Authors

Discussion

In the center of the discussion is the history of the Nganasan idol, named Kondo-koyka, of the Turdagin family (Nganasans from the Avam River, western part of the Taymyr Peninsula). In 1962 the shaman Seime Turdagin gave the idol to the Soviet ethnographer Yuri Simchenko. Since then the Kondo-koyka had been kept by the ethnographer until he sold it in the late '80s. The idol was bought by the anthropologist and founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies (USA) Michael Harner. Thus, the idol traveled across countries and continents for some time until it was returned by Harner’s Foundation to Natalia – a now-living woman from the Turdagin family. The ceremony of the idol’s homecoming was accompanied by a shamanic ritual. However, the idol did not stay in the family: Kondo-koyka was donated to the Taimyr Local History Museum, where it is kept nowadays. Natalia and her children still come to the museum to communicate with the idol and to perform some rituals. During the panel, the author proposes to discuss the results of this «idol biography» study which is an attempt to consistently reconstruct the journey of the Kondo-koyka by examining the choices and motivations of different owners and other stakeholders who interacted with the idol. During the study the idol is considered in a broader context of issues concerning cultural ownership, discourses of indignity, the role of scholars in heritage making, and different ways of understanding and deconstructing 'decolonization' in the Soviet Union and in modern Russia. The problem of transformation of religious concepts and general attitudes towards religion under the influence of the processes of Soviet modernization was also touched upon during the research. The relationship between the researcher and his interlocutor from the studied indigeneous community, their co-production of knowledge in a certain ideological context was an another focus of the study. The research is based on the author's fieldwork on the Taymyr Peninsula in 2021-2023 in tandem with the analysis of archival materials from related museums and research institutions.