Vagramenko, Tatiana. Indigeneity and Religious Conversion in Siberia: Nenets «Eluding» Culture and Indigenous Revitalization. In: Marginalised and Endangered Worldviews. Comparative Studies on Contemporary Eurasia, India and South America. Ed. by L. Gusy and J. Kapalo. LIT Verlag. Ethnologie: Forschung und Wissenschaft. 2017. P. 207-229.

Abstract

The article draws on examples from authors ethnographic research on conversion into Evangelical Christianity amongst the rural Nenets indigenous people of the Polar Urals (North-Western Siberia). Since the post-Soviet period, the territories of the Polar Ural tundra have become a zone of intensive international Evangelical missionary activities and frequent cases of conversion into Protestant Christianity among nomadic and sedentary native people. And while "traditional" Nenets customs and beliefs, sacred sites and ritual practices were being promoted on a public level as a foundation of Nenets survival, the rural Nenets often eagerly embraced the Christian Evangelical missionary message, challenging commonsense perspectives of the resilience of Nenets traditional culture. Local indigenous community turned out to be at the epicentre of many scandals associated with Protestant missionary initiatives and became a place of heated conflicts between missionaries, converted and non-converted natives and local authorities. In public discourse the image of "alien sects" that destruct "Nenets indigenous culture" and Nenets authenticity was prevalent. The article aims to explore how, through conversion experience and daily encounters with the missionaries, Nenets negotiated their indigenous identities, "native tradition" and "culture", and what response they elaborated in the situation of broken authenticity and cultural continuity. As the author argues, new religiosity was simultaneously perceived as change of and return to the true "Nenetsness", true Nenets "traditional lifeway". In a given ethnographic case, religious conversion and new religious identities provided a foundation for "indigenous awakening", and were transformed into a strategy of indigenous empowerment

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