Paper short abstract:

The Siberian Sakha people have experienced a new interest in their living landscape, expressed in the Yhyakh ritual. I incorporate Gabriel Tarde’s work into an account of this shift. The Yhyakh revival’s success helps us see how local Arctic perspectives can be integrated into scholarship.

Paper long abstract:

A strange turnaround happened in Sakha (Yakutia), north-east Siberia, at the end of the twentieth century. The indigenous Siberian Sakha people experienced a powerful new interest in their living landscape – expressed particularly in the Yhyakh festival – after decades of secularist modernization. This modernization had transformed both Sakha peoples’ interrelation with the land, and the land itself: extracting Sakha (Yakutia)’s natural resources was one of the Soviet administration’s key aims. Sakha conservation initiatives now evoke the pre-Soviet living landscape, in a reversal of Soviet modernisation’s twin effects. I incorporate the work of the nineteenth-century sociologist Gabriel Tarde into an account of the Yhyakh revival. I show how Tarde’s relational depiction of the social offers a way of describing Soviet and post-Soviet transformation without positing a conflict or disjuncture between modernization and its epistemologies, and the conventions that preceded it. Tarde’s work offers a way of handling the dichotomy between the unpredictable and partial nature of Soviet modernisation and its effects, and the uniformity of so many of the intentions that shaped Soviet policy. This dichotomy haunts the wider discussion of global modernization and its epistemological alterities, taking shape in some discussions as a hard distinction between ‘indigenous knowledge’ and the rest. The success of the Sakha Yhyakh revival, seen in Tarde’s terms, perhaps helps us see how local Arctic perspectives can be incorporated into both scholarship and conservation.