Paper short abstract:

This paper elucidates the historical nature of contemporary interrelationships between a Siberian community and their environment, by exploring the ways pop music performances harness the aesthetic conventions of contemporary Russia to express relationships that have their roots in pre-Soviet shamanism.

Paper long abstract:

Russia's Sakha population - the dominant ethnic group in the Siberian Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) - have developed their own popular music industry over recent decades. New and varied genres of Sakha popular music have emerged in tandem with an ongoing cultural revival: after decades of life in the atheist, materialist Soviet state, Sakha people are able to re-evaluate pre-Soviet shamanic conventions and practices. Paradoxically, this revitalisation sits with further transformation, as the Sakha population moves from the rural Sakha heartlands into the Republic's capital, Yakutsk. Pre-Soviet Sakha shamanic practice was founded on relationships with the deities, demons and spirits that inhabited the natural environment. How, then, can this tradition be pursued in Yakutsk, where lives are set among laptops, offices and shopping malls, rather than horses, forests and cow-byres?

This paper elucidates the historical nature of contemporary interrelationships between Sakha people and their environment, by exploring the ways pop performances harness the aesthetic conventions of contemporary Russia to express relationships that have their roots in pre-Soviet life. As I show, pop music has become a natural site for ordinary Sakha people - not shamanic activists, or the nationalist intelligentsia - to celebrate their sense of the power of nature associated with human community. Sakha pop performance illustrates the productive capacity of history, in that it holds together contradictory forms of relationship, value, person and action, predicated on contrasting ontological assumptions. Not only are pop singers skilled at wooing audiences through slick stage performances and YouTube clips, they can also mediate the area spirits.