mid-sixteenth century, by Dutch, English, and Norwegian travelers, vast areas of the interior were first “discovered” by outsiders only in the early twentieth century (Zhitkov 1913). The beginning of Russian colonization of the region came with the establishment of the first Russian Arctic town, called Pustozersk, which was founded in 1499 on the Pechora River.¹⁵ This and other settlements, including what was called Obdorsk (today Salekhard) on the lower Ob River, were established to procure highly valued furs from the Indigenous population and to sell them to royal courts in western Europe for a lucrative profit.

Until the mid-eighteenth century, collecting fur tax (yasak) often took place by seizing hostages. Samoyeds¹⁶ attacked the forts to free their imprisoned relatives and chase the foreigners away. The Russian military men retaliated with punitive expeditions, hanging hundreds of Nenets on larch trees near Pustozersk (Okladnikov 1999, 23–27; see also Golovnev and Osherenko 1999, 49; Vershinin and Vizgalov 2004). By the late eighteenth century, more peaceful relations had emerged between outsiders and tundra dwellers. Nenets benefited from trading with fur-hungry Russians to obtain axes, guns, flour, salt, tea, tobacco, and other goods. In the long run, this kind of trade created considerable dependence among Nenets on Russians both in terms of debts and for the growing necessity of these distant goods (Kolycheva 1956). One must add to that another dependence, which was addiction to alcohol used by Russians as “means of getting them [Natives] drunk and fleecing them” (Forsyth 1992, 106).

Unlike in many other parts of the world where colonizers and Christian missionaries arrived together, Russian Orthodox clergymen began proselytizing in the Nenets tundra rather late. Although there were already some cases of baptism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when, for instance, Samoyed children were baptized after Russians and Komi had taken them into their households as child labor (Yasinski and Ovsyannikov 2003, 314), the first large-scale attempt to Christianize Nenets took place in the early eighteenth century in the lower Ob area. This attempt failed because of fierce resistance from the nomads (Golovnev and Osherenko 1999, 53–56). A hundred years later, archimandrite Veniamin was given the task of converting Nenets in the European tundra, which proved successful, at least in numbers.¹⁷ After the mission campaign, three churches were built, including one dedicated to St. Nicholas on the Kolva River where the forefathers of Independents had kept their winter pastures. In the long run, this campaign replaced Nenets personal names with Russian ones and added new rituals, such as the baptism of children, burial in the ground (instead of erecting aboveground box graves), and blood sacrifices to icons.¹⁸ Despite the open hostility of missionaries toward “pagan” religion, shamanic practices persisted in the area until the mid-twentieth century, and various animist rituals are still practiced today.

Following the tax collectors, traders, and Orthodox missionaries, Soviet reformers arrived in the early 1920s. The Bolshevik regime marked the first time that every Indigenous family across Arctic Russia had to adapt to unprecedentedly intrusive campaigns of transformation. Compared to those of later decades, however, the 1920s policies were relatively benign. To quote James Forsyth (1992, 284), “This was in fact a kind of reforming missionarism without the Christian religion, but with an equally strong conviction of absolute enlightenment” (cf. Toulouze 2011b). Alongside the formation of national administrative regions, the development of literacy, medical care, and schooling were the main heralded objectives. Special culture bases (kul’tbazy) were built, such as Khoseda-Khard in the southern part of the Great Land tundra (Arzyutov 2016, 341–43; Habeck 2005, 208–11; Josephson 2014, 221–33; Toulouze et al. 2017). These were to become sites for economic transactions and teaching literacy, Marxism-Leninism, hygiene, and new gender relations. For instance, Indigenous women were taught that they had to be freed from what were considered to be abusive practices, such as following gender-based purity rules; arranged marriages; and the practice of bridewealth, polygamy, and other “remnants of clan life.” Several of these kinship institutions were criminalized in 1928 (Slezkine 1994, 226).

When Stalin launched his industrialization campaign in the late 1920s, hundreds of prospectors came to the North to search for natural resources under the reindeer pastures. In 1930, the young Russian geologist Georgi Chernov discovered high-quality coal on the banks of the Vorkuta River and returned the following year with thirty-nine Gulag prisoners to build the mining settlement that would later become the city of Vorkuta (Barenberg 2014, 15–16). At that time, local Nenets and Izhma Komi, who had been threatened with reindeer confiscation as part of the ongoing collectivization campaign, had to leave and yield their pastures to the rapidly growing territories of the Vorkuta prison camps. Within the space of just a few years, the camp system, known as Vorkutlag, accommodated tens of thousands of prisoners. Smaller prison camps were built on the coast of the Arctic Ocean in places like Amderma and Khabarovo. Each such area occupied by southerners meant fewer reindeer pastures, hunting grounds, and fishing sites for nomads.

A new phase of encroachment into the reindeer herders’ territories began in the 1960s when some of the world’s largest natural gas and oil deposits were discovered in western Arctic Russia (Dallmann et al. 2010; Golovnev et al. 2014; Rouillard 2013; Stammler 2011). Pastoralists had to withdraw from vast territories as gas wells, oil rigs, and other infrastructure were constructed. Also as a result of rapid industrialization, large areas have been contaminated with chemicals and metal rubbish. Another collateral effect is that Nenets today share their lands with newcomers, mainly urban labor migrants from the south who outnumber the Indigenous population many times over. While nearly all these Russians (here a loose term signifying the Russian-speaking white population of various ethnic backgrounds) live in towns and villages, a growing number of oil and gas shift workers occupy new reindeer pastures each year. Although the Independents roaming in the eastern part of the Great Land tundra are less affected by recent extractive industry developments compared to many other Nenets communities, they have been forced to give up some of their lands to the gas pipelines and service roads that traverse their pastures. Furthermore, some areas north of Vorkuta are used for military training, causing anxiety among herders who are not warned of upcoming missile tests.

Nevertheless, the nomadic lifestyle gives some room for maneuvering in the context of the various pressures coming from the sedentary world. The “art of not being governed” (Scott 2009) among the Arctic nomads is based on a flexibility made possible not only by high mobility but also their specific human-animal relations and technological adaptations. The Yamb-To and Ural Nenets live in tepee-shaped tents (myaq in Nenets, chumy in Russian) covered with reindeer skins in winter and tarpaulin in summer. A campsite consisting of one or several myaq is situated five to fifteen kilometers from the closest neighbors depending on the season and size of herd. Families change campsites dozens of times a year over the course of their nomadic cycles on the land, which is covered with snow for about eight months of the year. The two communities under focus here have slightly different migration routes. In summer the Yamb-To Nenets move with their reindeer to the cool and windy coastal pastures of the Arctic Ocean to escape the biting insects that can cause considerable damage to their herds. When winter approaches and green plants die, they migrate back southward to and beyond the Korotaikha River basin in search of lichen-rich pastures. Unlike most collective farm herders, they stay in the open tundra throughout the year. The Ural Nenets take a different route: they move to higher and windier places in summer in or near the northern slopes of the Ural mountain range, while in winter they migrate south of the Moscow-Labytnangi railway line where there are small patches of forest providing materials for woodworking. Many spend their winters on the eastern side of the Urals in the Yamalo-Nenets Region (see map 2).

Figure 0.5. Driving a reindeer caravan on the last patches of the snow at the end of spring migration, June 2007.

The importance of reindeer in the lives of the Nenets herders is difficult to overestimate.¹⁹ Reindeer feed people, pull sledges, provide clothing and tent covers, help to form relations with kin and affines through exchange, relate humans to spirits and predatory animals, and carry the dead to the afterworld. While humans submit reindeer to their will in many ways, it is, in a sense, a mutual relationship, or “symbiotic domesticity” (Stammler 2010), in which reindeer participate in the decision-making process through their particular behaviors (Anderson et al. 2017; Beach and Stammler 2006; Stépanoff et al. 2017). The herders view their environment through reindeer’s eyes, using what Andrei Golovnev (2017, 44) calls “reindeer thinking,” which is “herders’ coawareness and coconcern of their reindeer needs” (cf. Istomin and Dwyer 2021, 180; Ingold 2013). This is a practical perspective-taking which is needed for successful life on the land. Furthermore, living with reindeer entangles Nenets personhood intimately with the sentient tundra landscape, which is suffused with numerous forces and nonhuman beings capable of communicating with one another. The sentience of landscape is related to the idea that there are various masters of places and other agents, endowed with their own agendas, with whom one must learn to live (D. Anderson 2000; Ingold 2000, 24–26). This is a world where humans, spirits, and animals are persons who consume one another as well as make gifts to one another.²⁰

Furthermore, there is an aesthetic and affective dimension to the human-reindeer relationship. Godfrey Lienhardt (1961, 16) describes how, among the Dinka in Sudan, cattle give “imaginative satisfactions” to the pastoralists. Like Dinka men, Nenets herders spend most of their waking hours observing, herding, lassoing, or corralling their animals. They cherish the thought of having more reindeer; they take pride in their powerful white castrated bulls (khabtq) with big antlers, or hand-fed orphan reindeer (navka) who enter the tent whenever they like.

For many Nenets today, such an intimate relationship with reindeer has disappeared because they no longer live in the tundra. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Nenets women, children, and elderly people working in collective farms in the Nenets Region were forced to live in settlements. Eventually, Nenets youth became alienated from the tundra way of life, most of them having never visited a single reindeer-herding camp in their lives (Lukin 2011; Ravna 2021; Tuisku 2001). Nomadic Nenets call their way of living with reindeer nyeney yil, meaning “real life” (Kharyuchi 2001, 12; Stammler 2005, 22). From the perspective of most of the tundra dwellers I know, sedentary life is perceived as an undesirable separation from nyeney yil (cf. Yoshida 1997, 209). However, there have always been people who lose their reindeer in epizootics, due to unfavorable natural conditions, or during drinking parties, and who, as a result, “sit” (ngamdyo) in one place without reindeer.²¹

Map 2. Yamb-To Nenets and Ural Nenets areas.

Figure 0.6. White reindeer are particularly valued, August 2006.

Losing reindeer and settling down is not merely an economic matter but also, in some sense, an ontological one. As nyeney also refers to humanity, settling down and starting to live without reindeer as a Russian, lutsa, is perceived as potentially losing one’s full humanity (see chap. 1). Becoming sedentary and becoming Russian—living lutsa yil, “Russian life”—are thus seen as parallel forms of transformation.²² However, among the younger generation of Independents, this perception is losing its potency as more of them are attracted by city life, even if this usually remains a fleeting wish or unrealizable plan once they understand the various hardships related to it.

Figure 0.7. Feeding a pet reindeer called navka, February 2007.

For the Independents, calling themselves “the ones who live on their own” (khariq yilyenaq), a subsistence way of life with the private ownership of reindeer—even if there are not too many—has long been the only imaginable way of living. A Nenets family can live on two hundred to three hundred animals, although the ideal is to have a thousand or more. Nenets say only a few who have luck (yab) or good relations with the spirits—or now, for converts, with the Christian deity—reach this number. During the Soviet period, few Independents were able to live up to this central cultural value of having many reindeer, because they did not want to draw attention to themselves for fear of being labeled kulaks. Those whose herds grew big were occasionally targeted by the authorities that tried to confiscate their animals (see chap. 1).

Figure 0.8. A Nenets family corralling reindeer near the Polar Urals, 9 p.m., June 2007.

Among the Independents, personal and family autonomy is highly valued in many aspects of life. A social ideal is that a person or a family should not depend too much on others’ resources or skills. From their early teens, women work in the camp taking care of small children, cooking, making clothing, and sewing tent covers, while men work outside herding, hunting, fishing, and crafting sledges. There are also women who know how to herd reindeer and check deadfall traps for foxes or fishing nets on the lake and rivers, while most men can cook, and some know how to work with reindeer skins. As in other Siberian Indigenous societies, children are expected to acquire vital skills with relatively little interference from parents, as one’s ingenuity and mastery are thought to mature primarily through autonomous acts (Kwon 1993, 155–56; Ravna 2019, 2021; Stammler 2005, 84; Ulturgasheva 2012; Willerslev 2007, 54; see also chap. 7).²³

In the early 1990s, when the first newspaper article was published on the Yamb-To Independents (Tolkachev 1990), they became a symbol of the last true nomads of the Nenets Region for the local cultural elite in Naryan-Mar. (The Ural Independents in the Komi Republic have never been given such positive public attention.) As Nenets poet Prokopi Yavtysyi told me after he had visited the Yamb-To, “Unlike others [collective farm herders], these people are full of dignity. You can see this right away, as the men stand with their chests pushed forward.” For him, the Independents represented witnesses from “a lost past” and thus “authentic” Nenetsness.²⁴ At the same time, he was expressing his unease that many had converted to evangelical Christianity at the cost of rejecting traditional beliefs and customs. He shared the view, espoused by several others, that for the Independents the state would be a more benign agent than Christian missionaries.

However, Independents see this rather differently. A history of repression has made them wary of outsiders, especially state agents. For instance, years after the collapse of the Soviet state, some Yamb-To and Ural Nenets still fear confiscation of their reindeer by the state. They have also been reluctant to have their rights and obligations written down in official documents. As one herder told me, they are not interested in “setting up another kolkhoz” with its collectivist and hierarchical pitfalls.²⁵ Yet this does not mean that they desire isolation. In the Soviet period they regularly visited settlements, traded with state fur collectors, and bartered with army personnel or itinerant geologists. In case of emergency, some also sought medical help from hospitals, which was provided to people in reindeer parkas without too many questions asked. One family even sent two boys to boarding school in Ust-Kara in the 1970s; they became the first to convert to Baptism in the 1990s. Today these men, Ivan and Andrei, are the religious leaders in Yamb-To. The younger brother, Ivan, was the initiator of the change: he dreamed of becoming a shaman (tadyebya) but instead became a fervent denouncer of shamanism. However, he had never seen a single practicing shaman himself, as they had disappeared in the area by the late Soviet period after decades of repressions (see chap. 2).

Shamans and Missionaries

Once an elaborate and enduring set of rituals and cosmology, shamanism has persisted among Nenets in less visible forms as a set of underlying epistemological assumptions and ontological sensibilities about how seen and unseen forces act on people and how they can be acted upon.²⁶ I met a few Nenets who said that although they were not practicing shamans, they had related knowledge, skills, and sensibilities. For example, a young Nenets woman, Tikynye, now Pentecostal, told me that she was born with a caul on her head that marked her shamanic abilities (cf. Lehtisalo 1924, 146). A few days after her birth, a wolf made a kill in her family herd. As the family was supposed to carry out the so-called navel sacrifice (syunggan) for the newborn, the parents considered the wolf’s kill as a substitute to it and they did not undertake syunggan themselves (see also Vallikivi 2017). This event, as Tikynye explained, created a strong relationship between herself and wolves. She characterized this with the kin term syuny, which refers to the children of two sisters: “The wolf gave me meat. Through this, I became a relative of the wolf. We are now syunyq.” Since this event, whenever a wolf comes, Tikynye says she feels it as she starts to breathe rapidly. She then convinces the wolf not to kill reindeer by saying quietly “I know that it is you.”

This is an example of a common animist ontological stance concerning human-animal relations, although it should be stressed that this stance is not a “dispassionate metaphysical speculation” but an ethical lead for how one should interact with animals, and thus has practical ends (Keane 2016, 15; see also 2013, 189–90).²⁷ These ethical leads are derived from an understanding of the equality of human and nonhuman agents that stands in striking contrast to the hierarchical Christian model. With the arrival of evangelical metaphysics, things are expected to be reinterpreted, as all direct acts of reciprocity with nonhuman agents (except for the Christian God) must be avoided. Christian missionaries would classify Tikynye’s interpretation of her gifts as either a lie or demonic possession—thus themselves sharing animist ontological assumptions about others as potent agents (see chap. 4). Instead, their doctrine would prescribe that the all-seeing Christian God be petitioned to protect reindeer from predation, as God reigns over everyone while his believers share some of his power. Even if Tikynye knew, as a Pentecostal Christian, that she should cut all reciprocal relations with nonhuman others and deal with the predation of wolves through prayers to God, she seemed to treat her relationship as a given and efficacious. She preferred not to talk about this relationship with wolves to her Pentecostal pastor who would have admonished her for engaging with demons.

Many tundra dwellers have had similar experiences to those of Tikynye with various animals, spirits of the landscape, and spirits of the ancestors. Probably everyone over thirty has participated in sacrificial slaughtering of reindeer to local land, water, and mountain spirits, although this and all other “pagan” rituals have stopped in families who have recently converted. Evangelical missionaries teach that God forbids the strangling of reindeer for the spirits. So life has changed for everyone in the tundra, even for those who resist conversion, as many unconverted have abandoned sacrificial killings, or if they still sacrifice, hide their actions carefully from others. This wave of Christianization has an impact on nearly everyone, in a somewhat similar way to the past when the Soviets came and people concealed their animist or Orthodoxy-inspired ritual activities.

It must be stressed that different denominations of Christianity show a great variety of techniques when proselytizing. In Arctic Russia, one can find some accommodating missions, such as charismatic neo-Pentecostals among the Koryaks in the Russian Far East who, among other things, allow shamanic drums to be used during their services (Plattet 2013). However, most evangelical missionaries have chosen an approach that is well rehearsed throughout the history of Christianity, which is to demand a total rejection of everything that they define as “pagan.” Like Communist Party activists, Christian evangelists are often driven by a desire to condemn. They have not only urged people to burn their sacred objects (khekheq) and banned sacrificial slaughter, they have also discouraged everyday practices such as drinking reindeer blood or marriage between maternal cousins. To overcome the threat of syncretism, contamination, or superficiality, as true purifiers, the missionaries are busy defining various illicit amalgams of the “pagan” and Christian forms (Latour 1993, 2010).

Figure 0.9. Non-Christian Nenets eat a freshly killed reindeer, March 2007.

Christians must substitute vitamin-rich raw meat and blood with vegetables.

Missionaries travel to remote corners of the Arctic (where other nonreindeer-herding people almost never go) to conquer the periphery.²⁸ Their rhetoric of margins conflates the physical and moral outer border in their attempt to accelerate the second coming of Christ (see chap. 3). Although this Christian idea is global, it has a local logic in the former Soviet Union.²⁹ In the early 1960s, at the height of Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign, many Baptist believers (veruyushchie) refused to register their congregations and, as a result, hundreds of active preachers were imprisoned or lived in hiding (Bourdeaux 1968; Sawatsky 1981).³⁰ Unlike many others who followed the restrictive rules of the government, the Unregistered Baptists tried hard to enact the principle of total separation of church from state. Despite a greater religious freedom in post-socialist Russia, they still have not registered their congregations with the authorities and source their identity largely from their Soviet-era martyrdom experiences and ascetic style of religiosity. Pentecostals in the Soviet Union went through a similar split to that of the Baptists.

Although Baptists and Pentecostals are no longer that “new,” they are certainly imagined as not being “traditional” by the wider public in Russia. Today evangelicals are still—in recent years even more forcefully so—branded in the media and beyond as intrinsically “foreign,” essentially “non-Russian” (Agadjanian 2014; Fagan 2013; Glanzer 2002; Kazmina 2008; Koosa 2017; Richters 2013). Russianness for most is felt to be tightly tied to Russian Orthodoxy, whose representatives are wary or openly inimical toward evangelicals, sharing this antipathy with the state. Evangelicals again see Orthodoxy as a mistaken form of Christianity, if not outright devil worship. Somewhat paradoxically, the Nenets’ historic experience of Orthodoxy has rather encouraged their conversion to evangelical Christianity. Although there is only sporadic Orthodox evangelization in the tundra today (see, e.g., Borisova 2022; Konstantin 2014), the leading Christian church of Russia continues to have a relatively positive reputation among the Independents, especially when they compare Orthodox believers to nonbelievers.

Indeed, many features from Orthodoxy have entered the ritual life of herders. One can see icons in the ritually pure part of the tent, in front of which candles are burned on certain holidays. These rituals are inherited from their ancestors who were baptized by Orthodox priests in the tsarist period and who also witnessed Orthodoxy among the neighboring Izhma Komi reindeer herders (Habeck 2011). Some Nenets go to Orthodox churches to buy icons and candles. For example, among the Yamb-To Nenets, Mikul, the first Baptist convert Ivan’s grandfather, was known as “the old priest” (pop vesako) because he spoke highly of a Christian sacred book and carried out quasi-Orthodox baptisms of infants (see Leete and Vallikivi 2011, 94–95 for more detail). People who have not joined Baptists or Pentecostals still baptize (kresti) their children: this act is expected not only to safeguard a child but also to create relations through gifts received from the godparents. Despite carrying out Christian rituals, nomads have little understanding of the doctrinal teachings. For instance, before the evangelicals came, most people had never heard the name Jesus Christ. So for Protestant missionaries, despite the Nenets’ claims of being Orthodox, they are still “pagans” who do not know even the name of God’s son. However, as elsewhere in the mission fields, this diagnosis of ignorance serves as the primary initiative for proselytization.³¹

Overview of the Book

My main ethnographic focus is on Baptists, except for chapter 4 which is primarily on Pentecostals, while animists are touched upon throughout the book. Chapter 1 is dedicated to the history of the noncollectivized reindeer herders and their difference from the collectivized Nenets in the Great Land tundra and Polar Urals. The latter part of the chapter gives a short overview of post-Soviet developments, including the Independents’ engagement with the state and the appeal of the modern market. It sets a context for understanding the Independents’ new wish to engage with outsiders—that is, Russians (lutsaq), who are perceived as both threatening and useful at the same time.

Part II charts the process of conversion from both Nenets’ and Baptist missionaries’ perspectives. Chapter 2 looks at the conversion of the first Nenets convert, Ivan, which grew out of a long-term quest but is yet representable as sudden and radical. I go on to discuss one larger set of motivations in conversion, which is the rejection of alcohol. At that point, I also describe the growing tensions between the imagined futures of older and younger generations of converts. Chapter 3 gives an overview of the agenda of the Unregistered Baptist missionaries, who in their salvation work are driven by their particular views of past and future. Having restored God’s true church on earth, they aim to fulfill their role as messengers at the end of time and space. Meanwhile, chapter 4 explores the destruction of Nenets sacred images through an encounter between Vladislav, a Pentecostal missionary, and Iriko, the head of a Ural Nenets family. I shall discuss this not only as an event of material destruction but also as a crucial (de-)socializing and performative speech event.

Part III, which is about speaking and silence, contains three chapters that all treat various aspects of language use and personhood in the setting of the mission encounter. I focus on the limits of verbalizability, the role of the nonreferential power of words, and the aspects of intentionality and agency in the context of emergent and ongoing social relations. I demonstrate that, like words, silences can also have profound ethical consequences on social lives. Chapter 5 investigates the Nenets understanding of words, especially in their capacity to bind and create dangerous relations. In this context, the missionaries’ words enter the Nenets wordscape as potentially powerful agents. Chapter 6 portrays the changing understanding of words among Baptist converts who struggle with their constative (“state something”) and performative (“do something”) aspects. Linguistic practices are tightly situated in the power relations that are shaped by missionaries. The final chapter focuses on changes of personhood and the ethical self-formation of converts who strive for coherence in their lives; it discusses more specifically how new kinds of disposition and sensitivity emerge as patterns of self-reflective ethical habits.