Where Is the Nomadic Family? Rigid Laws and Flexible Tundra Life in North-East Siberia

Abstract

We start from a puzzle: in remote Arctic regions of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), why are many reindeer-herding families excluded from official 'nomadic family' benefits? The Republic's Nomadic Family Law is supposed to support indigenous minorities leading a 'traditional' lifestyle, but it often fails. We identify three models of family structure at work, each matching the fluidity of the physical environment and productive process more or less realistically. While our fieldwork reveals a highly flexible and all-embracing indigenous understanding of relatedness, analysis of the urban officials' laws show them to be based on unexamined concepts of 'family' rooted in Russian terminology and based on narrow ideas of the nuclear family rather than on the complementary distribution of labour across a shared space. We suggest that legal initiatives should include a wider ethnographic basis to provide a better understanding of emic concepts, while also consulting the local people most directly affected.