The book is centred on a fascinating personality, a Western Siberian indigenous poet, reindeer herder and ecological activist, who, in his 40s, made the choice to live in the forest with reindeer. There, he struggled with oil giant LUKoil to ensure his reindeer the possibility to live. A series of essays reflect on his awareness and construction of self and culture, his complex relations with the oil industry, and his native spirituality. It presents insights into what it means to be an indigenous intellectual in post-Soviet Russia at the beginning of the 21st century. Yuri Vella (1948-2013) is not an ordinary representative of his people, but he shows one of the possible forms indigenous leadership could take in Russia, if it aims at giving indigenous peoples the possibility in the near and far future to shape a sustainable relation to nature and their neighbours.

""This work is a masterpiece already as it stands now! It presents an unusually rich ethnography of a part of a community in Europe's farthest Arctic Northeast, with a focus on an extremely difficult topic to do fieldwork on: the conversion of a so-far hardly known group of reindeer nomads to radical evangelical Baptism / Pentecostalism." - Florian Stammler, author of Reindeer Nomads Meet the Market: Culture, Property and Globalisation at the "End of the Land" "Although not working from within the subdiscipline of linguistic anthropology, Vallikivi foregrounds speaking and communication in his analysis of the transformation from "pagan" to Christian. He finds a complex interweaving of speaking and refraining from speaking is key to Nenets personhood, and demonstrates how we have to understand cultural ways of speaking in order to understand Nenets Baptists and Pentecostals. [...] I have been reviewing book manuscripts for two decades for over a dozen presses, and this is by far the most polished and impressive manuscript I have read." - Alexander D. King, author of Living with Koryak Traditions: Playing with Culture in Siberia Words and Silences tells the story of an extraordinary group of independent Nenets reindeer herders in the northwest Russian Arctic. Under socialism these nomads managed to avoid the Soviet state and its institutions of collectivization but soon after the atheist regime collapsed, while some staunchly resisted, many of them became fervent fundamentalist Christians. By exploring differing concepts of how traditional and convert Nenets use and define words, and of the meanings they ascribe to the withholding of speech, Vallikivi shows how a local form of global Christianity has emerged through intricate negotiations of self, sociality, and cosmology. Moving beyond studies of modernization and globalization that have all-too-predictable outcomes for indigenous peoples, Words and Silences invites us to view not only religious devotees, but words themselves, as agents of a complex and ongoing transformation"--

This book documents the voices of scholars working in, with, or about Russia in the context of historical collapse. The brief answers, commentaries, and essays collected here were written in response to the four questions asking how academic lives and practices have changed in the aftermath of 24 February 2022. The original project, which was born in Russia at the end of 2022 and intended to be published in Russia and in the Russian language, was never realised. One year later, we are publishing this collection in Germany in the English language. These are no longer snapshots of the current situation, but historical documents that record structural disruptions, ethical and political uncertainties, and individual emotional and analytical reflections from a year ago. Academia is always both an active subject and a passive object under transformation in any continuing political, social, and economic processes; with this publication we hope to contribute to our understanding of diverse implications of the war and shifts in academic landscapes and public discursive regimes. The book/special issue includes 25 responses by young and well-established scholars and two introductions, written by the editors in late 2022 and 2023 respectively.