At the outset of the twentieth century, the Nivkhi of Sakhalin
Island were a small population of fishermen under Russian dominion
and an Asian cultural sway. The turbulence of the decades that
followed would transform them dramatically. While Russian
missionaries hounded them for their pagan ways, Lenin praised them;
while Stalin routed them in purges, Khrushchev gave them respite;
and while Brezhnev organized complex resettlement campaigns,
Gorbachev pronounced that they were free to resume a traditional
life. But what is tradition after seven decades of building a
Soviet world?
Based on years of research in the former Soviet Union, Bruce
Grant's book draws upon Nivkh interviews, newly opened archives,
and rarely translated Soviet ethnographic texts to examine the
effects of this remarkable state venture in the construction of
identity. With a keen sensitivity, Grant explores the often
paradoxical participation by Nivkhi in these shifting waves of
Sovietization and poses questions about how cultural identity is
constituted and reconstituted, restructured and dismantled.
Part chronicle of modernization, part saga of memory and
forgetting, "In the Soviet House of Culture" is an interpretive
ethnography of one people's attempts to recapture the past as they
look toward the future. This is a book that will appeal to
anthropologists and historians alike, as well as to anyone who is
interested in the people and politics of the former Soviet
Union.
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