Property and Economy among reindeer herders in Yamal, Northwest Siberia

The extended family of a private reindeer herding camp watching my visual fieldwork material. Showing this to the informants developed to a invaluable method, since their comments on my films provided additional information.

The extended family of a private reindeer herding camp watching my visual fieldwork material. Showing this to the informants developed to a invaluable method, since their comments on my films provided additional information.

During my fieldwork, I tried to cover a range of organisational forms of reindeer herding, having worked among formerly state owned enterprises, the sovkhoz brigades as well as with private herders, members of registered clan-communities (obshchina, cf. Gray) and herders employed by commercial reindeer processing enterprises. The focus of this work was the herders’ perceptions of the soviet past and the transitional processes around them and their strategies of making use of the recent developments. To answer the main question of herding success by encountering property relations and market economy, the main part of the fieldwork consisted of nomadic migration with the herders. Apart from this participant observation and narrative interviews, I collected data through a micro-survey of 25 reindeer herding households. This survey consisted mainly of questions on property regarding land and animals, patterns of land use, especially migration routes, and strategies to act in the recently evolving market economy.

Interviews with leaders of state farms (Sovkhozy) could be made while driving together to their farms' reindeer herding camps.

Interviews with leaders of state farms (Sovkhozy) could be made while driving together to their farms' reindeer herding camps.

The institutional framework of all these perceptions was covered by interviews with the people working at different levels of administration, with directors of reindeer enterprises, and regional policy-makers. The material gathered here was, apart from personal viewpoints of the interview partners, mainly on regional and local legislation. Reindeer breeding should also not only be seen in its meaning for the herders or in political programs, but also in its contribution to the region as a whole. Therefore, statistics on herd sizes, forms of property in reindeer, and the share of the migrating herders were gathered on all levels starting from the local administrative unit and ending in Moscow for the whole Russian Federation.