Accepted Panels

My report is going to present some work results on the problem of reconstructing and describing the institutional relations between indigenious communities and the state in the process of so-called "cultural building" among the peoples of the North under harsh climatic and political conditions in the Soviet Union. The specifics and complexities of these relations are reflected in the resolutions, reports, speeches at political and economic meetings, as well as in the field diaries and notes of soviet ethnographers who conducted their research on the Taimyr Peninsula. Through the variety of archival materials available in the town of Dudinka I was able to capture, in addition to the statements of non-indigenous representatives of the bigger society , also the voices of local elites becoming communists, managers in collective farms (kolkhoz), and people of new professions in their transition from nomadic to sedentary lifestyle. The archives of soviet ethnographers made it possible to know their position and to trace their reflection on the one hand as agents of the process of "cultural building" and ideologists of the soviet regime, and on the other hand as collectors and safeguarders of folklore and practices of traditional culture, which were first rejected by the state but then formed the basis of the idea of cultural heritage production in the USSR. Archive work was conducted in 2022-2023 as part of a group research of the settlement of the indigenous peoples of Taimyr under the effect of the industrial development of the region.