Identity, Domestication, and Family Structure in the Siberian Arctic 1926-1927: Panel - Inter-cultural dimensions of demographic and familial behaviour

This paper is based on the analysis of records on over 6000 rural households which formed part of a special select survey of the ‘polar population’ living in the newly created Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. The survey was intended to return detailed data on the identity, household structure, and economic activities of communities which had been weakly incorporated into the Russian Empire. The survey employed ‘modern’ statistical categories such as the recording of ‘nationality’ and the measurement of day-to-day activity in monetary terms. Surveying groups which today would be recognized as ‘indigenous’ at the same time as surveying Russian settler populations, the census revealed complex relationships of interaction, multiple occupational profiles, and complex family structures. The presentation gives examples of diversity of language, social status, and interpretations of cultural belonging among a large diversity of groups from the Russian North to Central Siberia