Book Review: Words and Silences: Nenets Reindeer Herders and Russian Evangelical Missionaries in the Post-Soviet Arctic

This book by Laur Vallikivi represents an ethnographic study of religious conversion among Nenets reindeer herding nomads in the Russian Arctic.Through observations of and interviews with Baptist and Pentecostal missionaries and recent converts, as well as by tracing concrete stories of conversion, the author describes and analyses how the Nenets nomads try to assimilate new concepts and establish new relations with material and social realities and learn new practices, verbal as well as non-verbal, of self-expression and self-analysis.Although description and analysis of this sort have already been made in other regions and contexts, the book by Laur Vallikivi is unique in two respects.First, it studies a rare and difficult-to-approach group.Overall, Nenets reindeer herders, the biggest group of Arctic reindeer herding nomads in the modern world, are relatively well studied: there exists a huge literature on them in several languages, most notably in English and Russian.However, Nenets live over a large territory, and their history, language, culture, and way of life are not the same everywhere.By far the most publications on the Nenets come from Western Siberia, most notably from the Yamal Peninsula.In contrast, the book by Laur Vallikivi is devoted to the European Nenets and could well be the first book in English about them; at least, I am aware only of academic articles on them in this language.