CONCLUSION

THROUGHOUT THIS WORK, I HAVE FOLLOWED HOW NENETS have looked for empowerment from outside, while trying not to be submerged by it. The nomads’ understandings, sensibilities, and values have been in flux as a result of their encounters with outsiders, who are various kinds of Russians. Nenets have both avoided and engaged with lutsaq and the Soviet state, pursuing innumerable other messy forms of contact, including conflict, collusion, and cooperation. This is a story about social connections in formation, full of speech acts and silence acts, with the power to cut existing relations and form new ones. When evangelical missionaries reached the tundra, they offered a new model of relationality with (the more powerful) God and his Russians that promised protection from demanding, unpredictable, and sometimes outright dangerous engagement with spirits, witchcraft, predators, and “unfriendly” Russians. For many Nenets, there has been hope that the new faith would work as life insurance in this world as well as in the hereafter. However, for others, it has been a source of hesitation and an unwanted demand for relation-building and submission, which has been perceived as intrusive and perilous, making them vulnerable to unknown consequences.

Evangelists, who found their pre-apocalyptic “ends of the earth” in the Arctic tundra, arrive with words that are meant to radically change people. However, depending on the listener’s viewpoint, these words have been seen as gibberish, invasive, or harmful weapons, or, on the contrary, as revelations of truth by those who are interested, even if the full message often remains obscure. We have seen how missionary Pavel’s calls for repentance led Yegor to make self-analytic statements and Vata to obstinately keep silence; likewise, the Pentecostal pastor Vladislav’s abundant explanations triggered Iriko’s collusive repetitions. Those who have stopped dodging missionaries’ words and responded to interpellation and have begun speaking the new evangelical language—by making thus an explicit promise—find themselves taking a course of action they could not have known beforehand: Christian logic often arrives later and the futures that were initially imagined must be reimagined.

After meeting evangelical missionaries, many Nenets have thus come under an obligation to speak for the first time, explaining themselves to others; aligning their thoughts, feelings, and deeds with the truth claims of a universalist ideology; and demonstrating motivation and obedience to its overseers, all of which require some solemnity and seriousness in its performativity. One is required to talk abundantly to God and about God, remembering that everything is judged by him and asking forgiveness and expressing praise to him (Bog in Russian; when speaking in Nenets, he is still called Num). This demands mastery of the correct words in situations such as initial repentance and subsequent praying, reading, witnessing, preaching, and admonishing. Protestant missionaries have introduced a logic in which the most powerful act that changes the world and oneself is a speech act, as it is speaking above all that conveys one’s inner thoughts and feelings. Furthermore, one’s words are said to be always (over)heard by a divine superaddressee, in whose name discipline is to be enforced. However, the force of the humans’ words comes from their representation of what is inside: in a sincere prayer of repentance, words are believed to have the capacity to override nonverbal actions (including Christian good deeds, kneeling, or any other visible act) through their power to give an explicit demonstration of one’s faith. For a newly sprouting individualist Christian, striving to make interiority and exteriority match each other is a challenging endeavor requiring a specific perspectival language.

In this process, this previously taciturn culture is unraveled and transformed by the verbose rhetoric of the evangelists, as a discreet, nonexplicit Nenets personhood is reshaped by the need to demonstrate and broadcast a new personhood that has a particular kind of moral interiority. Conversion has thus been a movement from a relatively silent animist world, in which most principles cannot be easily expressed in words and it is one’s actual deeds that count, to a verbally explicit religion in which each act can and should be reflected and commented on, often through reference to some passage in the Bible. In this new ideology, silence, when it is taken to be an absence of a meaningful relationship with God, is no longer a legitimate state: such sinful silences must be mended by the right kind of words.

In Nenets ontology, local assumptions of the power of silence are directly linked to an understanding that words are forceful. Words can create effects outside the notion of representation or signification, to the extent that semantic and pragmatic meanings are in some sense irrelevant. This is because in various social contexts, words are seen as parts of specific persons and flows of exchange, not limited by the intentionality of an individual speaker but, once said out loud, having an autonomous force of their own. Therefore, one cannot be sure what kind of efficacy words take on once they are expressed, as this depends on the power or vulnerability of a particular person as well as on the tone and the intensity of relations involved. Thus, Nenets relate the problem of words to an inherent uncertainty about whether and in what way they take on magical effects. The old logic of distributed personhood and intentionality, in which words—including personal names and personal songs—create relations to one’s past and to non-Christian kin may pose a threat to the converts’ attempts to sustain conversion (as in case of Baptist Yegor whose old-style singing threatened his Christian self).

There is, therefore, noticeable tension that emerges when missionaries arrive and try to push Nenets into acting against their own previous rituals and deeply internalized cosmologies. While some fall silent and refuse to engage with the evangelists, others attempt to learn the new language and behavior. This becomes an everyday struggle against the Nenets’ own earlier personhood, which was formed through a deep-seated engagement with their own memories and kinship relations, as well as with the spirits of the land on which they continue to live (as in case of Pentecostal Tikynye, who regarded herself to be kin to wolves). As in so many other places where Protestant missionaries have been active, this conversion has led to the destruction of sacred objects, to the demonization of places recently considered sacred, and to the condemnation of the Nenets’ own ancestors, epic songs, and shamanic sensibilities. Furthermore, the entire Independent community is getting more divided, making it more difficult to exchange gifts, partners, and knowledge between Christians and non-Christians.

Even if one’s words, ideals, and aspirations are Christian, this does not mean that a radical break with the past can emerge easily. This is why we can see elements of “continuity thinking” (Robbins 2007a) and perhaps also of continuity feeling popping up here and there. Robbins has called for taking Christianity seriously as cultural logic, and critically notes that “anthropologists assume that people’s beliefs are difficult to change and therefore endure through time” (13), arguing in a series of influential publications that anthropologists studying religious conversion tend to overemphasize the role of local bricolage-like activities and cultural continuity with the past as if people were unable “to view the world except through their received categories” (2003, 221; see also 2007a, 10, 2009, 2014, 2020; Bialecki et al. 2008; Højer and Pedersen 2019). However, as this ethnography has demonstrated, there is often considerable tension between the exclusionary logic of “either/or” and the pluralist logic of “both/and” (Lambek 2015b). Furthermore, as Iriko’s and Vladislav’s (mis)communications show concerning the burning of Iriko’s sacred objects, these crucial moments often take place in gaps where the two sides have rather different views on materiality and mediation; on the agency of humans, spirits, and words; and on the forms of responsibility for one’s acts and their consequences. In these moments of what missionaries describe as people “beginning to understand,” there is a lot of confusion and uncertainty, as with Syado, who struggled with the image of herself as both pure and impure.

While agreeing with the view that Christianity is a cultural logic that makes a particular kind of impact, I have argued that the capacity and willingness to take the new logic on board varies greatly. The mission encounter is a highly dynamic situation, with the inherent logic of Christianity making an impact, as do aspects of various power struggles, pragmatic interests, ethical choices, and moments of entertainment and aesthetics, which are not necessarily connected to Christian teachings as such. Even the most pious do not Christianize every moment of their lives, despite this being required by teachings. Perhaps it is not so much beliefs but character and habits that are difficult to change, although not entirely impossible. Old-time sensibilities tend to linger, as we have seen throughout the ethnography. At least this is so with many first-generation converts: they are not blank slates; they have earlier backgrounds, ideas, sentiments, and habits, even if some of these have been objectified and worked hard upon to be discarded. Taking on the novel is easier for the young than for the old. What we see when we compare Yegor and his son Ngarka is that the father, who is a well-formed person, is haunted by his past much more forcefully than his son.

Any molding of the self is not a straightforward process but is full of struggle and paradox. Not everybody who has become a member of the evangelical church would have begun to scrutinize him or herself with a same intensity to Ngarka, Yegor, or Andrei. Even if a convert like Yegor believed himself to be a new person, he struggled with his past ways, which he tried actively to overcome and forget. In the end, a radical break needs to be upheld through a continuous striving for self-perfection and repeated analysis of one’s failures, often via public speaking. In this encounter, an explicit set of moral norms, institutionalized and hierarchically orchestrated, meets more tacit and fluid assumptions that sometimes remain hidden, at other times are made conscious and then reformed. Indeed, many Nenets have become tuned into the ethos of rupture, speaking as devout believers and keeping silence on ungodly matters, including their previous ways of relating to spirits, dead ancestors, and sacred sites when they were still “pagans.” Nevertheless, even if conversion to evangelical Christianity has led to an obligatory articulacy, forgetting the old and remembering the new is harder than it looks. But as missionaries and more dedicated converts sometimes complain, there are many baptized Nenets in the tundra who “still don’t understand.” Some of these people were like Iriko and Pukhutsya, who were neither coerced nor persuaded to become Pentecostal converts but rather went along with events they did not fully control, hoping for protection from more dangerous lutsaq.

There are considerable generational differences in how the mission encounter is seen. In the background, there has been a fear of losing one’s humanity (nyeney nyenets’) and of becoming “the other” (lutsarakha, “Russian-like”). This has been a worry, especially for older converts who do not want to see their children becoming alienated from a life on the land with reindeer. Paradoxically, the first converts, who were young men in the 1990s, are now middle aged and struggle with their own children’s wishes to leave the tundra, just as their own parents—by now most of them dead already—once did not want them to accept the strange lutsa ways. There is a parallel with the sentiment among middle-aged Russian Baptists who criticize their children for being too eager to explore modern global culture or to leave the conservative church outright.

Nenets parents often warn their children against becoming too attracted to city life, fearing the metamorphosis of their children could become irreversible. Those who have lived longer are less attracted by the promise of modernity (including money, goods, and technology) and less worried about the sense of being marginal or isolated or about feeling embarrassed of not being sufficiently familiar with lutsa habits And even young people like Vera, who have dreamed of embracing urban ways (with Christianity included) have not moved away from the tundra but instead continue with the nomadic way of life. She has come to realize, like many others have—especially once they have created their own families—that the rough lutsa environment is not a better place. However, what all converts seem to appreciate is the possibility of improving their lives in one way or another—materially, socially, and spiritually—and of strengthening their sense of dignity in the larger world. The crucial point appears to be finding the right balance between the earlier ways of living with reindeer and families and the new demands of breaking with “paganism”—purity rules, myenaruiq, Nenets songs, raw blood, alcohol, and so forth. Giving up vodka has been particularly appealing for many, as they see fewer violent deaths around them and argue that their reindeer herds and families are more likely to prosper. Furthermore, missionaries who act as matchmakers help reindeer herders find future husbands and wives from distant camps that people cannot easily visit themselves.

Throughout the book I have pointed to several parallels between the Soviet and Christian reformisms, such as their passion to conquer unknown margins, including the people who live there, and to transform “souls” considered difficult to transform. Both kinds of reformers have attempted to master time within their linear logic, as they imagine making history by hurtling toward a better future. Tackling the final edge, in an Arctic that is full of dangers, is a definite sign of their success. These shifts have often occurred through a single Indigenous gatekeeper such as Ivan, who had long dreamed of becoming a mediator. But instead of becoming a shaman, he became a businessman and later an ordained evangelizer, as the new teachings and relations with missionaries precluded earlier patterns of transformation.

Evangelists know well that the younger generation in the tundra can more easily develop their Christian selves, as they have not actively been part of relation-making with local spirits in the landscape. These younger converts are school educated and literate, and they do not need to deal with “their demons from the past” since they did not have time to make local spirits their own. Just as early Communists in the 1920s paid attention to youth, so do evangelical missionaries who have told me that some problems will solve themselves once the older generation is gone. This demonstrates how both evangelical and Communist historical changes have their parallel yet specific logics: in both cases, youth is the main target and catalyst for change (Suslov 1931, 150; cf. Grenoble 2003, 167–68).

I have discussed how Christianity, in its specific expressions, has the potential to create and mold selves in certain ways and give impetus to the birth of ethical subjects of a particular kind, making completely new demands on thinking and acting, and leading to a shift in the “entire universe of causality and mutuality” (Vitebsky 2017a, 325). This new kind of ethics, which requires systematic objectification of oneself, was not part of these animists’ world, as required in the large historical formations such as Christianity or Soviet Marxism.¹ For Nenets Independents, evangelical conversion has been the first close encounter with such organized ethical practices and self-technologies requiring introspection. The Russian Orthodox priests and Soviet state administrators were unable to impose efficient practices of self-objectification and did not have much influence on the reindeer nomads’ ethical lives, at least as designed by these regimes.

Figure 8.1. A boy and a myenarui, reindeer bull dedicated to spirits, July 2002.

The young generation of Christians grows up without experiencing earlier intricate relations between humans, animals, and spirits.

What has been at stake is how much one or another regime—the Soviet and the Christian—has managed to make their transcendent projects relevant to people and turn them into self-motivated agents. The Independent Nenets stayed outside the direct impact of Soviet policies of subject formation, with their specific concerns such as claims of universal truths, aspiration for self-perfection, mutual surveillance, public penance, or condemnation of “outsiders.” The Independents did not live in the world in which working for the Communist cause meant working heroically and tirelessly for the good of society, in which individuals had to be changed not for the sake of themselves but for the sake of the collective, which was shortly to be transformed into a paradise on earth (Zigon 2010, 205). This was a collectivist faith in progress, which had to be achieved by molding each person as a Soviet new man.² While the Soviets aimed to eradicate the tundra way of life—as their ideology prescribed—to civilize and rationalize Nenets, Khanty and others, Christian missionaries have worked along a somewhat—although not entirely—different trajectory, stressing a need to become fixed in communion with God, to look inward, and to make one’s interior conform to God’s will, which, as a collateral effect, introduces “a civilized way of life” into the tundra. Unregistered Baptists know well what it means to be a target of ideological indoctrination by the state. Their stories of persecution by the Soviet regime or other lutsaq have shown them to be more trustworthy in the eyes of many unregistered Independents. Both sides have had a long history of tension with the Soviets which, as we have seen, has played out in radically different ways.

Where Communists failed and Baptists succeeded among Independents—
or at least among the most committed ones—was in the introduction of the transcendental gaze and its perspectival language in a way that led to profound ethical self-transformation. They both tried to impose total morality systems on the Nenets’ tundra life while trying to eradicate the old ways. As Keane (2016, 211) puts it, “In monotheistic traditions . . . the transcendentalizing move always contains the latent possibility—the invitation—of further purification, such as iconoclasm, antiritualism, and other attacks on the material things and practices that prior religions had made use of.” This observation can be extended to other highly organized religions as well as to secular ideologies such as Soviet Marxism. Inherently, this kind of shift involves various dimensions such as time, morality, and authority. Or as Vitebsky (2012, 192) describes in his comparison of transformations among Eveny collective farm reindeer herders in Siberia and Sora Baptist converts in India, “Where the local community’s frame of reference is local it must be made universal, where their time is cyclical or non-destinational it must be made future-oriented, where their sense of morality comes from within it must be structured and validated by an outside source.” It seems that in mission encounters of religious and secular kinds, a new social order requires a new cosmology, and vice versa.

Das (2007) has argued that any highly organized and centralized morality system that requires self-formation has the potential to create violence. As a result, caring for other humans is no longer primary; instead, the system motivates people to be brutal in the name of an ultimate and universal good. Soviet society, especially in its Stalinist version, serves as an example of this kind of highly repressive environment. While agreeing with Das in general, Laidlaw (2018, 185) points out that some morality systems can “also obviously lead people to heightened sensitivity or enlarged sympathy or motivate them much more strenuously to try to do good.” Or these systems can be used as tools to break some patterns that are not considered desirable, offering efficient means for self-cultivation. Take alcohol in the Nenets tundra, which has caused much damage to individual lives while supporting certain cultural life forms. While some, after accepting evangelical Christianity, could celebrate the eradication of alcohol consumption in Nenets campsites, others would lament the loss of earlier patterns of sociality in which drinking had a key role (cf. Safonova and Sántha 2013). What is important to note here is that these instances are possibilities for strong ethical evaluations for all sides involved.

It must be stressed that none of these grand totalizing morality systems, with their particular secular or religious ideologies, produces change or stasis automatically. Values, agendas, and power relations that do not quite fit or that outright conflict keep shaping the local cultural world in various manners. On a broader scale, although there are considerable similarities in these ideologies of transcendence, like the logic of obedience and commitment, conversion to Christianity should not just be seen as yet another wave of modernization or globalization with predictable consequences (Cannell 2006, 45; cf. Jenkins 2012, 471). Most Nenets converts are still intimately linked to reindeer and the landscape, pursuing the value of having large herds and large families. Reindeer and the land, as well as the nomads’ remote location, their ideal of independence, and their desire for innovation, thus continue to be affordances that link people with human and nonhuman others and thus have the creative potential to shape futures in unexpected ways. Despite promises of theological certainty, sociological unpredictability remains high.