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On Presence
on, has become every anthropologist’s nightmare), and perhaps even
some generated by Koriak women and men. But what is this roman-
ticism we are speaking of? Is it just part of the exoticism with which
Western anthropology and thought has for so long forced others, Na-
tives, mystics, “the mad,” and so forth, into offensive slots? Or is it
part of the naive notion that the natural world can save us from the
pressures of modern life, the onslaught of the capital economy, infor-
mation technology, and industrialization? I do not think so. If the ar-
ticle contained any traces of romanticism, it was a romanticism born
out of the sources of pleasure and joy of living on the land, and the
hard realities of life in the village, and also the knowledge, pleasure,
stories, and wholesomeness (at least for the most part) of Tymlat’s
elders. I do not mean to sound dreamy or simplistic. But neither do
I think that romanticism, if that’s what we mean, should be reduced
to almost always a point of accusation. For what we easily convict as
too romantic may also provide openings into new realms of knowl-
edge, comprehension, insight, and awareness.
For all the rightful-ness of the comments mentioned above, I sus-
pected that something else was at work here also. For the next ques-
tion is: To whom, and for what reason, did the article appear to be
too loving and affect-laden? The question is not aimed at individu-
als, but rather asks about scholarly sentiments and conventions. I sus-
pect that the article was deemed too romantic also because it worked
against analytical trajectories that were then still dominant in post-
Soviet cultural anthropology, and certainly with regard to analyses
concerning the Russian North. Socialist realism’s doctrine of parti-
jnost (or “Party-mindedness,” that is, the stipulation that many sci-
entific and literary works be infused with the party’s point of view
(see also Clark 1981 ), had also left its mark on anthropological an-
alytical trajectories and led to the production of ethnographic texts
that were largely set in evolutionary frameworks, with little diversion
from the social progress-embracing story line that marked Soviet an-
thropology to a large extent.
This is not to say that the Soviet Union’s ethnographic record is en-
tirely homogenous, but there is an argument to be made for an un-
derlying formulaic prose that generated highly conventionalized texts
