NOTES

Introduction

1. I use the word sides for the sake of clearer exposition. I do not mean that the two sides—Indigenous Nenets nomads and evangelical white missionaries of Russian and Ukrainian ethnic backgrounds—are internally coherent or even oppositional in everything they do. However, one of the results of the mission encounter is that the boundaries of the sides are being redrawn and the idea of belonging to bounded groups has become more emphasized along the way.

2. Yamb-To (yamb to, “long lake”) is a relatively new name that comes from the early 1990s when the process of the official clan-community formation began and a name was chosen for it. Among the Ural Nenets, the Yamb-To Nenets are known as the yedei yakha tyerq, “the people of the New River,” which refers to the Korotaikha River where the group has winter pastures. The Ural Nenets call themselves pe tyerq (“the people of the mountains”) or pe mal tyerq (“the people of the mountains’ end”). The name pe tyerq also refers to those Nenets who live on the eastern (Asian or Siberian) side of the Polar Urals and who are not the focus of this book (cf. Adayev 2017; Vagramenko 2014).

3. According to various estimates, the number of Protestants in Russia is over two million, constituting between 1 to 2 percent of the entire population (Filatov 2016; Lunkin 2014).

4. Lambek has perceptively described the coexistence of spirit possession and Islam in Mayotte. He writes about a situation in which different religious regimes meet with one another in Mayotte: “The ‘conversation’ between spirit possession and Islam can be characterized as one in which Islam (i.e. certain arguments made by Muslims and as Muslims from within an Islamic tradition) asks people to select ‘either/or’ with respect to certain practices, whereas spirit possession offers a world of ‘both/and’—one in which you can practice both, in which not only can a Muslim be a spirit medium, but some of the spirits too are Muslim” (Berliner et al. 2016, 8, Lambek’s italics; see also Lambek 2015b, 60–61). This is similar to how Nenets animists entertain the both/and view of spirits by calling certain spirits “Russian spirits” (see chap. 4; cf. Stammler 2005, 328–31, on the wider logic of selective adaptation and creative innovation among the collectivized Yamal Nenets).

5. Bernard Williams (2011) writes about “the morality system” (pluralized as “morality systems” by Keane, see 2016) as a set of social norms that constrain individuals. In a roughly similar way, Foucault (1997) uses the term moral code, talking of this as rules and norms (see also Keane 2016, 18–20; Laidlaw 2014, 112–13). Both Williams and Foucault reserve the word ethics for a different aspect that primarily deals with the question of how one should live.

6. In anthropology, various aspects of self-cultivation in religious settings have been producitvely explored by many (see, e.g., Beatty 2012; Bialecki 2015, 2017; S. Coleman 2006; Csordas 1994, 1997; Daswani 2015; and Meyer 2010, 2015 for Pentecostal and charismatic strands; Mahmood 2005 for Islam).

7. So far, the Gospels of Luke (Luka 2004), Mark (Mark 2010), John (Ioann 2014), Matthew (Matfey 2018), and the Book of Jonah (Num’ Vadi 2021) have been translated into Nenets. In addition to local Nenets linguists, the translations are made by Eunsub Song, a South Korean exegetical adviser who lives in Salekhard and works for the Institute for Bible Translation based in Moscow (see Song 2015). The Baptist and Pentecostal missions under focus here have not been involved in the translation work. However, they distribute these translations, as this suits well their effort to spread the gospel.

8. The word pagan (also heathen, idolater) is part of Christian discourse about those who are not Christian and in particular about those who do not adhere to any world religion and are considered primitive (Masuzawa 2005). Furthermore, the word religion (also faith, belief, etc.) is similarly awkward, as Nenets animists have not usually considered their cosmology or ritual engagement with sentient environment to be a “religion” that could be replaced with another.

9. The 2021 Russian census counted 49,787 Nenets (this number also includes a couple thousand Forest Nenets, nyeshchang, in Western Siberia; the overall number had more than doubled since 1959 when there were 22,845 Nenets): 35,979 were registered in the Yamalo-Nenets Region (this area has the largest nomadic community of pastoralists in the entire Arctic), 6,722 in the Nenets Region, 3,853 in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, 1,383 in the Khanty-Mansi Region, and 222 in the Komi Republic.

10. Along with the Enets, Selkup, and Nganasan languages, the language of the Tundra Nenets (nyenetsya vada) belongs to the Samoyedic group of the Uralic or Finno-Ugric language family (Burkova 2022; Salminen 1998). There are some variations across dialects in Tundra Nenets, yet all dialects are mutually intelligible (Koshkareva 2010, 2017). The first written standard of Tundra Nenets, which is based on the Great Land tundra dialect (also spoken by Independents), was created in the early 1930s. However, written Nenets has had limited use as there are relatively few publications in Nenets (Ogryzko 2003; Toulouze 2004) and most literate Nenets would prefer reading in Russian anyway. Furthermore, there are also Komi-speaking Nenets. Due to long-term relations with Izhma Komi (iz’vatas in Komi), a few hundred self-identified Nenets (including some Yamb-To women) speak the Izhma Komi dialect as their native language. When speaking in Nenets, the latter are known as kholva yaran (kholva comes from the place name “Kolva,” yaran means “Nenets” in Komi, see also Habeck 2005, 68; Istomin 1999, 2019, 88–105; Vallikivi 2014a).

11. Tundra Nenets is spoken by more than twenty thousand speakers and is one of the few Indigenous languages in the Russian Arctic that is also widely used by the youngest generation. However, the knowledge of Nenets is very uneven across Nenets regions. Many of these regional differences come from different Soviet-period sedentarization and education policies as well as from the variation of ethnic composition (see Vakhtin 2001). In the European North, the loss of ancestral language has been much more severe than among the Siberian Nenets, who have more children able to speak their ancestral language compared to any other Indigenous minority in the Russian Arctic: while in the Yamalo-Nenets Region 55 percent of all self-identified Nenets claimed to be able to speak Nenets in the 2010 census, the same indicator in the Nenets Region was only 10 percent—that is, 750 people (see Toulouze and Vallikivi 2016, 30–33). As Nenets journalist Irina Khanzerova (2022) notes, virtually the only Nenets children who know their ancestral language in the Nenets Region are from the Yamb-To, while others are monolingual Russian speakers (even if a few of them may understand some of their heritage tongue).

12. Today, officially the collective farms and state farms have been renamed joint-stock enterprises or such (Vladimirova 2017). However, locally people still refer to these enterprises as kolkhozy and sovkhozy.

13. Shamans were sometimes labeled as “kulaks-shamans,” despite many of them being poor. They were typically accused of practicing illegal medicine, fraud, and extortion. When found, their ritual objects were confiscated or destroyed. Some were imprisoned, and if they survived and were released, they hid or discontinued their practice. In the Great Land tundra, the best-known shaman at the time was Ivan Ledkov (Ngebt Yamb Vanyu), who spent three years in a Gulag and returned to become a tailor and informant for Russian folklorists and linguists (Menshakova and Taleyeva 2011; Skachkov 1934, 28; Tereshchenko 1990, 55, 334; Tolkachev 2000b, 267–72).

14. There is extensive literature on the nature of collectivization in the North, its randomness, and the discrepancy between the declared objectives and actual repressive practices (see Balzer 1999; Bulgakova 2013; Bulgakova and Sundström 2017; Donahoe 2012, 107; Fondahl 1998; Slezkine 1994; Ziker 2002).

15. In Russian history, Pustozersk was a notorious settlement, as it was the place of exile and execution of Archpriest Avvakum (1620 or 1621–82) (Avvakum 2021; Okladnikov 1999; Yasinski and Ovsyannikov 2003). This uncompromising religious thinker and writer became the spiritual leader of those dissenters who later became known as Old Believers. The lower Pechora area (especially Ust-Tsilma) was one of the strongholds for the fugitive dissenters who refused to accept Patriarch Nikon’s reforms (1652–66), including the three-fingered sign of the cross, the four-ended cross, and new liturgical texts. Nenets were not involved in these confessional fights, even if there are a few vague reports in which reindeer herders were accused of being followers of Old Belief (Okladnikov and Matafanov 2008, 72–73, 78; see also Lukin 2011, 217–22). Pustozersk was abandoned by the early 1960s; today there are various monuments, including one wooden figure representing “a Nenets spirit,” which has caused controversies with the Russian Orthodox Church. The site of Pustozersk is twenty-five kilometers from the administrative center of the Nenets Region, called Naryan-Mar (“Red Town”), which was founded in 1930 to serve as a port for the Vorkuta coal region (see map 1).

16. Until the 1930s, Russians called Nenets samoyedy (“Samoyeds”) and, in the eastern areas, yuraki (“Yuraks”). In Russian samoyedy sounds derogatory because, in part, its folk etymology links the word to “cannibal” (samo “self,” yed “eater”; compare with the regular word for “cannibal”—lyudoyed, from lyudi “people,” yed “eater”).

17. Veniamin (1855, 114) reports that between 1825 and 1830 he and his entourage managed to baptize 3,303 souls, which is roughly three-quarters of all European Nenets. Around a thousand Nenets living west of the Urals remained unbaptized, mainly in the Great Land tundra (Okladnikov and Matafanov 2008, 83). The large majority of the “pagans” (yazychniki) were herd owners from the Great Land tundra whose knowledge of Russian was poor and whose contact with “rebellious” Yamal and Ural Nenets (kamennye samoyedy) was intense. To avoid the Orthodox mission altogether, many moved temporarily across the Urals (Shemanovskiy 2011, tome I, 187).

18. I have discussed pre-Soviet Russian Orthodox missionization elsewhere in more detail (Vallikivi 2003, 2023; Leete and Vallikivi 2011, 89–95; see also Ablazhey 2005; Khomich 1979; Lar and Vanuyto 2011; Mavlyutova 2001; Okladnikov and Matafanov 2008; Perevalova 2019; Shemanovskiy 2011; Templing 2003, 2004, 2007; Toulouze 2006, 2011a, 2011b).

19. Reindeer herding is the most thoroughly studied aspect of the Tundra Nenets cultural world: Nenets nomads keep around one million domesticated reindeer out of more than two million in the world (see Arzyutov and Lyublinskaya 2018; Golovnev and Osherenko 1999; Golovnev et al. 2018; Istomin and Dwyer 2021; Krupnik 1993; Kvashnin 2009a; Lehtisalo 1932; Niglas 1997a, 2000; Stammler 2005; Yoshida 1997).

20. There is a growing body of literature about the Russian Arctic landscape as a living environment in which animals, spirits, stories, memories, and dreams become entangled in a complex manner (see D. Anderson 2000, 2014; Haakanson and Jordan 2010; Istomin and Dwyer 2010; Kharyuchi 2004; Lukin 2011, 2022; Safonova and Sántha 2013; Vitebsky 2005; Vitebsky and Alekseyev 2015a, 2015b; Willerslev 2007; Willerslev et al. 2015).

21. Already in the nineteenth century, losing reindeer was frequently mentioned in travelers’ reports (see, e.g., Nosilov 1895, 44; see also Krupnik 1993, 153–54). The latest cases of losing reindeer on a large scale, threatening to turn herders into reindeerless villagers or fishermen, are linked to several factors. On the one hand, the competition for lands has increased because of the rapidly expanding hydrocarbon industry and because of various legal restrictions, such as private owners not being officially allocated enough grazing areas (see Murashko 2013, 2016 on Ural Independent families being evicted from their pastures). On the other hand, the particularly fast global warming in the Arctic region creates unpredictable weather patterns. In recent years, frequent rain on snow and the formation of impenetrable ice crust in large areas has led to high reindeer mortality, as the animals cannot reach food (Golovnev 2017; Terekhina and Volkovitskiy 2023). Among the Independents, in the winter of 2013 and 2014 many families lost parts of their herds. Elsewhere, there have been other tragedies, also possibly linked to climate change. In 2016 an anthrax outbreak occurred in Yamal that was probably caused by the exposure of old grave sites of reindeer killed by anthrax when permafrost began melting (Laptander 2020a). Remarkably, a local cosmological explanation for this and other mass die-offs links it to evil spirits, such as vevako khabtsya and posa khabtsya, who live underground and kill animals and people. Some Yamal Nenets argue that these disastrous mass deaths are “caused by the disrespect to the sacred places and the dead” (Golovnev 2017, 41, see also 46); others talk about conspiracies such as the poisoning of their pastures with some liquid “by order from above” (Stammler and Ivanova 2020, 12). Tellingly, people complain that there are no shamans left to consult with to manage such disasters (9–10). As a rule, those who have been forced to quit the habitual mobile way of life try to acquire enough reindeer (for fish, sledges, clothes, etc.) to become full-time nomads again, which is still the key cultural value (Golovnev 1995, 52; Kharyuchi 2001, 12–13; Laptander 2020a, 22).

22. This idea is also visible in the semantics: in the Taimyr Nenets vocabulary, lutsimz means both “to become Russianized” and “to become sedentary” (Tereshchenko 2003, 195).

23. As Zoia Vylka Ravna (2021) shows, in addition to verbal directives such as prohibitions and warnings in a family setting, also stories, songs, and riddles have significant pedagogical value. Giving example and working together when crafting a sledge, marking reindeer calves, or moving in the landscape are typical forms of nonverbal education.

24. As one of my Nenets interlocutors in the tundra explained, not standing up straight is called lusarta, which in his view was related to the word lutsa, “Russian.”

25. However, some Independent families have recently joined nearby collective farms because of the lack of free pastures in the context where their herds have grown several times and the farms have the legal right to use the vast majority of the pastures (cf. Vladimirova 2017, 2018).

26. It must be noted that the term shamanism (like animism) is highly problematic as the ending “-ism” implies it being a systematized and codified religion like Christianity or some other literate and doctrine-based religion. Even if there are numerous studies about “Nenets shamanism,” there are very few detailed accounts of Nenets shamanic seances and related cosmology (see, e.g., Johnson 1903; see also Dobzhanskaya 2008, 2014; Khomich 1978, 1981; Lapsui et al. 2023; Lar 1998, 2001, 2005, 2006; Lar and Vanuyto 2011; Lehtisalo 1924, 1937; Lukin 2011, 2012, 2022; Pushkareva 1999, 2003, 2007, 2019; Pushkareva and Burykin 2011, 298–306; Pushkareva and Khomich 2001; Yadne 2006, 59, 167–69). This is so mainly because Nenets have hidden sacred matters from outsiders. Today, Nenets live in a “post-shamanistic” society (Vitebsky 1992, 244). However, among Nenets occasionally a few are still called shamans (tadyebya in Nenets, shaman in Russian) as they claim to have shamanic sensibilities and perform rituals, or as Nenets author Nina Yadne (2006, 169) writes, “Now there are few real shamans and those who are go further to the tundra” (see also Golovnev 2000b, 220; Kharyuchi 2004, 156–57; Pyrirko 2019; Vagramenko 2014, 29–31). Global neoshamanism with its “individualistic psychologization” and “environmentalist activism” (Vitebsky 1995, 189) has also reached the Nenets areas. For instance, Nikolai Taleyev, alias Shaman Kolya, a Nenets from Nelmin-Nos village, is known throughout Russia thanks to his public rituals of divination.

27. Following Keane (2013), I regard ontology to be local assumptions, representations, or theories that guide people’s actions (“weak ontology”), which is different from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (1998) claims of ontology determining the way people inhabit their own world (“strong ontology”). I find the notion of ontology useful when talking of people’s intuitions or views about what things are in the world (e.g., the wine of the Eucharist as Christ’s blood for Christians, see Keane 2013, 190), which can be radically different from one another. These intuitions and views can, however, change in divergent contexts depending on, among other things, ethical criteria (Lambek 2021, 120). These are “practices in an ‘ontology’ . . . in which relations are drawn on different principles,” as Caroline Humphrey (2018, 13) puts it with a reference to Philippe Descola’s (2013) work.

28. There is some research done on evangelical communities among Siberian Nenets east of the Urals by Skvirskaja (2014) and Tatiana Vagramenko (2014, 2017a, 2017b, 2018). Vagramenko’s work offers a valuable ethnographic insight into relations between various Christian denominations in Yamal, both in sedentary and nomadic settings, also shedding light on the widespread negative discourse on “sectarians” (sektanty) among Nenets and Khanty intelligentsia and beyond.

29. The biggest source of mission force today are Ukrainians, many of whom moved to Russia in the Soviet period, often attracted to the North by the possibility of earning the “long rouble”—that is, high pay. So are the central characters in my account, Baptist pastor Pavel and Pentecostal pastor Vladislav, both ethnic Ukrainians. Already in the Soviet period the largest Baptist community in Europe was in Ukraine, which was also called “the Bible Belt of the Soviet Union” (Wanner 2007, 1). As a result, Ukrainians have proselytized across the former Soviet Union, from Central Asia to the Far North (Pelkmans 2009b; Wanner 2009; White 2020). Among the northern Indigenous minorities, the Ukrainians, alongside Russians, are active not only among Nenets but also among the Khanty, Koryak, Chukchi, and others (King 2011, 96; Lunkin 2000, 130; Plattet 2013; Vagramenko 2014, 83; Vakhtin 2005; Vaté 2009; Wiget and Balalaeva 2007, 15; 2011, 168). With the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine in February 2022, many Ukrainians ceased to have access to the mission fields in Russia. One-third of all brotherhood members live in Ukraine; many of them have been forced to become refugees and some have been killed (V zone 2022, 22–25). The brotherhood has declared the war to be the sure sign of the end times (https://iucecb.com/news/20220923-1851).

30. The word veruyushchiy (“believer”) or khristianin (“Christian”) is the primary marker of self-identification for Russian Baptists and Pentecostals. They rarely use names derived from the denominational labels such as baptist (“Baptist”) or pyatidesyatnik (“Pentecostal”) (cf. Wanner 2009, 168, 180n10).

31. In the nineteenth century, Orthodox missionaries also complained that the locals who were baptized did not know the name of Christ (Khomich 1979, 21; see also Borisova 2022 on such “ignorance” today).

1. Dynamics of Avoidance and Engagement

1. I stress the word sense here, as reindeer herders’ situations vary considerably. Unlike some other marginalized groups (such as Pentecostal Dalit women in a South Indian slum see Roberts 2016), Nenets families usually do not convert to Christianity to alleviate their poverty (many converts are well-off, while some nonconverts are struggling to get meat on the table). However, Ural Nenets who have been threatened with removal are motivated to seek protection from farm bosses through their alliance with Christian Russians (more below).

2. This distinction has its roots in an earlier debate on Robin Horton’s (1975a, 1975b) “intellectualist theory” of conversion in Africa (see also Hefner 1993b).

3. It must be noted that firsthand knowledge of the cultural worlds both before and after conversion is rare among anthropologists, as this would require a rather long duration of ethnographic observation (but see Tuzin 1997; Vilaça 2016; Vitebsky 2017a; 2017b, 24).

4. The Veli is one of the oldest clans (yerkar) among the European Nenets. We know that some with the clan name Veli participated in assaults against Russians in Pustozersk in 1661. In the tax documents, the clan name first appears in 1683. They are then categorized as the dwellers of the forests (pedara khasavaq, “forest people”) possibly living in the lower reaches of the Usa River. This earlier area largely matches Mikul’s son Vata’s version, which is that his ancestors began to move from the forest to the open tundra in summer only in the mid-nineteenth century; some other Veli families already nomadized in the open tundra by that time, especially in the Kanin peninsula (see Dolgikh 1970, 46, 61; Islavin 1847, 135; Kvashnin 2019, 83–84; Kolycheva 1956, 84; Lashuk 1958, 162; Okladnikov and Matafanov 2008, 251).

5. There were as many as 363 baptized Veli (or Valeyskiy, which is a Russianized form) by the end of the nineteenth century (Okladnikov and Matafanov 2008, 251).

6. I have chosen to use “Independents” rather than “private farmers,” “noncollectivized peasant,” or “small-holders” when translating the word yedinolichniki. This is a term that came into a wider usage in the early 1930s, designating the people who were not (yet) collectivized in the rural areas (see, e.g., Maslov 1934). In Stalin’s constitution from 1936, as Karen Petrone (2000, 190) writes, “article 9 explicitly permitted the ‘small-scale private economy of individual peasants and artisans based on their personal labor’” (see also Lévesque 2006). Nevertheless, most yedinolichniki could not survive, as they were not given (good) land, and most of what they grew or raised was taken through exorbitant taxation. Officially registered yedinolichniki became rare in the documents of the Nenets areas after 1940, as they were forced to pay exorbitantly high taxes to the state (Khomich 1966, 252; 1971a, 237; Stammler 2005, 141). Nenets Independents with their thousands of reindeer were officially not registered as yedinolichniki, although they were locally called this by other reindeer herders of the region.

7. Yevsyugin (1910–95) belonged to the cohort of the early northern graduates from the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad (1930–33). In his memoirs Yevsyugin (1993) describes approvingly how in 1920, as a schoolboy in Nizhnyaya Pyosha, the priest-teacher was confronted by school children who had been changed “under the influence of Red commanders, political instructors, and revolutionary songs.” Further, he writes, “I am deeply grateful to the first Red Army men who came to us. Under their influence, I became an atheist and thereafter a Komsomol [member of the Communist Youth League] and a Communist” (7). Only a few Nenets went through this kind of conversion experience to cast themselves as revolutionary subjects, as the majority of them were out in the tundra and had little contact with political activists. In Yevsyugin’s, as in many other early Soviet narratives of conversion to Communism, one can discern a pattern like that of Christianity in which the motifs of rebirth, confession, and repudiation of one’s past self dominate (Hellbeck 2006, 311–12; see also Kharkhordin 1999).

8. Compare with what Nenets writer Vasiliy Ledkov writes in his novel on collectivization: “But they [yedinolichniki] also need the word of the Party. We leave them out of sight and they will be the prey of kulaks and shamans. And also the children of yedinolichniki need to be engaged. They must study . . . By all means . . .” (1977, 114, original ellipsis).

9. During the Great Purge in 1937, Prourzin was accused of, among other things, not carrying out “a decisive fight against the machinations [vylazok] of the kulaks, shamans, and clergy,” and he spent fifteen years in prison camps (Tolkachev 2000а, 44; see also 525–26).

10. “Yadey Segery” is a Russianized version of yedei syekhery, which translates as “new ways” in Nenets. It was one of the two small collective farms that were based in the village of Karataika. Mikhail worked as its chairman until 1952, when the farm was merged with two others into a “consolidated collective farm” (ukrupnennyy kolkhoz) (Mamoylova 1997, 66). During this period of “rationalization,” many Nenets lost their leading positions in rural collective structures.

11. Possibly he was caught as a participant in the mandalada uprising, even if he did not take part in it (more below).

12. Ngel was conscripted in 1942 and was declared “missing” (propal bez vesti) in 1943, which usually means death without the body being found but can also mean capture by the enemy or desertion (https://www.obd-memorial.ru/html/info.htm?id=68260918,checked27/2/2019).

13. The archival documents provided by Tolkachev (2000b, 305) tell us that “Valey Vasiliy Tarasovich (Taras Vas’)” was arrested among those putative “bandits” who were caught only after the event at a distance of up to thirty kilometers. It is known that there were random retributive arrests made among those who did not participate in the mandalada.

14. Among rather brief and vague reports of yedinolichniki, a more concrete example is given by Alexandra Lavrillier (2005, 123) who writes that “we still find today in the village [area] of Ust-Nyukzha some nomadic kin groups that never joined the state institutions and whose herds have never been requisitioned. This is the shaman Fyodor Vasil’ev’s lineage and another family whose name I will not reveal. The latter are currently looked for by the police, who, despite many years of searching in the taiga, have not been able to locate them.” I heard of a similar case of a nomadic family in the Ural Mountains whom the authorities have never “found” (as in 2007, more below).

15. Khalmer-Yu, a village with a Gulag history, was at the time the center of the Bolshezemelskaya District of the Nenets Region before it was transferred to the Komi ASSR in 1959 (Vorkuta was transferred in 1940). The changes in administrative borders must have made Independents less visible to the authorities. Furthermore, the copresence of Gulag and civil administrations in the area made the issue of responsibility for dealing with such “illegals” less clear.

16. Also, many Baptist pastors who were not working were sentenced by the same law (see Bourdeaux and Filatov 2003, 171, 195).

17. Moving around in settlements was always dangerous, as the identity documents were occasionally checked, especially in the heavily guarded areas like the Vorkuta Gulag area (see Solzhenitsyn 1991, 82–83n42). However, the reindeer herders were not asked for documents on streets that often, as they wore reindeer coats and moved around with reindeer, which put them in a particular “savage slot.”

18. Like in the tsarist era, so trading did not necessarily involve cash transactions. The Independents often engaged in the exchange of pelts for rifles, ammunition, tarpaulin, rubber boots, or similar illegal or difficult-to-get things with Russians.

19. Living without a propiska was a criminal offense in the Soviet Union, as it was a prerequisite for all citizens to have one; it secured housing, schooling, medical service, and employment. De facto it was a vicious circle as one could not get a propiska without being employed in an enterprise, which was a “primary unit of society” (Humphrey 2002, 25).

20. Many Izhma Komi are of Nenets origin, or as Otto Habeck (2005, 203) notes about the people with whom he did fieldwork, “The Khatanzeiskii families see themselves as ‘somewhere in between’ Komi and Nenets.”

21. These are internal passports (pasporta) that were used as national identity cards and were issued to the rural population only in the 1970s (Baiburin 2021). The data in the Independents’ passports are often rather approximate: for many, the date of birth is the first of July and the place of birth is “Bolshezemelskaya tundra,” “Kara River,” or similar.

22. There is a similar case of a Yamb-To child finding himself in the orphanage in 1976 as a result of his mother dying during childbirth. The family was visiting the village of Karataika to buy supplies when her labor unexpectedly started. The child was saved and taken to Arkhangelsk. Although the family name and patronymic of the newborn were known, his father and brothers were found only at the beginning of the 1990s when contacts emerged between yedinolichniki and Nenets in Naryan-Mar. The orphan joined his family in 1993 without knowing the Nenets language or reindeer herding. Although at the beginning he tried to escape several times, he has stayed and is living in the tundra (Khanzerova 2018).

23. This is a paraphrase of Stephen Kotkin’s (1995, 220) expression “speak Bolshevik”—“the obligatory language for self-identification and as such, the barometer of one’s political allegiance to the cause” (see also Petrov and Ryazanova-Clarke 2014). There is a certain parallel with the “Baptist dialect,” with its “numerous archaisms, biblical allusions and euphemisms” (Prokhorov 2013, 309), which also works as an identity marker. As Konstantin Prokhorov notes, “Those familiar with this ‘pious’ dialect quickly distinguished the ‘ins’ from the ‘outs’” (312).

24. As we shall see later, the issue of sincerity is much more contested than it would appear from these statements (see also Rappaport 1999).

25. The formal and informal property regimes have been rather complex in the tundra area over the last hundred years (see Konstantinov 2015; Ventsel 2005; Vladimirova 2006). Atsushi Yoshida, who has done research among Gyda Nenets (2001, 69), reports, “Most of the reindeer herders had officially been organized in sovkhozy (state farms) or kolkhozy (collective farms). But quite a large number remained as independent herder-smallholders called yedinolichniki in Russian. In documents, they are sometimes called hunters (okhotniki) or fishermen (rybaki), depending on their secondary specialized mode of subsistence. Some also do double-duty working as herders for collective farms or working seasonally as fishermen in fish factories. However, if one looks beyond the statistics, most are at the same time also herders” (cf. Bogordayeva and Oshchepkov 2003, 170; Stammler 2005, 144). Unlike the Yamb-To and Ural Nenets, these yedinolichniki in Gyda still had links with the state farms, as their other citizen duties, such as schooling, army service, and identity papers were all managed through their offices. They are those who I would call “grey-zone herders” (cf. Lévesque 2006, 109). Furthermore, during the Soviet era, despite official restrictions, many managed to run big personal herds inside the collective farm system, hidden from the gaze of outsiders or enjoying silent agreement from farm administrations (especially in Yamal and Gyda, see D. Anderson 2000, 144; Golovnev and Osherenko 1999, 98; Golovnev 2004, 92–93; Stammler 2005, 135).

26. Initially the name was Obshchina olenevodov-yedinolichnikov ‘Yamb To’ (Proyektnye 1993; cf. Tuisku 2002). Only in January 2011, the Yamb-To clan-community (with the full Russian name: semeyno-rodovaya obshchina korennykh malochislennykh narodov Severa Nenetskogo avtonomnogo okruga ‘Yamb To’ [Dlinnoe ozero]), with fifteen families, was finally registered by the local authorities. A few Independents have also become “associate members” of the nearby collective farms based in Karataika, Ust-Kara, and Vorkuta or remained unaffiliated herders (chastniki) (Bobrova 2010). The existence of the official clan-community has been rather unstable. In 2015, it was liquidated by the federal authorities, as the necessary tax reports were not filed in time. Before paying a visit to the community the same year, I had accidentally discovered the official statement of “the liquidation” of the community on the official website of court acts (Reshenie 2015). No one among the Yamb-To reindeer herders I talked to had heard of the closing of the clan-community, including the illiterate head of the community. The following year the community was officially restored with the help of Nenets officials in Naryan-Mar. Since 2011 they have been allocated some pastures; however, these cannot accommodate their twenty thousand or so reindeer (cf. Korepanova 2019, 487).

27. The confrontation of the state and Indigenous understanding has often caused bureaucratic problems. A Nenets woman told me how her family had buried her grandmother, and as one of the items she asked to be buried with her was her passport; this was done. Afterward it caused significant problems for the registration of her death. These examples demonstrate, in different semiotic ideologies or ontologies (Henare et al. 2007, 19; Keane 2007), how material items can gain agency of their own and can pose a real threat to existing cultural forms.

28. The number of the Yamb-To Nenets (not considering their relationship to the Yamb-To obshchina) is around two hundred (in 2007 it was 205; most of them were registered in Amderma, the Nenets Region). The number of the Ural Nenets, who have always been more numerous, is almost double that. By 2001, Vorkuta City Council had issued documents for 253 Nenets who had previously no documents (Komandirovka 2001, 63; see also Bogoyavlenskiy 2001). In 2019, the Vorkuta municipal area had registered 237 Indigenous people (the majority of them are Nenets), 192 of them listed as nomads and others as part-time nomads (Status 2019). My rough estimate of the Ural Independents, based on my fieldwork material, is between 300 and 400. Many of them are registered in the Yamalo-Nenets Region, where more generous allowances are paid.

29. As Sovetskiy village was closed, in 2016 the four-year school was moved to Vorgashor, the coal-mining village on the other side of the Vorkuta industrial region, which is also planned to be shut down. In 2019, seventy Nenets children went to this school. However, the number is decreasing, as many families have moved their children to schools in the Yamalo-Nenets Region (Romanova 2022; see also Kuwajima 2015).

30. Since the early 2010s, the Ural Independents have been under increasing pressure from the local joint-stock farms “Reindeer Herder” and “Red October” (an ex-sovkhoz and an ex-kolkhoz), whose bosses (father and son) have sued several Nenets heads of family for using the pastures of farms that have an official lease agreement with Vorkuta city (for the years 2005–2028). As there is no land to rent for the Independents, this can be seen an opportunity to “collectivize” the Ural Independents (Murashko 2016). There have been several court cases (I attended one session in 2012) and Nenets have been fined for using the pastures their parents and grandparents had used for decades. There is another dimension to this as well: various accusations have been made that the Independents not only are uncivilized and unable to manage their herds but also, being Baptists, are supported and manipulated by foreign churches, which implicitly means a moral danger to everyone, including the Nenets themselves (Ezhegodnyy 2015, 19; Murashko 2013, 58; see also Andreyev 2017; Opasnost’ 2019 for examples of accusations against Protestants). Indeed, the Nenets who were sued have agreed that the Vorkuta Baptist church petitioned against their attempted eviction from their lands (http://iucecb.com/news/20140406-0254). In the early 2010s, a few Ural families formed an obshchina called “Tybertya” (from Nenets ty pertya, “reindeer herder”) and acquired the rental rights for some pastures on the border of Komi Republic and Yamalo-Nenets Region in 2014. Some others have been forced to join a joint-stock farm so as not to be evicted from their pastures.

2. Trajectories of Conversion

1. The paradox of being simultaneously modern and antimodern is managed through the concept of interiority and exteriority, the dichotomy that defines most aspects of a believer’s life. The part that will be saved is one’s soul, while the body is above all an externality that is said to be mirroring what is “inside” (the role of body is not stressed in the doctrine of resurrection; see Cannell 2005). Yet, as we shall see below, the idea of mirroring interiority may become a source of significant anxiety for converts.

2. Also other gadgets such as smartphones became popular in the late 2000s. These were used primarily for entertainment, as most of the time there was no mobile coverage
(cf. Stammler 2009).

3. The story has a few parallels that are known from shamanic initiation stories, such as suffering and losing consciousness (Lehtisalo 1924, 147; 1937, 3). However, Ivan’s demonizing discourse based on the Christian value system did not reveal whether he thought in these categories himself. So, the parallel is rather “typological” here and based on Ivan’s claim that he had earlier desired to become a shaman.

4. “Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?” (1 Corinthians 11:14).

5. Reluctance and tormenting visions have been common in shamanic initiation among the Nenets, as reported by several commentators (Schrenk 1848, 403; Siikala 1978, 190; see also Vitebsky 1995, 74–77). Although Nenets shamanhood is hereditary, sometimes marked by a birthmark or a pellicle on the crown of the head (like in the case of Tikynye; see introduction), it is believed that spirits chose the future shaman and pressured the person into the apprenticeship of shamanhood (Khomich 1981; Lar 2005). Spirits were said to be choosing the person and would punish an unwilling person with a disease or death (Popov 1944, 90). The motifs that keep repeating in shamanic initiatory accounts are spirits cutting up, boiling, and putting back together the initiate. Often some bones or organs are added to the person before being brought back to life. This is thus a kind of corporeal rebirth that gives the person shamanic powers.

6. When Andrei was being ordained, his wife, Lyuba, knelt next to him, indicating that the role of a fully functioning pastorship needs a believing and supporting wife as a household church.

7. Here is a strong parallel with the nineteenth-century Lutheran pietist movement known as Laestadianism that spread widely among Sámi reindeer herders in northern Scandinavia. This was started in the 1840s by Lars Levi Laestadius (1800–61), a Swedish Sámi pastor and botanist, who integrated a successful temperance program into his evangelization campaign.

8. There are many passing notes on this topic across Siberia (see Broz 2009, 31; Golovnev et al. 2014, 87; Khakhovskaya 2018, 219–20; Kharitonova 2004, 30; Pelkmans 2009b, 154; Sillanpää 2008, 87; Toulouze and Niglas 2019, 276; Vagramenko 2014; Vaté 2009, 50; Wanner 2007, 220–25; Wiget and Balalaeva 2011).

9. Also nonconverts were talking of conversion as becoming sober. For instance, when I refused to have a drink with nonconverts, they asked whether I had become a Baptist.

10. The female converts’ relative invisibility among the Independents contrasts with what Vagramenko (2014, 2017a) describes about school-educated female converts in Beloyarsk, Yamal, where two middle-aged Nenets sisters helped Russian Baptist male missionaries to arrange most conversions via their kin networks.

11. Like the Nenets Independents, the Unregistered Baptists have reservations toward too much education. While the Nenets do not want their children to stay at school more than four years, the Baptists do not encourage their children to go to university, as this is not necessary for living the life of “a service to God.” In the pages of Herald of Truth, senior Russian Baptist Vladimir Chukhontsev (2007, 11) condemns those believers who have pursued higher education: “They have invested resources and wasted their efforts and time. They lived five years under strain. . . . for what good? In order to boast when an opportunity presents itself: ‘I have higher education!’ This is open vanity.”

12. Obviously, Ivan did not consider himself a Russian. When living in the city, this is virtually impossible, even if one wished. He said that Russians on the street call Nenets pejoratively chukchi (a stereotype of uncivilized reindeer herders, from an ethnonym of the Chukchi living in the Far East) or churki (people from the Caucasus or Central Asia) because of their Asiatic appearance and small stature.

3. Baptist Missionaries on the Edge

1. Until 2001, their name was “The Union of Churches of Evangelical-Christian Baptists,” then they added “International” in front of their name. On the one hand, this reflects the fact that Russia and other ex-Soviet states where churches were located belonged to different political entities now. On the other hand, a claim for “internationality” helps them to strengthen their image as the Christ’s church on earth (more below).

2. Those churches that survived the Stalinist purges or emerged after either remained independent, and thus illegal, or joined the state-sanctioned All-Union Council, which united both Baptists and Pentecostals. The Vorkuta Baptist church existed as an independent congregation until the 1990s, when it joined the unregistered union. The Vorkuta Pentecostal Church has grown out of the official Pentecostal branch, which until 1989 was a part of the All-Union Council (Bourdeaux and Filatov 2003, 266–83; 2005, 195–200). The Registered Pentecostals were forced to adopt Baptist theological and ritual preferences, which were more acceptable to the secular authorities. While retaining believer’s baptism, the Pentecostals had to give up their central rituals, which distinguished them from the Baptists: they were not allowed to speak in tongues or prophesy, or perform spiritual healing during joint church services (Sawatsky 1981, 93–95).

3. He was referring to Vladimir Yevladov’s (1893–1974) book Po tundram Yamala k Belomu ostrovu (“Across the Tundra of Yamal toward the Belyi Island”). Yevladov worked for the Ural Regional Land Service and traveled on the Yamal Peninsula in 1928–29 and 1935–36, studying the land resources and Indigenous peoples (Yevladov 1992; see also 2010; Pika 1998).

4. There is a perennial problem for Christian missionaries who strive to find what is “cultural” (and can therefore be left alone or even positively used for Christianization purposes) and what is “pagan” (see also Pelkmans 2007). A discrepancy between missionaries’ and Nenets converts’ perceptions is apparent: the latter are sometimes even more radical in their attempts at eradication, as they can see “paganism” in things and habits that are invisible to the missionaries, who know very little of the local cosmologies and ritual practices (see also Vagramenko 2017b).

5. I sensed a symmetric suspicion by both state agents and missionaries. Pavel implied that my academic work could be used by the state. An official in Naryan-Mar whom I contacted to ask for permission to work in the closed border area where the Yamb-To summer pastures are located inquired whether I was working for the missionaries or was, in fact, a missionary myself (cf. Broz 2009, 34n8; Vagramenko 2014, 60–63).

6. This was the All-Russia agricultural census that took place in summer 2006. Note also a quote from an Unregistered Baptist: “When Christ comes to take his church, if she has registered her marriage with the State . . . of course, He will repudiate such a church! Would you be pleased if your bride registered her marriage with another man?” (quoted in Prokhorov 2013, 345, original ellipsis).

7. Other strands of Baptists and other evangelical Christians in Russia are involved in various social programs (Caldwell 2017, 25; Mikeshin 2016).

8. The author of the lyrics is Viktor Belykh, a Christian who was in a Gulag camp in Vorkuta. The song was already circulating in the 1960s. Interestingly, one can recognize the similar language of harshness in the Vorkuta punk subculture (Pilkington 2014, 162).

9. Born in Ukraine in a Baptist family, Pavel found his way to Vorkuta by being conscripted into the army in Vorkuta in 1979. After being released from the army, Pavel took his wife and son to Vorkuta and started working in a coal mine, attracted by a high salary and other “northern privileges.” In the late 1990s, he retired from work; since then, he has dedicated most of his time to traveling and evangelizing in the tundra.

10. However, both the Registered and Unregistered Baptists shared the basic seven dogmatic principles shared widely among Baptists elsewhere: the Bible as the only rule and guidance, freedom of conscience, the church of only regenerated people, baptism of adult believers by immersion, independence of local churches, the priesthood of all believers, and the separation of the church from the state (Vins 1979, 103; cf. Sawatsky 1981, 338). Despite sharing the same set of dogmas, the actual practices and church ideology in both groups were considerably different, mainly due to their different attitudes toward the state and secular modernity.

11. “For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not ye judge them that are within? But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person.”

12. In the Soviet period, some young believers wore photos of prisoners on themselves, as Prokhorov writes, “These small photos were being revered and were functioning almost like icons” (2013, 218–19). He has demonstrated that in this and many other cases Russian Orthodoxy has had a major impact upon the religiosity of Russian Baptists.

13. In recent years, Protestants have experienced hardships that they have not seen since the late Soviet period. In 2016, the new law (known as the Yarovaya Law after lawmaker Irina Yarovaya) was enacted (Zagrebina 2017), forbidding missionizing outside recognized church buildings without special registration, thus making the Unregistered Baptists’ evangelization illegal in the eyes of the state.

14. The number 666 is a widespread worry among Christians in Russia, including Russian Orthodox (Benovska 2021, 1).

15. The language barrier poses serious challenges to the missionaries, who must read other signs to assess converts’ Christianness. Pavel writes in a mission report on the importance of visible deeds: “In summer 2004, G. and D. experienced the joy of being born from above and were baptized. The language barrier often hinders understanding the inner world of our Nenets brothers and sisters. But deeds express their interior world and thoughts better than any words. So once again when visiting the Ural Nenets church, I saw how brothers from other tents came on their reindeer harnesses to visit one of the poor families. One of them brought the carcass of a reindeer calf, another took with him dried bread [sukhari] and the third brought sugar. When seeing the loving work of God in the life of those people, my heart fills with trembling and gratitude to God for His work among these people.”

16. In this respect, Unregistered Baptists differ from many other Christians elsewhere in the world who often launch their mission through translation work (see, e.g., Handman 2015; Hanks 2010; Meyer 1999). In Russia, this stance is related to the dominant language ideology that represents the Russian language as an inevitable part of every citizen’s life.

4. Destructive Persuasion

1. “But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolator, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat.”

2. William Pietz (1985, 14) notes, “The discourse of the fetish has always been a critical discourse about the false objective values of a culture from which the speaker is personally distanced.” But as we shall see below, this is an issue not only of values but also of ontological concepts of things and their agency.

3. “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”

4. Or take the fleshiness of a leather-bound Bible, which is good for waving when making a point, as we shall see further below (cf. Rutherford 2006). There are many reports from the Soviet period that Bibles were valued as sacred objects because physical copies were hard to come by (Prokhorov 2013, 224–33).

5. Orthodox Nenets avoided damaging syadeyq. The priest Nevskiy gives a telling account of this when he travels with Nenets in the Great Land tundra in 1905. He learned that a larch tree he had stopped by during the day was “an idol” with a carved face on it. Later in the day at a nomadic campsite, it was explained that Nenets smeared the face with vodka, as this helped to avoid getting lost in the tundra. When learning of these details, Nevskiy began explaining about the “falsity” of this belief. He then noted that “finally, they understood and laughed at the idol.” But when he asked for an axe, they refused, saying, “What’s it to you? You are a priest, so [the idol] will not touch you, but we shall suffer evil” (Nevskiy 1906, 271; see also Baryshev 2011; Mikhaylov 1898; Okladnikov and Matafanov 2008; Ovsyannikov and Terebikhin 1994, 68–69; Shashkov 1896; Yur’ev 1919, 64–65).

6. Like Orthodox icons, Indigenous sacred objects, such as shamanic drums, cloaks, and carved images, were publicly burned by Soviets (Balzer 2011, 43–45; Bulgakova 2013, 196, 213–15; Bulgakova and Sundström 2017, 246).

7. Many scholars have written about similar issues elsewhere in Siberia (see, e.g., Bloch and Kendall 2004, 94; Højer 2009, 579; Lukin 2010; Rethmann 2001, 39; Slezkine 1994; Ssorin-Chaikov 2001, 14–15; Vitebsky 2005, 323).

8. As Baptist missionary Pavel put it after his trip to Vaigach (using the language of the prophet Daniel, especially 9:27; 11:31): “The island in Nenets is called Khebyidya-Ya, which means ‘sacred island’ [he mistranslates ya, “land,” as “island”]. Scholars call it ‘a historical monument of the Nenets national culture,’ but the Word of God calls these places ‘the abomination of desolation’ [merzost’yu zapusteniya] where everything is polluted with idols and idolaters. The world and God value phenomena and facts in a diametrically opposed manner.” Note that the missionary speaks not from a human but from the divine point of view (see chaps. 3 and 7).

9. Khomich writes that myad pukhutsya (“old woman of the tent”) does not always have a typical wooden or stone core but just a piece of cloth is taken around that the khekhe grows (1971b, 242; see also Ivanov 1970, 85; Menshakova and Taleyeva 2011, 21). Each time a child is born, mother adds a new overcoat or a scarf to the myad pukhutsya who has eased childbirth. Lehtisalo (1924, 123) describes how Forest Nenets shamans used to give clothes taken from a khekhe to ease the pain of an ailing person. Lapsui writes that myad pukhutsya is “an earthly, tent-dwelling part of goddess Ja-Minja [Yaminya]” (Lapsui et al. 2023, 19).

10. There is no guarantee that local spirits would always be protective for their owners. Some Nenets non-Christians said to me that khekheq could be rather moody and unpredictable (see also Golovnev 2000b, 213; Lehtisalo 1924, 118).

11. Finding a partner has always been a challenge in the areas where most around are close kin, which is sometimes further complicated by religious choices (Vallikivi 2009, 72–73). The missionaries who traveled widely acted as matchmakers, ensuring that young Nenets would form Baptist families (cf. Vagramenko 2014, 177–94; 2017a; 162–64; Wiget and Balalaeva 2011, 171).

12. These reindeer bulls with big antlers are considered leading animals in a herd. A young non-Christian Yamb-To man told me that the first myenarui appeared when a Nenets in the old times fell ill. He then promised a reindeer to a god and, as a result, he recovered quickly. Since then, every person has one. So, in his account, myenarui was necessary not only for the well-being of the herd but also for the owner’s health.

13. Pe Mal Khada is known among most Nenets alongside some other gods (e.g., Yamal Khekhe, Ser Ngo Iri) whose dwelling places are visited from afar. Some Nenets identify her as the goddess of earth (also according to Tikynye) and the daughter of the sky god, Num, whose caravan was transformed into stone (mountain) after the master of the underworld Nga attacked her (Khomich 1966, 199–200n20). One of many legends of origin tells that Pe Mal Khada traveled from south to north through the valleys: she stopped seven times, and each place became a sacred site (see Golovnev 2004, 319–20 for more details). She is a protector of calves and newborn babies (Lar 2003, 107–8; Lar and Vanuyto 2011, 101). Golovnev (1995, 491–92), who observed a sacrificial ritual there in 1993, has reported the following sacrificial words: “Grandmother, we brought you a reindeer calf, so others could live unharmed” (see also 1994). And in a shamanic song, Pe Mal Khada responds to the invocation call of a shaman, “Pe Mal Khadako, where have you gone?” by answering, “I stop at the nose [front end] of the sacred sledge” (Golovnev 1995, 381–82). The nose of the khekhengan, where the “material” khekheq are kept, is smeared with the blood of a sacrificially slaughtered reindeer (cf. Prokof’eva 1953, 227). This implies that the deity moves around and yet she (or part of her) may dwell in the doll-like figure.

14. One could argue that in this way reindeer herders solve the problem of being constantly on the move unable to visit distant sacred sites. It has to be noted that not all khekheq are collected from sacred sites (khekhe ya). Some are given by shamans or encountered in the landscape. People may choose something for a khekhe because of its unusual finding circumstances or shape (e.g., anthropomorphic). This is usually interpreted as spirits’ volitional act of self-revelation (see also Golovnev 2000b; G. Kharyuchi 2001, 82, 107; 2012, 19; Lehtisalo 1924, 104, 133–34; Skvirskaja 2012, 156; Zhitkov 1913, 51).

15. A khekhengan is a sledge where only “pure” things can be kept. Iriko stored on it sacred items but also food and men’s tools. It is on the other side of the tent entrance, farther away from the syabu sledge, which has things with dangerous female powers (see chap. 7).

16. The Pentecostal mission “Voice of Hope” (affiliated to the All-Ukrainian Union Churches of Evangelical Pentecostal Faith) was founded in Lutsk, Ukraine. From this mission, Fyodor Velichko first visited Vorkuta in 1990. He became a bishop of the church union in the Komi Republic, being integrated into the Russian Church of Christians of Evangelical Faith. All the churches of the union are registered with the state authorities. Unlike the Vorkuta Baptists, the Pentecostals are also involved in social programs like outreach to prisoners with HIV/AIDS and alcoholics (Bourdeaux and Filatov 2003, 266–83; 2005, 195–200; see also Wanner 2007).

17. Among Russian Baptists, joking and laughing, especially in religious settings, are signs of disrespect to God, if not a sacrilege (with a reference to Ephesians 5:4, cf. Prokhorov 2013, 180, 314, 321).

18. Note that demons or devils (cherty in Russian) and idols are discursively the same and not-the-same, just as the devil is one and many. It is commonly argued by Christian theologians that the devil (Satan) is a fallen angel who governs the world with all the other rebellious angels who are, strictly speaking, “demons.” These spirits can manifest themselves in a myriad of visual guises (see, e.g., Valk 2001). Furthermore, it needs to be stressed that Nenets old-timers, young converts, and missionaries most likely understood “devils” to be rather different nonhumans “in their aspects both as persons and as concepts” (Lambek 2021, 33) with their particular histories, capacities, and motivations.

19. Tikynye also called a spirit effigy like Pe Mal Khada a sidyangg, which means “shadow” and “photo” (cf. Lar 2003, 82). The same word had a wide spectrum of use: from the recently deceased who wandered around to somebody’s representation on a photo, as mentioned. This refers to the perception that the effigies were not classified along the line of material and immaterial or even visible and invisible, but rather in a hybrid way. Pretty much like another part of a person, the breath (yindq) is both material and immaterial. Rane Willerslev (2007, 57), while discussing the Yukaghir concept of soul, makes a similar observation by quoting Valerio Valeri (2000, 24), who writes that breath is “most invisible in the visible, most immaterial in the material.”

20. The idea that some people go to live in the sky where everything is pure has been around for some time among the Nenets. Yet only exceptional people could do this, such as a mythic shaman called Urier [Nguryer], who, being tired of the worsening conditions on the earth, drove with one of his wives on a reindeer sledge to the sky (Castrén 1853, 234; Schrenk 1848, 527; cf. Lehtisalo 1924, 115). This motif is likely influenced by the biblical ideas of the moral degradation of the earth and the rewards of paradise as well as by the story of St. Elijah (cf. Leete 2014, 99).

21. In her recent report on this sacred site, Ol’ga Poshekhonova (2016, 13 photo 4) has published a photo of “home spirits,” myad khekheq, at this site that have possibly been returned by Nenets converts.

22. According to the Russian ethnographer Yekaterina Prokof’eva (1953, 225, who relies on the data gathered by Grigoriy Verbov and Georgiy Prokof’ev), a piece of wood, stones, or textile taken from a sacred site is called khekhe-pyelya (see also Kharyuchi 2013, 51, 65). This word can be translated as “spirit-part” (pyelya, meaning “half,” or “part,” or “patrilineal kin”; ngamzani pyelya, literally “part of my flesh,” meaning “brother” from the same exogamous group, which refers to shared substantiality and close relationship, see also Verbov 1939, 49).

23. On his visit to the same site (also known as Yamal Khekhe Salya) in 1996, Golovnev (2000b, 223) notes that one is supposed to leave and take things at the site to return in three years’ time. A related idea is to have sacred items detached from a person who cannot (e.g., those who live in settlements or are female widows, see Kharyuchi 2013, 92; Murashko 2004, 60) or need not keep them anymore (e.g., a person has no reindeer left, see Kharyuchi 2001, 99; 2004, 158–59; Khomich 1981, 22, 37).

24. Note that Vladislav’s wish to return Iriko’s icons to their place of origin (“an Orthodox church”) bears a typological similarity with the idea discussed here. However, as we see, his cosmological and moral assumptions are radically different from those of Nenets animists.

25. Not only khekheq were burned but occasionally also card sets that they played for reindeer—as a result of gambling, some families had lost most of their herd.

5. Silence and Binding Words

1. The conspicuousness of silence among Nenets has been touched upon by several scholars (Khristoforova 1998, 2006; Laptander 2020a; Leete 2014, 2019; Novikova 2016; Ravna 2021; Simoncsics 2005; Toulouze and Niglas 2019, 206–22; Yadne 2006, 182). A well-known short novel called Molchashchiy (“The Silent”) by Nenets writer Anna Nerkagi echoes uses of silence in a riveting way (1996, 231–305; see also Samson-Normand de Chambourg 1998). The inclination to few words among Nenets is also noted by cross-cultural psychologists who compared Nenets with Russians from Central Russia, who were found to be far more verbose (Draguns et al. 2000).

2. There are plenty of examples of similar speech avoidance practices throughout the Russian Arctic and Siberia (see Brandišauskas 2017, 64–65, 153–55; Kwon 1993; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003, 150–54; Vitebsky 2005, 67, 113; Vladimirova 2006, 311–14; Willerslev 2007, 159–80). Most commentators seem to agree that elliptic and abbreviated forms of speech among herders and hunters stress the value of personal experience and relative unimportance of others’ explicit instructions. In some Indigenous communities, there are also social situations when staying silent is discouraged (see, e.g., Vorob’ev 2013, 50 on a prohibition to keep silence in a hunting hut among Chirinda Evenki).

3. Falling silent may be simultaneously concealment and revelation. Consider, for instance, what Yelena Pushkareva (1999, 61) writes about a ritual event from 1997 in which Gennadi Lapsui “demonstrated the art of Nenets shamanism”: “Then the shaman begins to predict the future to other spectators. Losses and misfortune can await some of them, in which case he will not mention the names, he will just give a hint. If the man guesses, he will ask the shaman a question: ‘Tell me about my future, I didn’t quite get what the deities said.’ The shaman will heat the drum again and ask the deities again. The shaman stops, falls silent, he can’t find words, he will only say: ‘They didn’t say a word.’ The man will lapse into silence, while the shaman will predict the future to all those present. He predicted happiness to all with the exception of one man” (see also 2019, 190–217).

4. When in a tent, Nenets parents often use the word munzyuq (“keep silence”) or khursyn (“you are noisy”) to silence noisy children.

5. Among Nenets, conversion to evangelical Christianity has led to an obligatory articulacy, unlike in some places, where it has led to inarticulacy. Vitebsky gives an excellent description of how Sora Baptist converts in eastern India are left “literally lost for words” (2017a, 326), after they cannot articulate their feelings in the old mode of ritual dialogues with the dead.

6. On a similar campaign among Indigenous peoples in the Far North during the early Soviet era, see Slezkine (1994, 231–33).

7. Repetition as a “metamessage of involvement” (Tannen 2007, 61) is an everyday linguistic phenomenon across the world. However, it can be also highly ritualized, as in Nenets shamanic practices. Pushkareva (1999, 59) writes that “a good assistant must join the shaman when the latter finishes a sentence, and the shaman will in turn continue singing as soon as teltanggoda finishes his part” (see also 2003, 113–15; Dobzhanskaya 2008; Lukin 2017, 200–204; 2022). This practice was known among the Yamb-To Nenets as well. Vata said that his father Mikul, when he was young, had acted as a shaman helper teltanggoda. He had to repeat the shaman’s text (and sometimes also the gestures) of the shaman during a seance. Among other things, this technique served for memorizing the text and allowed a repeater to be part of the story told.

8. Another Russian ethnographer, Andrey Popov (1984), describes a similar situation among the Dolgan, eastern neighbors of the Nenets on the Taimyr Peninsula: “Sometimes the bride’s father remains silent and forces the matchmaker to ‘open his mouth’ by giving him a fox-skin. Sometimes even this does not help. Then it is up to the matchmaker somehow to provoke at least one word from the bride’s father, to draw him into conversation” (207, my italics; see also Czaplicka 1916, 109). Among Nenets in the western tundra, once negotiation over the details has begun, as Vladimir Islavin (1847, 126–27) describes it, a matchmaker and a girl’s father communicate with each other “almost without speaking”: the visitor presents a fox skin as a gift and, if the gift is accepted, negotiating continues by cutting notches on a wooden staff, which alternately mark the offered and requested number of reindeer for the bride-price (see also Yadne 2006, 162).

9. Tim Jenkins (2013) depicts a parallel “modernist” language ideology among social scientists. In his critical and perceptive rereading of Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance in When Prophecy Fails (1956), based on the secret observation of a small group that anticipated the end of the world, Jenkins shows how the scientists operated with similar assumptions of individuals being bounded and entailing a moral interiority (79–81).

10. According to Althusser (1971), hailing works as a “physical conversion,” or as he writes, “Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else)” (174, his italics).

11. Unlike in Foucault’s (1997, 248) account on early Christians (see also chap. 7), Nenets are described as “confessing” silently. In the literature, a rare example of “confession” among Nenets is related to a difficult birth when a man, “without saying a word,” ties as many knots in a piece of string as times he has committed adultery, which is then shown to the woman giving birth, after which she gets some relief (Kostikov 1930b, 42–43; see also Khomich 1995, 189; Kushelevskiy 1868, 120–21).

12. Syo is semantically related to “throat,” “voice,” and perhaps also “breathing” (Niemi and Lapsui 2004, 25; see also Lukin 2022, 15–16).

13. Niemi writes about the significance of silence in the context of singing: “Thus, in a sense, every song type is needed for different occasions for talking about the unsaid. Song is a special vehicle for communicating things that cannot be communicated with speech. . . . Individual songs are a way to place an individual in a larger network of family ties and continuum of generations. The ‘unsaids’ of the Nenets include deceased relatives. The individual song is considered as a suitable means of talking about the deceased and even then, the closest and dearest relatives are deeply revered [in] an inviolate silence” (Niemi and Lapsui 2004, 30; cf. Abramovich-Gomon 1999). Note that among Nganasan, as Oksana Dobzhanskaya (2008, 89) writes, singing another’s song is not allowed, because this would steal the song owner’s soul and mind.

14. Occasionally, Yegor asked me in the morning what I had dreamed. When discussing our dreams, he always insisted that it was dangerous to believe “too much” in dreams. Even if interpreting dreams is also a local practice (Liarskaya 2011), this ambivalence of dreams being truthful and deceptive is something that seems to have become more black and white after missionaries arrived (cf. Prokhorov 2013, 335–43).

15. Niemi (1998, 62–63) gives a vivid example recorded from a Yamal Nenets man called Gennadi Puiko, who describes how interrupting an epic song (syudbabts) by a performer can dangerously stop the flow of actions in the song and, as a result, the stuck character can come to the presenter’s—or, as Nenets say, “the one who holds the song”—dream and kill him (cf. Pushkareva 2004).

16. During a shamanic seance, as explained by Pushkareva (1999), the song embodies a shaman’s journey, which is described using the vocabulary of reindeer sledge riding: a shaman is the lead reindeer in the harness, his assistant is also in the harness; furthermore, the whole shamanic journey is acted out as traveling in the landscape and is measured by a leg, which equals the length of time the shaman sings in one go (see also Dobzhanskaya 2008; Lehtisalo 1947, 497–503; Lukin 2015, 2022; Siikala 1978, 197–211).

17. Natal’ya Tereshchenko (2003, 31) translates the expression of vada yan khaqma(s’) as “to say something that others do not pay attention to (literally: ‘the word falls down on the land’).” The stress in the sacrificial incantation is thus on making the curse of the Russians fall down. Other related expressions are man’ vadin yan khaqmydq, “my words were not paid attention to,” and vadam yan tankhalts’, “do not fulfill somebody’s request (literally: ‘to trample the word into the land’)” (see also Nenyang 1997, 198).

18. As I will discuss later, Baptists have a similar concept of unmentionability related to the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit (see chap. 6).

19. The Nenets word porti comes from Russian portit’ (“to spoil”). A similar phenomenon of harming through words is spread all over Slavic Russia under the name of porcha (Ivanits 1989; Lindquist 2006) as well as among Komi (Il’ina 2008; Sidorov 1997) and other Indigenous groups (Brandišauskas 2017, 224; Zorbas 2021). Among the Nenets, the concept of porcha seems to have been better known among western groups who have been in closer contact with Russians and Komi (consider the expression in Komi vezh kyv us’ködöm, literally “dropping an envious word”; see also Napolskikh et al. 2003, 104). For instance, in the KGB report on shaman Ivan Ledkov from the Great Land tundra, he is said to have chosen to heal only those who were not seriously ill, claiming that they suffered from porcha. He would find the bewitcher and heal the patient. However, others who are ill from God should address a doctor (Tolkachev 2000b, 270; see also Khomich 2003, 67; Vagramenko 2014, 27 on cursing accusations).

20. Khebyakha is described as a misdeed or taboo by the Nenets interlocutors. A cognate word or root of it is khebya or khebts(n), which means “exit.” This possibly refers to the idea of the openness to the realm of spirits (cf. Anttonen 2005). Tikynye used the word khebyakha often also in a sense of “harm” or “accident.” Another way to say something is forbidden is khevy (Kharyuchi 2012, 103) from khebyos’, “to be forbidden.” Russian linguists (see, e.g., Tereshchenko 1990, 332; 2003, 796) usually translate khebyakha as grekh (“sin”), and it is used in the scriptural translations to mark “sin” (see, e.g., Luka 2004, 5).

21. Salt has power to repel invisible forces, both benevolent and malevolent. For example, salt cannot be added to a sacrificial cauldron that contains reindeer meat, as spirits would not eat from there. Likewise, using salt in protective magic is widespread among Komi (Napolskikh et al. 2003, 288–89) but also elsewhere in Europe, including in Catholic countries (e.g., consecrated salt, sal sacerdotale, with a reference to 2 Kings 2:19–22; cf. Siikala 2002, 77).

22. The Komi also use a pike’s head to protect the family against witchcraft (Leete and Lipin 2015; Napolskikh et al. 2003, 357; see also Tolkachev 2000b, 268 for the above-mentioned shaman Ledkov’s relationship with the pike; Vallikivi 2022 for the role of yid yerv).

23. This seems to indicate that the danger might come from the dead, as in the shamanic song of a Nenets who visits the underworld and whose speech is heard in the realm of the living through fire (Lehtisalo 1924, 135–37; see also Laptander 2020b, 2023; Laptander and Vitebsky 2021; Lar 2001, 85–89, 220–24; Pushkareva 2019, 210).

24. Sanggovo vada functionally parallels the Russians’ concept of the evil eye (sglaz). In her Nenets dictionary, as a counterpart to sglazit’ (“to put the evil eye”), Tereshchenko (2003, 66) gives an idiom from the Great Land tundra vevako sevm khaqvra, literally “send an evil eye.” Intentionality is here central: sglaz is usually unintentional, while porcha is intentional. Sglaz is also an explanation for babies who cry a lot. In the context of Russian village life, Margaret Paxson (2005) writes that “excessive praise (ogovor), like the evil eye (sglaz) can wittingly or unwittingly cause porcha to attach itself to a victim by attracting the forces lying in wait” (171, my italics). A similar set of ideas can be found in Komi (Sidorov 1997) and Mongolia (Højer 2019).

25. As E. E. Evans-Pritchard noted, witchcraft accusations not only explain unfortunate events but also produce lots of uncertainty (1937; see also Favret-Saada 1980; Lambek 2015a, 20). Likewise, as Florian Stammler and Aytalina Ivanova (2020, 12) report, Nenets entertain conspiracy theories when explaining recent events of mass deaths of reindeer in the tundra, which has caused lots of “spiritual uncertainty.”

26. Vitebsky describes a similar case among Eveny, who can tell by the taste of a reindeer intestine the character of the person to whom the animal belonged to (2005, 110–11).

27. Compared to Baptists, in charismatic strands of Christianity, words have a far stronger link to automatism, embodiment, and materiality. Consider what Simon Coleman (2006, 165) writes about Swedish Pentecostals: “When sacred words are regarded as thinglike in their autonomous force and their production of tangible results, the identity of the born-again person appears to be pervaded and even constituted by such language. To read and listen to inspired language is seen as a means of filling the self with objectified language, even in a physical sense.”

28. As discussed in the introduction, I have taken speech act theory onto a slightly different path and followed what words do in the framework of Nenets language ideology. As Keane (2004) has argued, the implementation of speech act theory would not always help us to understand how our interlocutors in the field themselves see the characteristics and agency of words: “In many cases, the practitioners themselves do not see their rituals as achieving their effects simply by convention. They may, for instance, be concerned with influencing the spirit world through emotional effects or magical causality” (433, his italics).

29. As Nigel Thrift (2008, 131) puts it, Butler “cannot bear to part entirely with a textual model of performance based upon sign and referent.”

30. This topic has been presented as the question of “opacity of other minds.” Especially in Melanesia but also elsewhere, people avoid talking about others’ intentions, as they claim that others’ minds cannot be known (Robbins and Rumsey 2008). As Keane (2008a) and Rupert Stasch (2008) have stressed, this is not to say that people do not take others’ thoughts and intentions as unknowable but that this is rather a moral stance that these should not be discussed.

6. Speaking Saves, Silence Damns

1. This story originates from The Life of Aesop. Yegor thought it came from the Bible. There is also certain cultural parallel here, as Nenets have various kinds of saying that warn against the misuse of words (e.g., “Fear your own tongue”). Consider also a riddle about the tongue: “Without blood, without wounds can it kill” (Nenyang 1997, 200, 223).

2. As briefly mentioned in chapter 1, Yurchak (2006) argues that, although all speech acts have a constative and performative dimension according to Austin, in one or other settings, one dominates over the other. For instance, in the late Soviet period, the importance of the constative dimension of authoritative discourse diminished, while the performative dimension as overwhelmingly ritualized use of authoritative language grew in importance. Nevertheless, as Yurchak suggests, this did not mean that ordinary Soviet citizens were mainly pretending when participating in speech acts of authoritative discourse: they used the language (and rituals) without necessarily being committed or opposing the meanings of what was said (or acted). In this and many other ritual contexts, sincerity understood as a match of inner thoughts and visible acts may become irrelevant, as, for example, in the case of irony known as styob (249–54; see also Prozorov 2009 for a different reading of Austin’s theory through Agamben in the late Soviet context; Lambek 2015a, 22, 150–70 on irony).

3. As I have shown in chapter 3, Pavel believed that objective descriptions (“ethnography”) can be produced about things that do not concern “spiritual life”—for instance, about reindeer herding or sledge making. Nevertheless, he doubted that there was any use to these descriptions.

4. This is why sermons entail frequent quotations like “For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10:10), or “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers” (Ephesians 4:29), or “Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man” (Colossians 4:6).

5. Among the Baptists, it is perfectly normal to claim that the same act is done by human and God (see chap. 7).

6. There is an inevitable tension between the literalists’ language ideology and the literalists’ practices (Keane 2007, 101). Harding (2000, 28) has demonstrated this discrepancy in the case of the American fundamentalist evangelicals who were led by Jerry Falwell: “The interpretive tradition is literalist in the sense that it presumes the Bible to be true and literally God’s Word, but the interpretive practices themselves are not simply literalist. The biblical text is considered fixed and inerrant, and it means what God intended it to mean, but discerning that meaning is not simple or sure or constant. The Bible is read within a complex, multidimensional, shifting field of fundamental Baptist (becoming evangelical) folk-narrative practices, and so are the lives of preachers and their peoples.”

7. Unregistered Baptists are openly hostile to ritualism. For instance, they never use the Russian word obryad or ritual for their own religious acts, emphasizing thus their antiritualism.

8. Consider what Marcel Mauss (2003, 21) has written about the dynamics of prayer: “Almost empty at first, one sort suddenly becomes full of meaning, while another, almost sublime to start with, gradually deteriorates into mechanical psalmody.”

9. The phrases in Russian are “Verish’ li, chto Iisus Khristos est’ Syn Bozhiy?” (during the explanatory service, Pavel said that this question comes from Acts 8:37: “And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God”) and “Po poveleniyu Gospoda i po vere tvoey kreshchu tebya vo imya Ottsa, i Syna, i Svyatogo Dukha. Amin’” (the reference is Matthew 28:19).

10. The Russian Baptists I know read the Bible every day: they use it as a manual and source of “self-authorization” (Crapanzano 2017), alongside other texts published and circulated by their own church, believing that these texts are highly pertinent to their lives. They interpret their everyday experiences in the scriptural mode, being “driven by a search for relevance” (Malley 2004, 117). This careful process of recasting one’s thoughts and self-expression is not idiosyncratic but is in dialogue with the patterns of interpretations, which are shaped by authoritative members such as local pastors and visiting church leaders. Furthermore, the use of Bible quotations that one knows by heart and considers one’s favorite depends on the dominant currents in the church at the time.

11. This reminds us of Cavell’s discussion of his passionate utterances and particularly the idea that “expressions of emotion excite emotion” (2005, 191). Or as Alison Jaggar (quoted in Keane 2016, 193) writes, “We absorb the standards and values of our society in the very process of learning the language of emotion, and those standards and values are built into the foundation of our emotional constitution.” Unlike the situation of “finding” the moral emotions in the existing repertoire, Nenets converts must learn these largely from scratch.

12. Missionaries thus present themselves as divine instruments, who talk of things as though they are for God and who spread his message of love (cf. Prokhorov 2013, 256–57). Consider parallels with the Soviet context, in which instrumentality took various forms. Slavoj Žižek (2008) describes in the somber political context of Stalinist totalitarianism when people were killed for the sake of the Progress of Humanity: “What we encounter here is the properly perverse attitude of adopting the position of the pure instrument of the big Other’s Will: it’s not my responsibility, it’s not me who is effectively doing it, I am merely an instrument of the higher Historical Necessity” (286–87, his italics). For the Russian Baptists who suffered directly from the Soviet authorities’ perverted “sense of duty,” these “Satanic acts” all made perfect sense. Militant atheists or KGB investigators were seen as instruments of Satan, as they now perceived themselves to be instruments of God. Despite fundamental differences between Stalinist and Baptist ideologies, the logics of instrumentality converged, as shifting one’s sense of personal responsibility for one’s own acts was part of both regimes.

13. As discussed above, even if people can speak religiously without commitment, like a schoolboy in a classroom performing a creed (Keane 2007, 71; see also 2016, 58; Lambek 2010b, 45), such compelled act of speaking potentially has the power to transform the self, partly because the speaker is evaluated by others.

14. I realized the particular significance of talking to God audibly when Pavel told a story about being on a mission trip to Yamal during which he fell ill and temporarily lost his voice. As he said, his biggest fear at that moment was that he could not ask forgiveness from God, should he die. In this case, even his sincerest intentions and thoughts were as if not enough. This account shows the importance of having voice as material medium, which is a necessary precondition for successful communication with God despite him being otherwise known as an all-knowing agent with the capacity to see into one’s mind and hear one’s thoughts.

15. A blasphemy, like any taboo, functions as a performative that almost always bears effects independent of one’s intentions or other contextual parameters. Fleming (2011, 153) has called this “rigid performativity” (see Prokhorov 2013, 347–48 for other examples of word avoidances among Russian Baptists—e.g., bes meaning both “without” or “un-” and “demon”).

16. Promising in the form of taking an oath or making a vow (valytava, vatorava) used to have a significant role in the Nenets tundra (see, e.g., Litke 1828, 239). Vows were made to the Russian God or Saint Nicholas, known as Mikola (Kostikov 1930a, 122–23; Lar and Vanuyto 2011, 138; Latkin 1853, 94; Lehtisalo 1924, 5; Schrenk 1848, 409; Shemanovskiy 2011; Templing 2003, 2004, 2007; Veniamin 1855, 115). Furthermore, Tikynye told me that there were women who were promised to Num and who thereafter were not allowed to marry (numd vatormy nye, khayupa ni khanq): this vow was made when the girl had been seriously ill and her parents had pledged her to the deity (cf. Lehtisalo 1924, 139; 1956, LII; Lukin 2022, 14; Vagramenko 2014, 29–31; 2017b; Yadne 2006, 184). These instances of promising do not necessarily refer to inner intentions but to contractual relations between humans and beyond, which, if they are broken, can result in a curse (proklyatie, a loanword from Russian) or punishment (vangy).

7. Pure Subjects

1. This problem is described in several ethnographies of new convert cultures in which people struggle with the impossibility of living a fully Christian life here on earth and are thus torn between Christian ideals and everyday “sinful” realities. In Robbins’s (2016, 11) account, Urapmin “cultivate an ‘easy’ or ‘quiet’ heart filled with ‘good thinking’ that will lead them to live a lawful ‘Christian life.’” And yet, as he explains, they “still need to rely on traditional patterns of moral action in key stretches of everyday life, their lives are marked by a conflict between the values of wilfulness and lawfulness” which “leads them to define themselves as deeply sinful people” (see also 2004; Bialecki 2018, 217). Although Nenets converts talk about being sinners, their tools for dealing with this condition are somewhat different from the Urapmin, as I shall demonstrate below.

2. Foucault (1985, 26–28; 1997, 263–65) delineates four separate questions to consider when analyzing projects of self-formation, which could be outlined in a simplified way, like this: the part of oneself chosen (e.g., soul, body, desires, feelings, intentions), the rules and ideals applied (e.g., divine law, state law, cosmological order), the practical activities taken (e.g., self-examination, confession, prayer), and the goal set (e.g., purity, self-mastery) (see also Faubion 2011, 3–4; Laidlaw 2014, 103–4; Mahmood 2005, 30; Robbins 2004, 217).

3. This is an aspect, as Foucault (1997, 249) writes, “what was called in the spiritual literature exagoreusis. This is an analytical and continual verbalization of thoughts carried on in the relation of complete obedience to someone else; this relation is modeled on the renunciation of one’s own will and of one’s own self.”

4. Bialecki (2017, 220n3) argues that “discussions of subjectivity tend to come in three different varieties: one relating to the phenomenological, psychological, and experiential; one concerning Foucaultian and Aristotelian ethics and techniques of self-formation; and one focusing on the architectonic structure of the subject”; much of the debate in anthropology has been around the “architectonic” (Bialecki 2017; Bialecki and Daswani 2015; Eriksen et al. 2019; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Mosko 2010, 2015; Robbins 2015, 2019; Robbins et al. 2014; Strathern 2018; Werbner 2011). I would suggest that becoming Christian is not so much antisocial as it is pro-individual.

5. Both dowry and bride-price are still practiced after conversion, even if to a lesser extent. Also, rich non-Christian Nenets give their animals to poorer Christian Nenets who use these reindeer for two or three years and then return them as castrated and trained harness animals (see also Stammler 2005, 195). Only a few converts have argued that these exchange practices were unnecessary (cf. Vagramenko 2014, 181). Ivan declared that he did not engage in exchanging reindeer as gifts any more, as this was morally suspicious or, as he said, futile (pustoy in Nenets, borrowed from Russian).

6. In Siberian Indigenous communities, various kinds of reciprocity rule involving humans as well as nonhumans are explained to outsiders as zakon tundry, “law of the tundra” in Russian (D. Anderson 2000; Stammler 2005; Ventsel 2005; Ziker 2002).

7. We saw in chapter 3 how the notion of purity had in the Soviet times occupied a strong collective dimension for Unregistered Baptists. They guarded the purity of the church by denouncing and excommunicating. Yet collective purification cannot replace individual maintenance work: it can only boost it.

8. Torabtq usually contains a piece of beaver fur (lidyangg)—obtained from the southern neighbors living in the forest (cf. Kharyuchi 2001, 159)—wrapped in the dried intestines (palako) of a reindeer that is killed ritually. It is used to fumigate, for instance, reindeer harnesses or human genital areas.

9. Engelke (2007, 84) describes the conundrum of certainty and uncertainty among evangelical Christians, with reference to the work of Harding and Crapanzano, when he writes that “work on sanctification raises two points. First, even when a subject comes to inhabit a religious language there is always a disconnect between that language and the subject. Second, and importantly for the discussion here, the religious subject can act with certainty and still not understand what that certainty entails.” Throughout this chapter, we see a similar struggle between the language of certainty and the sense of certainty.

10. The tent replicates the larger cosmological divisions with its horizontal and vertical lines. One of the invisible lines is behind the fireplace, which stretches the cosmological axis into the surrounding landscape and can also attract dangerous spirits and misfortune when overstepped throughout the time when the tent is up (see also Golovnev and Osherenko 1999, 32–39; Haakanson and Jordan 2010; Skvirskaja 2012, 151; Stammler 2005, 85). I noticed that baptized women generally avoided stepping across it, although in a few cases, I saw some of them cross it demonstratively.

11. Even if heart (syei) has been an important notion in preconversion Nenets society, one can see a certain shift taking place in the rhetoric of Nenets converts. The syei in the Nenets’ non-Christian understanding is the locus of life-force, emotionality (e.g., courage, passion), and volition. Someone’s evil words can hurt one’s heart, as in the expression tartsyaq vadakhavaq syeikhanan khartanarakhaq, “these words pierced into my heart like a sharp knife” (Tereshchenko 2003, 752); there are many other sayings with syei to express losing courage, initiative, or will. Another close word is syonzya, which is “inner part,” “character,” as in the idiom syonzyada lak, “(s)he has an explosive temper.” These words offer certain, although limited, continuity with the Russian biblical understanding of serdtse, which denotes one’s emotional, volitional, and moral interiority but also “the locus of divine indwelling,” as described (often in contradictory ways) in around one thousand mentions in the Bible (Comfort and Elwell 2001, 579; cf. Robbins et al. 2014; Vitebsky 2017a).

12. Being angry or otherwise losing one’s temper is generally frowned upon among Nenets (as among many other Arctic communities where emotional control is highly valued; see, e.g., Briggs 1970). There are plenty of either individuals (Yadne 2006, 529) or entire clans (Golovnev 2004, 61) that are characterized as having such “dangerous” qualities as rage (cf. Basso 1970, 221–22).

13. The Baptist church leader Boyko (2006) has written how he had spent most of his life “in an uninterrupted prayer to God,” which made his acts, strictly speaking, not his but divine: “The Lord taught me not to rely on my own intellect but to be constantly in fellowship with Him through prayers” (55). When the KGB-hired atheist lecturers tried to persuade him of the truth of the scientific worldview, he saw this as an action not against him but against God: “Lord, make them understand that they are not dealing with me, with an insignificant human but with You” (56). Such claims are frequent in the statements of senior Baptists who take on the role of divine tool and demonstrate their holiness, as discussed in chapter 6.

14. At least since Augustine, aligning one’s will with that of God’s has been a key issue and has been discussed a lot. Augustine (1997, 240) writes, “The good derive from you [God] and are your gift; the evil are my sins and your punishments.” The Russian Baptists I know would argue that all good deeds are from God and all bad deeds are from Satan, who is the source of one’s sinfulness (“For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure,” Phil. 2:13; see Ob osvyashchenii 2006, 17). However, in everyday situations, the individual is still made responsible for the wish to be in the alliance with one of them, and it is rather a matter of situated interpretations and exercises of authority. The theological question “Who finally is responsible for an act? God or man?” (Crapanzano 2000, 94; see also Robbins 2020, 56–70) does not have one answer; instead, asking this question creates various performative effects in one’s life as a believer.

15. When someone fell through the ice into the water, in the old days this would have been interpreted as the water spirit yid yerv taking a sacrifice (see also Golovnev 1995, 470–71; 2000b, 212; 2004, 305; Kharyuchi 2012, 94–95; Lar 2003, 108; Lar et al. 2003, 79–80; Pushkareva and Burykin 2011, 163).

16. In his account of Paul as a revolutionary, Badiou (2003, 63) argues that becoming a subject of truth (an evangelical convert, committed Communist, etc.) is an endless process that “has to be understood as a becoming rather than a state” (see also Robbins 2010, 647; 2020; Faubion 2013, 299). He unites in his revolutionary figure both rupture and evolution roughly in the same way, as Baptists would see the formation of one’s self-transformation.

17. One possible way to look at this kind of shifting is through the notion of “moral moods” (Throop 2014, 68). Jason Throop argues that “moments of transgression, worry, and/or concern into both past and possible future horizons of experience . . . stretch well beyond the confines of the present.” Moods are only partly controlled by the person alone, as ethical life is not fully reflected by oneself; moods are triggered by other agents.

18. Obviously, anthropologists also shift the perspective of their interlocutors, which I have experienced in the field again and again (see chap. 6). For instance, Tikynye once told me that my questions made her think differently about her past and see it as a valuable source of information, despite her occasional Christianity-inspired claims of the need to forget “the old.” Consider what Vitebsky (2017a) writes about his presence as something that triggered strong emotions from the past in a newly Baptist Sora community.

19. There are considerable typological similarities with Soviet ideology once again and with the cult of Stalin, who was characterized as “our father” (Fürst 2010, 114). Even if Stalin’s gaze was not commonly imagined to penetrate one’s mind by Soviet citizens, there was anxiety that one would accidentally betray one’s hidden feelings or splash out unsuitable words that could be read as the vestiges of one’s past self still being present. Many early Soviets strove to conform to the model of the “new man,” which required extraordinary adaptative measures. These techniques of the self are seen as a continuation of the pre-Bolshevik practices of ethical self-constitution and self-perfection (see Fitzpatrick 2005; Halfin 2002, 2009; Hellbeck 2006; Kharkhordin 1999). However, what is radically different between a majority state power and a minority religious group, is the use of violence and readmittance: while Communist revolutionaries rarely readmitted people after they had “sinned,” the evangelicals let people repent and will readmit “the lost son” into the fold (cf. Humphrey 2014).

20. In her book about African American evangelical Christians’ struggle when taking care of their severely ill children, Cheryl Mattingly (2010, 24) shows how they are not entirely determined by the evangelical logic of faith and hope in their attempts to lead a good life (see also 2014, 166; 2018). Which is to say that people lead several and fragmented projects, and despite the totalizing rhetoric of evangelical Christianity, other aspects of their cultural resources provide them with commitments and plans next to specifically Christian teachings.

21. A month later, this topic came up again when Yegor said that his grandfather had observed Sundays and considered working on a day of rest a transgression, khevy, and as a punishment a fire would be made on top of the person in the afterworld (see also Leete and Vallikivi 2011, 94). Paying visits to one another on Sundays had become common by the late nineteenth century under the influence of Orthodox priests who told to keep the Sabbath (Mikhaylov 1898, 164–65; Shashkov 1896, 183–84).

Conclusion

1. Or, following Bialecki (2017, 8–9), one should say that it was “actually existing Communism,” with its particular relationship to the ideal, as it is with “actually existing Christianities” that take various local forms in specific ethical regimes.

2. There are significant differences in how much collectivized Nenets were indoctrinated by Soviet ideology, depending on many aspects such as age, gender, school education, Russian language proficiency, the intensity of contact with the lutsaq, reading habits, personal inclinations, and so on. This is well exemplified by Yaungad’s dialogue with his father in chapter 1.