Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the experience of being in a divinely created world by studying the early modern Muscovites' accounts of the Siberian nature. It scrutinizes the reports on the nature's bounties and their consumption through the lens of the Orthodox Christians assumptions about matter and divinity

Paper long abstract:

Sweet juicy vegetables and numerous types of berries, grape vines, fig trees, date palms, and fragrant flowers, as well as countless fatty fish, abundant fowl and game - these are the features of the Siberian environment the Christian Muscovite travelers and settlers observed and reported on in the surviving written accounts. Arguably, they identified the Siberian land with the garden of Eden that God Himself destined for the Orthodox Christians to inhabit. And yet, the same authors reported on the constant struggle for survival they have experienced while in Siberia due to food shortages, unfriendly terrain, and extreme temperatures.

The spectacular descriptions of Siberia's cornucopia can be attributed to a Christian symbolical interpretation of the environment or simply to a textual borrowing from the Bible. Instead, this paper attempts to see in thus described world "what there is to be seen" (Holbraad/Pederson) by treating these testimonies as factual statements. Specifically, I examine such aspects as the obtainment and consumption of food, feelings of hunger, thirst, and satisfaction, as well as coldness and warmth through the lens of the authors' ontological assumptions. The most vivid of these assumptions are the existence of a good and loving God, the world's divine inception, and the consequential ethical implication for acting in and upon it. Ultimately, the paper studies the experience of being in a divinely created world