Petra Rethmannbe part of a self-imposed denial of what I have called elsewhere (Reth-
mann 2000 ) the “poesis of life.” Essentially, I ask what we miss when
we fail to recognize our own analytical conventions and limitations.
Part II elaborates on the presence of silence. There is a great deal of si-
lence in the northern Kamchatka Peninsula and Chukotka (as almost
everywhere in the North, as I’ve been told), but ethnographies them-
selves have evinced a great deal of silence about the notion of silence.
Why is this the case? And what can silence teach us about the pres-
ence? Part III brings aspects of these questions together. It does not
rehearse or summarize the arguments and thoughts I have provided
in parts I and II but rather asks what we can learn from them. It does
this in a somewhat roundabout way. It works through what I think
of now as the lessons of Shura Chechulina. When I use the word les-
son here I do not mean self-conscious teachings delivered in the style
of a talk or lecture. Neither do I mean the passing on of fixed knowl-
edges and wisdom. What I mean are openings, forays into (at least
for me) new forms of being that are more audacious, centered, and
connected than the ones I knew so far. Trying to be present to what
is, with all its multitudes, challenges, and facets, is perhaps one of the
greatest challenges there is.
In 1995 , when I was first writing up the materials of my fieldwork
into a dissertation, I looked at it as a journey. Instead of including a
chapter entitled “Introduction,” I began with a section entitled “De-
parture.” The purpose of this move was to keep a sense of travel,
movement, and openness—after all, I was writing about people who
moved with their reindeer herds often across the land—alive. For the
same reason, the dissertation did not offer a conventional conclusion
that summarized its findings but instead a chapter entitled “Arrival.”
Again, I wanted to keep the flux and flow of life alive. In this piece,
too, the underlying idea is to get at something one might call “life.”
Not just in its existential but also its experiential sense.
RomanticismIn the year 2000 , I published an article in American Ethnologist en-
titled, “Skins of Desire: Poetry and Identity in Koriak Women’s Gift
Exchange.” The article, from what I projected as the Koriak point