7

PURE SUBJECTS

Striving for Christian Individualism

In this last chapter, I ask how Nenets Baptist converts try to make themselves into new kinds of person, and more specifically, how they adopt the Christian concept of self in which the notions of purity and holiness are central. The ethnographic focus here is on committed converts who attempt to create new lives for themselves as they are instructed by God via missionaries, the scriptures, and divine signs around them. As we have seen in the case of Yegor and others, there are struggles related to the ideals of piety and everyday life, with its moments of vulnerability, contradiction, and failure.

I suggest that these tensions are part and parcel of the conversion experience, especially when these inconsistencies are made explicit and become a part of the ethical project of self-cultivation. Defining failures and mistakes as sins (grekhi in Russian, khebyakhaq in Nenets) and correcting oneself are integral parts of gradually becoming a different person—a born-again Christian—which in the long run should transform one’s character with more lasting effects. According to Baptist logic, growing into a true believer involves sustained striving and investment: taking a new perspective on the world and oneself, learning Christian rules and developing new virtues, becoming alert to failures, talking about one’s faith, and exposing oneself to criticism from others. Conversion thus entails continuous reworking of one’s self, both in public and private

As Andrei said in the previous chapter, one’s life as a believer is keeping one’s promise to God. Swearing oaths and keeping promises, of course, are not Christian inventions. As Lambek (2010a, 27) has put it, “keeping one’s word,” or rather trying to, lies at the center of any ethical becoming. He writes, “It is striking how often a central, primary, or salient feature of ethics is identified as keeping one’s word, following through on what one has committed to, finishing what one has begun, or at least acknowledging that one has changed direction. This may be as ordinary and implicit as adhering to the conversational implicatures of speaking (as set forth by Grice or equivalent ones in a given speech community), as everyday as carrying through the obligations of kinship, or as grand and explicit as adhering to the Abrahamic covenant or redeeming the Christian sacrifice” (27–28; see also Grice 1975).

One’s pledges and promises are constantly evaluated by other people (De Vries 2008, 82–84; Lambek 2015a, 34–35). Among Independents, these are not only fellow Christians but also non-Christians who comment on converts’ behavior. Every punryoda knows that, at some level, minor failings to keep one’s promise are unavoidable. But cases of breaking the promise to God, which in the evangelical language is “backsliding” (otstuplenie), are perceived as tragic among devout believers, even as the hope that “the lost son” (bludnyy syn) will return is still entertained. When I visited Yegor’s camp in 2012, one of his adult sons, Vanya, had stopped praying. Yegor turned to the Bible for his daily reading and chose to read the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). While slowly reading out the words, he looked from time to time at Vanya, who sat silently nearby. Yegor’s facial expressions reflected pain and reproach. Throughout my stay, he was not openly critical toward his son and fulfilled his duty to express Christian love for his child. In this case, personal attachments and affects were competing with explicit commitments to various human and nonhuman others creating hurtful moments for those involved.

Baptists insist that a believer who has made a promise and has sincere faith relies on God’s promise to save his children who endeavor to be pure and holy. In this ascetic logic, it is not so much the achieved degree of piety but rather an ongoing striving for an ethically consistent life, especially in its public dimension. Believers can show their conviction and promise-keeping by bringing their words and acts into the realm of the explicit through their conduct—the verbal in particular, as this is the primary way to probe oneself and be visible and audible to others. Public commitment to one’s words and deeds has far reaching consequences: it evokes evaluative measures of discipline, obedience, surveillance, and denunciation in the community; also it tests relations with oneself and others around that are inherited from the preconversion past and that continuously reemerge.

I suggest that we consider two aspects regarding the radically new experience of converts in the tundra camps. First, the converts become much more self-focused: they try to consciously cultivate themselves as born-again Christians by changing their embodied behavior and ways of speaking. The introduced cultivation of the self—a systematic virtue ethics—is a deeply novel experience for Independents, especially considering that they were not exposed to the transformative policies of state institutions (schools, the army, collective farms, etc.) that exerted a significant influence on most tundra dwellers’ lives in the Soviet period. Second, the evangelical model teaches that one’s self is a source of sinfulness and therefore one’s human self must be, in theological language, renounced. This entails a promise of a kind of theosis in this life and salvation in the afterlife.¹ This somewhat paradoxical claim of a need to work on one’s self and to renounce it will be in focus next.

Foucault’s model of “technologies of the self” has been particularly productive for thinking about ethical self-fashioning in Christianity (Faubion 2011; Robbins 2004; Strhan 2015; Zigon 2010, 2011a, 2011b; see also Laidlaw 2014). In his later texts, he developed a genealogy of Christian practices of cultivation of the self by commenting, among others, on monk and theologian John Cassian’s (c. 360–c. 435) writings on monasticism. Foucault (1997, 177) describes these ascetic technologies as “techniques that permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power.”² The fifth century monks had to engage in a constant practice of self-scrutiny, as Foucault (242) notes: “Each person has the duty to know who he is, that is, to try to know what is happening inside him, to acknowledge faults, to recognize temptations, to locate desires; and everyone is obliged to disclose these things either to God or to others in the community and, hence, to bear public or private witness against oneself. The truth obligations of faith and the self are linked together. This link permits a purification of the soul impossible without self-knowledge” (see also 2015, 54). Foucault (2015, 72) argues that, in the Christian practices of the self, verbalization plays a special role. Confessions articulated in the presence of others at once reveal one’s sinful thoughts and help to distance oneself from the sinful ways, turning words into a form of self-renunciation or self-sacrifice.³

Christian practices of verbalization as self-transformative procedures have a profound impact on the world of those Nenets who have converted. Unlike in early Christianity, where purity of heart is gained through specifically monastic ways (“contempt of all possessions,” “the mortification of desires” as phrased by Cassian, quoted in Paden 1988, 73), Baptist converts in the tundra are as much concerned with recognizing their sinful human nature as they are busy recognizing their own saintliness and purity.

In the following, my ethnographic focus stays with Yegor, his son Ngarka, and the young woman called Syado, who all, in one way or another, go through the struggle of becoming and being good Christian individuals. In their everyday lives, they all try to adapt to fundamental evangelical ideas such as human sinfulness, purity of soul, and certainty of salvation. Doubt and anxiety are an essential part of this process, as are the judgments of how to balance ideas, values, and commitments that are incommensurable with one another.

One night before falling asleep, Ngarka, lying next to me in the tent, said, “You know what keeps me awake in the night . . . why on earth Eve had to sin? If she had not sinned, we would all live happily in Eden now. But instead, we have to suffer here on earth.” Ngarka’s burst of anxiety showed me how much some Nenets converts were contemplating cosmic matters that had come to have relevance for their individual lives ages later, or by their account, “six thousand years later” than the initial event. The twenty-five-year-old Ngarka had just returned from his first missionary trip to the Yamal Nenets and Khanty across the Urals. He was one of those core young members whom missionary Pavel occasionally asked to give a sermon from the pulpit in the Vorkuta prayer house. Ngarka was determined to leave the tundra and enjoy all the benefits of city life, especially, as he said, close communion with church members elsewhere. For him, like many other younger devotees, leaving the tundra was also an issue of finding a partner, preferably a white Russian girl, and starting a proper family life, as God required every man to do. He knew that he could shape his life in a very different way from the lives of his ancestors, a conviction echoed by Protestants elsewhere who feel themselves “enticed to write new scripts for their lives” (Meyer 2004, 461). For Ngarka, as for Ivan and many others who enjoyed the new kind of communality associated with conversion, there was a pull to create a modern, individual self, filtered through specifically Christian concerns.

Ngarka’s moment of anxiety over the character of fallen human nature and the consequent separation from the transcendent God was not exceptional among fresh converts. Like many others, he had become acutely aware of the new logic of loss and gain. The anxiety worked in a tension between the events at the two ends of history—falling into sin and the Second Coming. In her discussion on the problem of transcendence, Fenella Cannell (2006, 15) has described the significance of this idea to Christianity:

Ngarka’s deeply personal anxiety—his “unhappy consciousness”—mirrors these cosmic tensions. I suggest this anxiety is not an impasse, however, but rather an inadequacy that is necessary for one’s self-constitution as a good Christian here on earth. This is not only “a mournful awareness of the inevitability of moral failure” (Robbins 2004, 208) or morally right attitude of humility (Laidlaw 2014, 127–28) but also a necessary precondition to cultivating one’s certainty of salvation. This is because transcendence is not understood as absolute: this “distant God,” with the three-in-one composition (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), is now and again spoken about as being nearby, dwelling inside oneself, and yet located in an elsewhere of the future. As Jon Bialecki (2017, 7) put it in his study on Vineyard Christians of California, “There is a perception of religious time as ‘already/not-yet,’ where God’s grace is present in the world but has yet to complete its inevitable triumph over the Devil and his damaged earth.” This is a “problem of presence,” as Engelke (2007) has aptly characterized a perception of the divine being simultaneously present and absent.

Russian Baptists stress that between these two crucial events—falling into sin and the Second Coming—lies the resurrection of Christ, which gives Christians the possibility to lead a holy life through endeavors of purification (ochishchenie) and sanctification (osvyashchenie). Through these teachings, which are of particular importance for Unregistered Baptists (see Ob osvyashchenii 2006), Nenets converts have come to realize that they cannot entirely escape the sinful human condition, but they can still surmount the distance and have a taste of the heavenly future by having chosen salvation, being born again, and being filled with the Holy Spirit. Holiness—as a near reunion of man and God—is thus something that must be attempted in this life, even if becoming holy will never be completed here on earth. Therefore, one’s objective can be only a partial restoration of the initial, prelapsarian communion with God, accompanied by a promise of full communion with God in heaven.

Even if a convert’s sense of change may be sudden (especially in a self-narrative such as presented by Ivan, see chap. 2), sanctification—the process of becoming close to God—is seen as a gradual ethical self-transformation. Turning one’s ideas, motives, habits, and desires into sustained practices of thought and talk require time (cf. Crapanzano 2000; Stromberg 1993, 2015). As Ngarka put it, the main objective in his life was to save his soul, and all other objectives were subordinated to that. Having gone through a rupture, having given God his promise to live a saintly life, and having been forgiven for all the sins from his past life through an act of repentance and the rite of baptism, Ngarka was now facing lifelong maintenance work with himself. Surrendering to God was possible only through rejection of his sinful nature in order to warrant the presence of the divine inside—an imagined site of new significance—and the constant exercise of vigilance in regard to Satan’s evil acts.

The evangelicals’ theology of self-perfection contains thus an inherent tension, as a believing individual has both fallen and saved components. The aim for believers is to recognize one’s sinful desires and thoughts, to ask forgiveness for these and to try to live up to the exemplary role of a holy person, to be Christlike. Although the ideal is that a person stays saintly throughout one’s life—and largely this is what Unregistered Baptists imagine to be the case—unconscious (nesoznatel’noe) sinning is still assumed to happen even in the lives of the born-again. This divided person is therefore always in flux, trying to live up to what one knows God would expect from oneself.

In practical terms, striving for sanctification required that Ngarka and other committed punryodaq dedicate themselves to various everyday activities such as praying, reading the Bible, avoiding sinful deeds (both visible and invisible), and responding to others’—especially missionaries’—evaluative comments. Ngarka’s moment of anxiety, described above, would have been impossible before his exposure to Christian language. Speaking about his own inherited sinfulness and desire for salvation was part of the production of his Christian self. But to become a good believer, he needed to hold communion with others and engage in forms of collective prayers and Bible reading events that, as evangelists say, are more efficacious than solitary prayers or attempts to understand the Bible alone (recall what Pavel said on the benefits of communal reading in chap. 6; cf. Prokhorov 2013, 159, 273). Nevertheless, this form of collective work primarily serves the purpose of his individual salvation. On the one hand, Ngarka shared his religious aspiration and commitment with others in the family and nearby camps. On the other hand, he was also aware that only he was responsible for his failures and successes and that only as an individual—and not just by being a member of a believing family—could he conquer the sin he had inherited from Eve.

In the anthropological literature, it has become a common assumption that conversion to Christianity, and especially to evangelical Protestantism, makes people more individualist or has the power to individualize a person in a specific way.⁴ This is not to say that Christianity necessarily would introduce individualism “into a world that formerly had lacked” it (Keane 2007, 52; see also Laidlaw 2014, 32–39) but that Protestant individualism, as a value and practice, promotes a new pattern of ethical self-formation by paying heightened attention to oneself as an object of scrutiny and taking public responsibility for one’s words and acts.

A few remarks about earlier Nenets individualism and related ethical practices that existed before conversion may clarify what has changed since Nenets have converted to evangelical Christianity. As mentioned in the introduction, Nenets reindeer herders entertain a particular ideal of living on the land and being relatively independent from others (Golovnev 2004, 47). The preconversion Nenets model of autonomy, however, entails various kinds of dependencies and relationalities through exchanges—such as gifts, known as myadonzey, myadinzey, and padarak; or bride-price payment (nye mirq); or dowry—that form bonds temporarily or over one’s life course.⁵ As we have seen (see chap. 5), this model also contains distributed and detachable aspects of personhood that emerge through various constellations related to personal qualities (e.g., the excessive power of an adult compared to the vulnerability of a small child), things and animals (e.g., reindeer and puppies as extensions of their human owners), spirits and forces (e.g., hiccup worms moving in one’s body; dangerous power coming from menstruating women), or words (e.g., being exposed to one’s personal name or song; being asked about one’s intentions and future plans). Nenets individualism is not so much an expression of indivisibility but an ideal of relative autonomy of action while dealing with aspects of vulnerability to certain forms of relationality. As we saw with the case of Tikynye’s inherited shamanic kinship with wolves, various forms of relationality with nonhumans are common. Such instances of humans’ porousness demonstrate that a person would need to be careful not to become exposed to others’ intrusive and damaging forces (this is where shamans were believed to be different from ordinary people, as they were empowered with extraordinary capacities by being reconstituted by spirits during initiation). Furthermore, as we have discussed earlier, one needs to avoid emotionally charged relations and attachments with other humans, as they may have fatal consequences (as in verbal quarrels that can kill, see chap. 5).

In more mundane circumstances, the value of relative autonomy—taken as a form of nondependency—is evident in both collective and individual terms. A family that leads an independent life in the tundra marks its independence with the word ngara. This can be translated as “to lead an independent way of life,” as when a young family starts to live on its own after securing enough reindeer, skins, and sledges; when somebody who has worked for another person or inside a collective farm is able to start an independent (ngaryoi) life; or when those who once settled in villages return to a tundra lifestyle in search of freedom. This form of autonomy for a family is primarily related to reindeer or, to be more precise, to many reindeer. Those who have too few reindeer are dependent on others as they get transport reindeer bulls on loan from wealthier herders or engage in other forms of exchange as insurance against misfortunes such as losing reindeer in an epidemic (see Yevladov 1992, 168–73).⁶ This also has a cosmological dimension, as Yevladov notes, “Nenets believe that you should not regret the loss [of reindeer] because ‘gods take these to themselves’” (171). However, the loss of reindeer to other humans, including state representatives (or just any lutsa), is looked upon differently and is considered an act of intrusion and theft. Wealthy and poor, Christian and non-Christian alike try to keep their independence from state institutions that, as they fear, would limit their options for increasing the number of their reindeer.

There is yet another layer of independence that is more personal (not necessarily solitary, rather cooperative) and has to do with individual ethical practices. As a young person, one can achieve autonomy by learning skills through listening, observation, example, and repeated trials. This is how one becomes good at herding, hunting, wayfinding, sewing, cooking, repairing snowmobiles—in short, managing things on one’s own and not depending too much on others’ help (Golovnev 2017, 50; see also Ingold 2000). This kind of autonomy ideally helps to raise a herd of several hundred animals, which gives a young family a wide-ranging economic independence. This (above all male) vision of becoming an independent herder, finding a partner, and starting a family is positively discussed among the (male) youth who still live with their parents.

Figure 7.1. Mastering lasso is one of the most important skills for men, November 2006.

After conversion new values of sociality have been introduced. On the one hand, the church as Christ’s body aims at a “religious ethic of brotherhood” (Weber 2009, 348), which is supposed to create new forms of care and support at the expense of preconversion relationalities. And yet, people in the tundra share histories and reindeer pastures, and they must still cooperate with one another, regardless of their religious belonging and views. As Keane (2016, 214) notes, even the most pious depend on kin and community who might not share the same religious values and aspirations. Some Nenets believers even continue their gift partnerships with nonbelievers (who are often their kin), or otherwise show respect, hospitality, or generosity based on established relationships. In Christian terms, this is discussed as the dictate to “love thy neighbor,” which demonstrates how “habitual ethics” (207) is linked to the new ethics of explicit rules.

As missionaries discourage becoming too intimate with nonbelievers, so do they not recognize a positive version of intimacy with animals and things (while this kind of intimacy is imagined to exist; see chap. 4): this would constitute an illicit form of relationships for a believer. While converts sort relationships with humans versus nonhuman others on the basis of a binary principle of absolute good versus evil, the older Nenets concept of personhood allows for far more varied forms of partibility with spirits, animals, and things. But as Andrei once said in a sermon, “the old life,” (nyevkhy yil), must be discarded fully. However, converts struggle with this new Christian logic, as the earlier logic of engagement with nonhuman others is difficult to abandon and forget. As Piers Vitebsky notes (2017a), sometimes it is not converting “to a new way of being” but converting “from an old one” (165, his italics), which is the key issue in a religious conversion.

Purity and Certainty

Nenets converts stressed repeatedly that one must live a pure life that would please God.⁷ Becoming holy is related to the concept of purity (chistota, also “cleanliness,” see chap. 2), as the missionaries taught. But purity is a notion that matters to both Christians and non-Christians, even if there is no straight translatability between the Christian and Nenets concepts. For Christians, purity is related to a life without sinful conduct such as drinking, smoking, or cursing, and, more broadly, to God’s saving grace. One can attain God’s grace by living with the right kind of intentions in mind, ensuring blessings in this life as well as eternal life thereafter. For non-Christian Nenets, purity is not related to inner intentions, desires, feelings, or introspection but to one’s distributed personhood, bodily fluids, and relations with invisible spirits. Because of these conceptual discrepancies and translational difficulties, fresh converts struggle with the notion of purity and holiness, as we shall see in the following ethnographic example.

I witnessed a scene in 2002 when missionary Pavel—using the Pauline language from the New Testament—asked a recently married and baptized Nenets woman, Syado, whether she saw herself as holy (svyataya in Russian). A male Nenets convert, who was interpreting Pavel to Syado, translated svyataya as nyaro, which means “unpolluted” or “pure,” contrasting with syaqmei, which means “polluted” or “dangerously powerful.” Among Nenets, nyaro and syaqmei are the key concepts regulating relations not only between men and women but also between the living and the dead or between Nenets and Russians.

Syaqmei is conceptualized as a certain kind of power that attracts various visible and invisible agents, be these diseases, wolves, Russians, or other predators into the sphere of the “real people.” To ward off dangerous agents, a ritual of cleansing with the smoke of torabtq⁸ and metal items are needed. This purification rite (nibtyeva) takes place after a woman has given birth, finished menstruating, or overstepped or touched certain objects belonging to men or related to reindeer; when somebody has died or visited a settlement; when a shaman starts a seance; or when men prepare to go to a sacred site. Syaqmei is partly gendered, as women are seen as a main source of dangerous pollution (Liarskaya 2005; Serpivo 2016). Until a girl’s first menstruation, she is nyaro like any boy: after reaching the fertile age, she should not step over men’s belongings, reindeer poles, or strings, and she should place her boots in a special bag (syaqmei pad, also used for catching evil words, as described in chap. 5) that she can carry on the special syabu sledge in order not to contract pollution to others. When women reach the end of childbearing age, they are nyaro again (Kharyuchi 2004, 156). Christianity has brought a change in these concepts and practices: after conversion, routine cleansing rituals where women repeat “kyv, kyv, kyv” in a low voice disappear; instead, purifying prayers are enacted with the words “Please cleanse me, O Lord.”

Pavel’s question about holiness and purity made Syado hesitate, look down, and say that she did not know whether she was nyaro. She had been raised with the knowledge that all fertile women had female power that was both procreative and destructive. But now she could not be sure what she was expected to say and feel. She knew that this had to be pleasing to God and missionaries. Pavel insisted that she ought to know that she was svyataya, saying that her confident words about her own holiness would mirror her inner condition as a saved person. Syado was probably confused not only by the mismatch between the old and new concept of purity but also by the complexity—and inherent contradictions—of the evangelical concepts of purity and impurity and certainty and uncertainty.

Pavel’s claim that Syado ought to see herself as pure was based on the conviction that after having become a Christian, a person enshrines the Holy Spirit that helps to keep one’s sins under control. Nevertheless, Syado could hear in sermons that even believers had to ask forgiveness for their sins. There was thus always an inherent tension between representing oneself as sinful and being truly confident in one’s salvation. On the one hand, one is supposed to scrutinize oneself; on the other hand, this constant vigilance must coexist with the assurance of salvation. Furthermore, as we saw in the case of Nyeteta and her episode of mental breakdown (see chap. 4), one’s sense of certainty could be undermined by extraordinary events that others could judge as signs of an impure spiritual condition. Even if one’s thoughts and acts have not changed, being subject to evaluation—and potentially condemnation—by others is a force that one cannot fully control.

Among Unregistered Baptists, purity and certainty are entangled notions. Aleksandr, a senior Russian presbyter, once told me, “Every person carries inside a testimony [svidetel’stvo], a confident conviction of being saved or not. You have to inspect yourself. You need to open your heart to God.” This rather Calvinistic statement partly echoes what Foucault has written about Christian efforts of purification of interiority as an ethical process, as we have seen above. Aleksandr’s statement demonstrates that Russian Unregistered Baptists in the early twenty-first century demand an assertion of conviction (as celebrated in the lyrics of a popular hymn: “Yes, I am saved! That is not a word of pride”). Declaring certainty had to be supported by petitionary prayers to God to make it real and effective. And yet, in other places and moments, Baptists show doubt and anxiety over their status in God’s eyes (Prokhorov 2013, 101–2). This performative talk of certainty and praying to God was thus accompanied by claims of doubt, a necessary balancing act so as not to sound too arrogant and to avoid losing one’s salvation (Crapanzano 2000; see also Engelke 2007, 81–85).⁹

At least in the very first phase of conversion, we see that self-examination is guided by rules and ideals offered by missionaries rather than being a self-motivated act of self-scrutiny. Syado was expected to publicly declare herself to be pure and confident, even if she continued to keep her syaqmei pad in the entrance area of her tent and put it on the syabu sledge, as in the old days. As an explanation for this practice, Ivan said to me that using such old-style arrangements based on gender rules was now a matter of keeping order in the tenthold and no longer a spiritual problem.¹⁰

Never in Anger

For Nenets converts, following teachings and managing one’s natural inclinations proves challenging. Baptist missionaries taught that the heart (serdtse in Russian, syei in Nenets) as an interior self was the battlefield between sinful and divine inclinations, a cosmic fight taking place on a very intimate level.¹¹ I witnessed such a struggle over the years in Yegor, who made continuous efforts at avoiding relapse into his previous life of sin and molding himself as a saved person (see chaps. 5 and 6). As we have seen, Yegor’s postconversion biography contained slippages to the past sinful self and guilt over participating in the old kind of singing as well as feeling his heart being filled with the Holy Spirit. We also saw that Yegor prayed to God to strengthen his self-control—including getting his tongue right—and to improve his knowledge of the teachings.

Many in the tundra considered Yegor a tempestuous authoritarian. Yegor used to say he had two big sins that were hard to get rid of. (I never heard non-Christians engage in this kind of self-analytic statement.) One was his inclination to make jokes, and another was his outbursts of anger. Both were related to what he characterized as his inability to control himself. Almost every day, Yegor found a reason to laugh at children, me, or other guests. Although this kind of joking is widespread among Nenets, it is categorically condemned in the new Christian context. When others went along with the laughter, often he stopped laughing and then others stopped as well. Then Yegor said, in a serious tone, that laughing was not pleasing to God. Thus he reestablished his “right” kind of self as a “serious” person in the eyes of those present, either human or divine. He also became enraged easily and occasionally shouted at children when they had not done what was expected or when they just got something wrong. In these moments of anger, he typically called the children lutsaq.¹²

Once in 2006, when on the road to the next campsite through deep snow, I saw Yegor accidentally injure a stubborn harness reindeer (pyelyei) with his driving pole (tyur). It started to bleed from its anus. Not only was there danger of losing a beautiful white reindeer cow but also this was a deeply embarrassing accident for him. He had behaved clumsily, like a lutsa. Watching the bleeding animal, Yegor shouted at us when we came close to the heavily breathing animal: “Does it look funny to you?” All silently retreated to our sledges. Later in the evening, after we had set up our camp, Yegor seemed unusually subdued. He took up the event again: “Anger is a big sin. But God knows that we were only having fun. He knows that I am impatient and that I am always in haste to reach the next campsite before darkness. I have a habit to joke and to yell at others. I use to tell my sons that if I say things quietly, people think I am not serious.” He went on with reading a passage in the Bible picked up from his reading plan and asked God in a prayer to forgive and assist him to get rid of his “bad habits.” Yegor was troubled, but he expressed certainty that he could rely on God’s help to restore his pure inner self, placate his excessive emotions, and undo all his failings. He lived with God’s promise to help him keep his own promise to God.

Note that Yegor spoke from both the first-person singular and plural (compare this to the singing that took him back into his “pagan” self, as described in chap. 5). As a unitary individual, he ought to see himself as solely responsible for his actions. But Yegor asked forgiveness in the name of “us” by saying that “we were only having fun,” even though no others were involved in his moments of rage or laughter that day (or at least did not initiate them). Yegor seeing “us” as the cause of his own rage reflects an older Nenets understanding, in which the source for one’s actions may lie with other actors. The presupposed individual responsibility seemed to have made only a partial inroad into Yegor’s ethical sensibilities. This kind of ambivalence, or the displacement of responsibility, is present in new converts’ lives and, as a result, lots of self-rectifying claims were made among punryodaq. Yegor’s nephew, young Andrei, who was perhaps the least serious Baptist youngster I knew among the Yamb-To converts, claimed that his jokes were just acts of his tongue: “Actually, my heart is not like that.”

In the long run, this practice of striving for coherence in one’s life should bring about the transformation of ethical character. As we have seen (see chap. 6), Baptist logic posits that one’s self-transformation takes place only with God’s help—that is, through divine grace. God could open human hearts, and this was frequently requested in prayers, once again illustrating how efficacious language was imagined to be. Recall what Pavel said about Poru in chapter 2: “But Poru loves to drink. Yet our Jesus is able to make his heart receptive.” The inherent theo-logic here is that growing as a believer is letting Christ (or the Holy Spirit) take over one’s self: when he lives in one’s heart, he will lead the person’s actions and desires, “for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose” (Ob osvyashchenii 2006, 16). The Baptists’ manual of teachings makes it clear that there is no self left, as “yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (ibid.) or, as the same text puts it, “By fulfilling God’s commands, the more we fulfill with the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 5:18), the more we acquire knowledge and strength for the holy life, the more Christ expresses in us, and the less there is place for our ‘I,’ the manifestation of our character” (17). We see in the Baptist tenets that self-constitution works paradoxically by diminishing the share of one’s self and giving more space to God inside a person through the Holy Spirit (or Christ). This is not only an intellectual but also an embodied experience, as we saw with Yegor, who rubbed his chest after his baptism and expressed his overwhelming joy (see chap. 6).

I suggest that, somewhat paradoxically, the verbal denial of the self is the actual production site of the individualist self and Christian character (cf. Bialecki 2018, 217). Missionaries who have accumulated lots of blessings and wisdom (premudrost’) have little of the human—meaning sinful—self left in them; therefore, what they say and command is seen as action of the Holy Spirit.¹³ Circularly, the same spirit helps them in their prayers to the very same divine agent. While Pentecostals performed this circularity through speaking in tongues, the Baptists demonstrated it through a sober, measured language (see chaps. 4 and 6).

What every convert is supposed to know is that one becomes holy only when one’s desire and choice are perfectly aligned with the right kind of external determinacy—expressing the will of God.¹⁴ This requires assuming a God’s-eye view on oneself, others, and the entire environment in which one lives. One morning, after reading a passage on God’s rage, Yegor said, “If we do not remember God, the rage of God would come close to us.” The same day, the two of us drove our sledges over the autumn ice of a lake. Water emerged from the trails of our sleds, showing how risky it was to make a shortcut over a layer of thin ice. Yegor said with a tone full of meaning, “You see, this water is like God’s rage. We should keep to the edge of the lake.” It was his daily practice to recall the Bible passage he had read that day. The questions “What is God trying to tell me?” or “What is God’s intention?” are parts of converts’ everyday work of reading the self in context (Harding 2000, 33; see also Crapanzano 2000, 89–90; 2017). Yegor was reading the landscape, as he always had done, only his moral interpretation had changed. Instead of identifying signs of local spirits in the landscape, Yegor was interpreting what God wanted to tell him through the freshly read or heard Word (see Vallikivi 2022 for more detail).¹⁵ He was replacing preconversion ideas with the propositional knowledge acquired through everyday reading of scriptures. His duty was to hold present the divine gaze on himself and the world, listen to God, be open to unexpected moments of divine intervention (e.g., the sound of the cracking ice, dreams, etc.), and share them with others. Yegor’s reflection of the world through scripture demonstrates how the formation of Christian character is constituted through shifting between perspectival positions: by self-reflection through a God’s-eye view, which is a kind of reminder to oneself of God’s presence, and by standing back and looking at one’s deeds, words, and thoughts from a distance (cf. Nichols 2011, 221).

Embracing a God’s-Eye View

It is often repeated in insiders’ and outsiders’ texts that religious conversion opens a new perspective (Schott 2016, 200). This expression is not only a metaphor for a change of faith; it can also be seen as the development of a new type of imaginative, affective, and embodied type of perspective-taking (Hage 2014, 150). To be a believer is to question how one appears to oneself in the eyes of God, which is inseparable from being evaluated by fellow humans, or by the generalized other—that is, our sensation of how society sees us (Mead 1962, 154; see also Strhan 2015, 16). For converts, assuming this gaze takes the form of the crucial question—What does God want from me (or us)? This is an imagined vantage point that has profound ethical consequences. The ideal is that the new perspective from God would always be held present to help the convert construct a coherent Christian life. In practice, however, assuming a divine point of view requires self-discipline, forming necessary habits, remembering God’s teachings, and learning new words and rituals, all of which entail arduous work. It is a constant process of developing and maintaining obedience and loyalty to a point of view.

Keane (2016, 201) has also argued that piety regimes rely on “the inculcation of a God’s-eye view,” which “posits a single organizing vision” (213). It is seeing oneself from another’s point view and imagining God’s (or, in secular contexts, the state’s, party’s, leader’s, etc.) perspective on oneself. He has noted about Christian and Muslim piety movements, “The participants in these movements actively and self-consciously strive to live ethically consistent lives. In both piety movements, that demand for consistency is partly explained by the inculcation of a God’s-eye view, a version of the third-person perspective from which the faithful is expected to see the totality of his or her life and impose order on it” (200–201). Keane shows that the ability to take an external perspective on oneself is essential to ethics, from everyday acts of communication to complex religious systems such as Christianity or Islam—these ethical regimes can be highly organizing as well as rationalizing and universalizing. He stresses the significance of perspective-taking in reform movements like this: “The point of view of a transcendent deity offers a position on which to stand, from which one may survey the whole range of known ethical values available in any given cultural world, such that their inconsistencies become visible. It is the pressure exerted by this asymptotically transcendental point of view that provides at least the conceptual and ethical motivation for the kinds of purification or reform movements that are so characteristic of monotheistic religious history” (210). God’s gaze is mediated not only by other people but also by things and signs all around, which are, in Keane’s term, “ethical affordances” (e.g., new names for experiences, things, or ideas that emerge in social interactions), which offer, but do not determine, whether any of these are picked up and used. Although there is no God in Communist regimes, they can offer “a similar totalizing role” with the help of “the Marxist-Leninist theory of history and the social categories it presupposed” (240; see also 2014), or more specifically with such documents as the “Moral Code of the Builders of Communism” (Kharkhordin 1999, 250–51; Zigon 2010, 206), or various institutions such as the Communist Party (Groys 2009, 106; Kotkin 1995, 229; Laidlaw 2018, 186).

I would suggest that any conversion is a combined shift in a linguistic and moral vantage point (see also Jenkins 2013, 74). Expressing loyalty as a Christian requires the acquisition of the new language and speaking it to significant others, divine and human, in public. This language contains its own vocabulary, style, prosody, narratives, and texts that reflect a particular connection to the Christian morality system. To look at the interconnection of perspective and language, it is worth returning to Humphrey’s reading of Badiou and her concept of decision-event (see chap. 2).¹⁶ Let me recall that in Humphrey’s (2008, 357) interpretation, a decision-event is part of subject formation in particular circumstances, such as “the advent of new regimes, convulsions wrought by war, schisms of former social wholes and, in general, the overturning of accustomed patterns of intelligibility and the advent of a radically new idea” (see also Laidlaw et al. 2018). A decision-event cannot happen without “universal ideas” or without “the deployment of a new language” and its specific vocabulary (such as “organization-creation of the mass,” “common people,” “Party,” “us,” and “together,” as in Humphrey’s [2008, 363] example of revolutionary figures of Inner Mongolia in the 1920s).

The Nenets who have decided to become believers know that they must change their perspective and speak the new language, which is the only way to constitute themselves as new subjects (compare with early Nenets Communists, such as Yevsyugin, introduced in chap. 1). It is not only new words and categories (sin, salvation, pagans, witnessing, and so on) that converts must learn, however, but also a whole set of new pragmatics. As discussed in chapter 6, one is expected to become fluent in this faith language, which becomes objective proof that one has stopped speaking the language of the past self or unsaved others. However, the new language—despite its claims of universal reach—has its inner limits, and in wider social contexts, it may need adaptation or translation. This is a revolutionary language that must become one’s own, while it might not be fully comprehensible to those who are not fellow revolutionaries (cf. Prokhorov 2013, 260, 309–15). It can make sense only from within.

Badiou (2001, 82) calls this kind of language a “subject-language” that acclaims a truth (see also 2003). Žižek (1999) describes the concept of subject-language (which has some similarity with Latour’s love-talk, discussed in chap. 6) as being engaged in a “subjective perspective” that is based on fidelity to the truth-event (e.g., resurrection of Christ, falling in love, etc.) and assessing everything from this standpoint. Žižek writes: “Let us imagine a person in love describing the features of his beloved to his friend: the friend, who is not in love with the same person, will simply find this enthusiastic description meaningless; he will not get ‘the point’ of it. . . . In short, subject-language involves the logic of the shibboleth, of a difference which is visible only from within, not from without” (136, original ellipsis; see also Badiou 2006, 398; Hallward 2003, 128). However, not all speech acts can be consistently attached to the truth-event in the same manner in different social circumstances, even by a subject-in-becoming. Real-life situations require a person to carefully choose where and when to use such enthusiastic subject-language; otherwise, communication would be hampered or outright impossible. As believers live among rather different kinds of people, both Christian and non-Christian, there is a need to shift between different registers, vocabularies, and natural languages, and thus, in some sense, between different vantage points.

It is once again helpful to turn to Bakhtin (1981) to discuss the linkage between language and perspective, with a focus on the shifting between different kinds of language when addressees change. He argued that people use varied languages (or registers) throughout their lives: “All languages of heteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying them and making each unique, are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values” (291–92, my italics). Bakhtin illustrated this with an example of an illiterate peasant in eighteenth-century Russia, who “prayed to God in one language (Church Slavonic), sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third and, when he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he tried speaking yet a fourth language . . . he passed from one to the other without thinking, automatically: each was indisputably in its own place, and the place of each was indisputable” (295–96).

As in the example of Bakhtin’s peasant, Yegor frequently shifted between different perspectival languages or registers. For instance, when speaking to non-Christian reindeer herders, he chose a different, more quotidian register, and when speaking to Russian acquaintances or officials, he used his limited Russian, opting for words that had entered the Nenets language relatively recently (e.g., pasport, administratsiya, etc.). In both settings, his aim was to get things done, yet he occasionally inserted references to God’s commands and his own identity as a believer; at other times, he avoided evangelical language, his subject-language, entirely (cf. Engelke 2013, 66).

In a departure from Bakhtin, I would suggest that shifting between different registers does not need to be an entirely automatic or entirely self-reflective act either. When Yegor was making jokes, he was speaking Nenets in a “pagan” way; when he was condemning his jokes, he was speaking Baptist. My strong impression was that it shifted him between varied dispositions he was not able to fully control, even if he was able to reflect upon these later.¹⁷ Unlike Bakhtin’s peasant, Yegor knew that the ultimate ideal was to stay only in the Christian-language world and not to speak the language of his past self, as this entailed the danger of losing the perspective of “God’s-gaze-on-me,” which was the only moral way to anchor himself into the right perspective or subject position. This inability to fully control himself at all times, and thus his struggle for a Christian subjectivity, was also a reason why he avoided speaking of and to spirits or singing old songs, as these could have swayed his perspective and drowned him in the old “pagan” world (see chap. 5).¹⁸

Earlier Yamb-To Nenets used to say “Num [God] Mikola is watching” (Num Mikola manie) when someone committed a mistake or transgressed a taboo (e.g., women stepping over reindeer harnesses). These moments had the potential to shift one’s perspective to that of a transcendental judge, an idea that probably came from Orthodox Christianity. However, this did not lead to a sustained practice of self-objectification, as the Orthodox God did not have the piercing gaze of the Baptists’ God. Nenets punryodaq say that God’s view penetrates everything, including one’s soul. So, the evangelicals’ God’s gaze works rather as Foucault’s internalized gaze in Bentham’s panopticon, which is there to guard oneself in the absence of a visible other (Foucault 1977, 195–228).

In this context, we can ask, “When does a person occupy an ethical subject position?” (see also Faubion 2013; Humphrey 2008). Baptists, like many other Christians, often use kin terms when speaking of their relations with God. God is “our father” and we are his “children.” If self-reflectively engaged, these are moments of the perceived presence of God as father who offers the perspective of “what pleases him.”¹⁹ I suggest that sensing the presence of God’s gaze as a father’s gaze could be characterized as having a different ontological perspective than when looking at the world from the perspective of human willfulness. We could argue that Baptist personhood is a site where various connections take place, analogous to perspectival stances in Melanesian persons as “dividuals,” that is microcosms of relations that emerge through exchanges with others over time (Strathern 1996). Marilyn Strathern (1999, 253) suggests in the Papua New Guinean context that ontological consequences come from the position where people find themselves in kin relations at a particular moment, “being a son to these people and a sister’s son to those, or to being a consanguine by contrast with an affine.” Once again, this positionality is contextually set not only in “space” but also in time.

Taking another’s perspective is a capacity that is essential to all human beings. However, it is never a total self-detachment. It is rather a “double perspective,” as my gaze from elsewhere is at the same time a gaze from myself that witnesses me being looked upon. This simultaneity is only partial because at a particular point of time, a person is either more here or there. George Herbert Mead (1962, 174–76) expressed a similar idea by arguing that the “I” that observes cannot directly grasp itself. In Christian history, this has produced paradoxical situations when an observer “I” and observed “I” get hopelessly entangled with each other (see Paden 1988, 77, for such instances in the diaries of seventeenth-century Puritans of New England). Therefore, the third-person perspective is inseparable from the first-person perspective.

Converts in the tundra are taught to adhere to God’s perspective through interiorized disciplinary practices and through talking about it to oneself and others. To live a good life as a believer thus requires striving to occupy the right subject position and stay in it. The crucial node is the shifting of viewpoints between the human and the divine, an oscillation that is probably necessary to live a complete life, with its moments of doubt and moments of certainty about one’s salvation. This struggle does not end with either success or failure. Rather, verbal praise for success or admitting failure both serve as highly productive ways to craft a new Christian self and community (see Beekers and Kloos 2018). What matters, as they say, is a sincere intention to strive and hope that divine grace does the rest. There is the possibility of movement toward a more stable subject position, where one becomes an experienced and practiced believer. Such a person is said to be filled with the Holy Spirit (see chap. 6).

Believers in the tundra try to manage the paradox that is inherent in the demand for a coherent life and their lived lives, which are filled with irresolvable tensions. The ideal of achieving coherence guides one’s life and puts one’s thoughts and words in a specific mode. This occurs forcefully in moments when one can achieve a God’s-eye view, especially when the challenges and contingencies of life would—as Laidlaw (2014, 128) phrases it—“provoke particularly intense ethical questioning.” And yet we should not forget that there are always parallel, conflicting, and fragmented projects in one’s life, even among the most committed and pious monotheists. Coherence is an ideal that has a fragile relationship with the lived life and its many connections and contingencies. As Robert Hefner (2019, 145) puts it, commenting on Muslim subjectivities: “Even the most fervent pietists . . . may aspire to other interests and ethical concerns.”²⁰ Therefore, some maneuverability between “ethical traditions” is what makes life livable, as Laidlaw has argued. Giving an example of lay Jains in North India, Laidlaw (2014, 168) says that despite them knowing what it takes to act morally and be “a self-consistent virtuous self,” they can yet do it “only at intervals and only in counterpoint to the pursuit of contrasting goods and ends.” Even if people are torn apart by various conflicting projects in their everyday lives, we should not discount the power of aspiring to coherence and to the theo-logic of certainty in salvation.

We could argue that Nenets converts switched between different ethical regimes (like they moved between different registers and languages). In daily matters, Yegor continued to use his practical judgment to sustain the well-being of his family, reindeer herd, pastures, and pragmatic relations with various lutsaq. However, during the moments where he took God’s gaze on him, he expressed these concerns under one total scheme, which was living for God through his prayers and his reading and witnessing practices. And yet, it was not easy to manage this ideal of living with God’s gaze for longer periods. Once when I asked why he did not keep Sunday, he replied that God knows that he needs to pasture his reindeer every day and added, “We think that all the work we do, we do for God.” He seemed to have forgotten what he had told me a few weeks earlier, when he complained that his back and legs were aching after he went on a Sunday to check fishing nets and fell from his snowmobile into a hole and injured himself. He explained that this was a punishment for him working on Sunday.²¹

As we see, everyday practical issues must be continuously renegotiated, rejustified, and re-accounted for because of the demand to look at one’s life from a God’s-eye view. In the end, Yegor and other converts can rely on God’s power to forgive and resolve tensions once the right words are uttered, feelings expressed, and rituals performed. Furthermore, prayers always contain a reference to “the sins one has committed without knowing.” Even if everyday misfortunes cannot always be avoided, there is hope for a delayed reward in the hereafter for all the pious words, sincere intentions, and correctly embodied behavior. This is a radically new world Yegor and other converts have entered, one they could not have imagined until recently. Their new life (yedei yil) is full of competing and sometimes incommensurable visions of a good life—achieving of which requires a new way of dealing with words and silences.