Authors

Mariia Mochalova¹;  ¹ Personal capacity, Russian Federation

Discussion

The institutionalization of indigenous cultures in the Taymyr region was part of a multi-level Soviet modernization process that began in the 1930s and was largely completed in the 1960s with the settlement of previously nomadic populations in villages. This institutionalization became an instrument for forming a hybrid identity of the "New Soviet northerner" – a variation of the "New Soviet man" – and led to the emergence and development of a network of institutions with diverse functions, administratively unified under the category of "cultural work".  This was the space where practices of working with cultural objects began to emerge, which became the basis for the formation of the heritage industry in the late USSR and new Russia. which became the basis for the formation of the heritage industry in the late USSR and new Russia. At the same time these practices of heritage-making marked a peculiar disruption of the traditional ways of indigenous knowledge transfer. 

My research is dedicated to expert heritage management practices in the Taimyr region and it is conducted within the framework of critical heritage studies, emphasizing the processes of discursive heritage production. Using archival and field materials, expert publications, and oral history I trace and deconstruct the genealogy of indigenous heritage management patterns that developed in Taymyr in modern Russia after Perestroika and the USSR's collapse, which in particular allows me to discover their origins in the late Soviet period (1970s-1980s). In addition to the concept of authorized heritage discourse (Smith 2006) and its critical reinterpretation, I also turn to the field of indigenous studies and use the concept of indigenity which represents a relative problematic field where discourses of governance, subjectivity, and knowledge production intersect (de la Cadena, Starn 2007). Drawing on several case studies I will demonstrate how both indigenous and non-indigenous actors were involved in these discourses, creating and transforming local and state power structures, as well as ways of imagining and speaking about each other using new institutions and languages.

De la Cadena, M., & Starn, O. (Eds.). (2007). Indigenous Experience Today (1st ed.). Routledge.

Smith, L. (2006). Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge.