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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Magnificent photos, reindeer herders, boots, beads and more!, 23 Jan 1999
By A Customer
Oakes and Riewe present a beautiful portrait of the indigenous peoples of northern Siberia and the Russian Far East, using their own magnificent photographs of clothing, footwear and landscapes, plus those of other researchers, and from Russian and European museums. The beauty and harmony of traditional Siberian ways of life emerge from the pages. The authors, specialists in clothing and land use among northern peoples of Canada, have avoided showing us the poverty and destruction of today's everyday life in Russia's north, emphasizing instead the lifeways that indigenous peoples are struggling to preserve. (A less romantic picture can be seen in Doeker Mach's Forgotten Peoples of Siberia. Zurich: Scalo 1993.) The text, based on the authors' fieldwork, with the help of specialists from Russian museums and educational institutions, gives a historical overview, showing varieties of environment and ways of life, linguistic and cultural groupings, details of sewing tools, materials and methods of skin preparation, and of spiritual traditions based in nature. Some of these traditions relate directly to clothing and footwear, vital to survival in harsh northern climates. For example the Even people say that footwear provides a connection between the sacred and the profane. Good boots keep them in harmony with the earth. Sewing tools frequently show up in traditional tales, protecting and empowering women in the same way hunting tools empower men. I feel that the spiritual importance of clothing could have been clarified even more, and that it would have been valuable to give a more complete overview of Siberian spiritual traditions in the book's introduction. This would have allowed the authors to show which aspects are shared by many peoples and which are unique to one. They could also answer fascinating questions like why the Even and Evenk wear open coats in winter (which may reflect more southerly origins), and why Chukchi women make their clothing from whole skins instead of cutting them, (probably to keep the power of the animal intact). Emphasis on footwear reflects the authors' area of specialization as well as the help of the Bata Shoe Museum in bringing to Canada the footwear exhibit from the Russian Ethnographic Museum (also called "Spirit of Siberia") on which the book is based. The photographs and text elaborate the uses of reindeer skin, walrus skin, various furs, embroidery with threads and with the chin hairs of the reindeer, fur mosaics and beadwork. Appendices show the distinct details characteristic of the footwear of the various peoples, as well as skin preparation techniques. Besides the uniformly positive image provided by the photos, one other problem is with the frequent use of the "ethnographic present tense", which makes it difficult for the reader to be sure which traditions are still followed today and which are not. One example is the bear festival of the Amur peoples, in which a young bear was kept in a household for several years before being sacrificed to the masters of the taiga. This ceremony has been revived only once since the end of the repressive Soviet era, and the people decided not to do it again because changed mores made the sacrifice seem too cruel to the bear. Spirit of Siberia provides a beautiful and fascinating introduction to an ancient but radically changing tradition.
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