Analysis of interviews

After turning the recorded narrative into written text, I started looking at theoretical approaches to narrative analysis and inquiry. Then I came across Catherine K.

Riessman’s (1993) book, Narrative Methods. In this book Riessman described four methods of narrative analysis: thematic, structural, dialogic/performance, and visual. Then she specifies four key aspects of narrative research: 1) finding proper narrative terms, 2) making a selection of texts for analysis, which are transcribed oral recordings, 3) selecting methods of narrative analysis, and finally, 4) describing the validity of the narratives selected for the research.

Her approach of narrative analysis is represented from a personal perspective:

reading others’ stories allow a researcher to enter people’s life and understand their life experiences and viewpoints. It is through the written and spoken word that one can reflect on one’s own experience to understand someone else’s life story. Riessman shows that the interpretation of the narrative may change based on the type of transcription used by a researcher. She also defines two levels of concern about what was a true story told by the participant and if the researcher’s analysis is accurate

about what is the true story. People can have their own version of a story depending on their perspective, which can be different from a “real” event. Therefore, the narrative could be compared with other people’s narratives about the same event.

If this is not possible, the narrative analysis should lead the reader to believe the narrative.

Following these key aspects, I tried to understand how selected life stories and personal narratives make group and collective memory stories. I considered that people who live in the same territory have their own local memories about special groups of people and their families, and these can become collective memory stories (Stammler et al. 2017). Individual songs have owners, who made them, with connections to their family members, who can be also responsible for these songs with connection to their family history. Therefore, these stories are very indicative.

People connect their memories to special events and stories about other people.

There are also stories about tragic emotional episodes in the past. In general, as mentioned already, the process of storing personal memories depends very much on the social and political context of the country’s politics towards its people.

Commonly human memory filters, selects, and archives those parts of the past that people want to silence and forget. Then people keep and tell those memories that are positive and that they want to preserve for the future.

The Nenets’ storytelling tradition is based on the presentation of a story in which a narrator relates a certain event or historical fact along with his or her own evaluation of it from the perspective of the present day. Such life stories and memories are important and unique sources of unwritten oral information about the Nenets’ historical past. For example, almost every text of collected interviews gives a description of the Tundra Nenets’ social life and of the relationships of Yamal Nenets with other groups of Nenets vis-à-vis their connection to working with reindeer.

Additionally, besides looking to Nenets stories as sources of historical information about the past, I paid attention to the Nenets specifics of narrating and silencing stories and memories about the past. Since I understood that silence and silencing play an important role in the process of remembering and forgetting stories, this made me look for an explanation of verbal/nonverbal communication and the place of silence in Nenets culture. Further, I sought to describe the aspects of telling, silencing and remembering personal names and stories about individuals and families in Nenets oral history. The decision of a Nenets person to open silenced stories for small groups of people or to close them to public audiences also depends on how long people will remember them. In general, there are various reasons for opening silenced, sleeping or even prohibited stories. In my research, I show that awakening silenced stories can be considered a sign of protest and disagreement with official state decisions and actions towards the indigenous peoples of the tundra.

At the same time, silencing difficult stories is based on fear. Resented decisions and

plans of the Yamal government to reduce the number of Yamal reindeer made the Nenets people uncertain about their future life in the tundra.

For analysing Nenets individual narratives and songs, I used the Labovian narrative approach (Labov 2013). To analyse narratives, I divided the texts into four main parts: an abstract; an orientation, which gives information about persons, places, and times; the complication action; and then the fourth part is further divided into three more sub-parts: evaluation, resolution, and coda, which returns listeners to the present time.

This method proved successful with long folklore texts and personal life stories.

While it was not suitable for working with short texts, dialogues, and group conversations, it worked well for analysing multiple interviews and narratives joined by one topic. The reason is that not all stories and interviews can fit into the Labovian table of narrative analysis. I will show this based on the examples of a Nenets collection of narratives, canonical text stories and a collection of interviews in Chapters 4, 5, and 6.

In Chapter 4, there are interviews with Nenets elders based on three stories about Nenets individual songs that describe the Nenets’ general perception of acquiring or losing reindeer in the tundra. Interviews presented in this chapter talk about individual songs and the stories of these songs. First, three narratives discuss different cases of reindeer theft and the last one is about confiscation of reindeer by the Soviet authorities. The analysis of these stories gives an explanation of why people remember and tell them, but also why people can silence such stories.

The first song belongs to a reindeer thief who tells the story of taking reindeer from other reindeer herders. Analysis of this individual song was made following an example of Lotte Tarkka’s (2013) work on analysing Karelian oral poetry about reindeer theft in the border area between Finland and Russia in the 19^th century. In her work, Tarkka provided the example of how border people tell stories about reindeer thieving by signing the events in songs (Tarkka 2013:433). This is very similar to the story about Nany Khorolia father’s individual song. I divided Nany’s song into three episodes, and can talk about every action of the song and orientate the listener to what happen there, where, how and why. Therefore, the contents of such songs provide orientation and tell narrative episodes, while evaluation of the song gives an emotional description of the personal feeling of a singer. Listeners receive further evaluation of the song in the story of this person, his children and grandchildren.

The second song tells a story that provides information about common tundra rules of crimes and their punishments, depending on the situation and the cruelty. However, it also states that people are aware of the tundra spirits and their punishments, which usually do not fall only on the person who committed a crime. Significantly, the person’s punishment can later be transmitted to their family members and even to descendants, who are thus also made retrospectively responsible for their ancestors’ crimes.

The third interview tells the story of reindeer thieves giving reindeer to a family.

It has orientation, episodes and evaluation as a lesson about Nenets common rules of reciprocity as knowledge. However, the fourth story stands aside from these three stories. Its evaluation is that the negative memories about the past can be silenced because members of Nenets society can make personal decisions concerning what kinds of memories they can pass as a message or as knowledge about the past.

These stories are already parts of Nenets collective memory stories about reindeer theft in the tundra. However, even within the wider audience of the Nenets, when these stories about reindeer theft are told, nobody can say openly that their ancestors were reindeer thieves who stole reindeer from other people. It is still a very sensitive topic, and most people prefer to keep it in silence because in Nenets culture stealing reindeer is a crime. It is especially serious when people know the victims of such crimes but do not know who did it or when. However, there are exceptions, such as stories that tell about people who stole reindeer in old times. Usually in such stories, people also talk about the present descendants of the reindeer thieves as a reminder that they are responsible for their ancestors’ past.

In Chapter 5, a canonical narrative is illustrated, represented by several personal stories and collective narratives about one family story. I collected these interviews from three different places. The first interview was collected from people living in the neighbourhood of the Puiko family, whom this story is about. There is a common orientation that repeats narrative episodes. Here every narrator had his/

her own evaluation of the story, which showed the specifics of multi-vocalism, that is, the retelling of the same story while giving many different interpretations, meanings and evaluations of it. First, this story was silenced as a common agreement between people who live together. It was made through a group decision that was not protested by anyone. Later, this silence was broken again because of the group agreement to voice their protest.

In Chapter 6, different stories are presented about the recent events involving reindeer deaths. I conducted interviews with reindeer herders, asking them about the recent icing events in the tundra. Information about what had happened in the tundra is an orientation. Episodes of stories tell what people did to help their reindeer. Finally, the evaluation of narratives is the part of interviews where people reflect on their emotions about their contemporary life in the tundra. The second part of Chapter 6 is about why people can silence their contemporary stories about the recent epidemics in the tundra. This part of the work allows us to see what people will tell about their life in the tundra in order to better understand how memories about the recent Soviet past control people’s way of telling their tragedies in front of an audio recorder. Whereas the two preceeding Chapters 4 and 5, are about stories that were first silenced, but later voiced, Chapter 6 discusses how memories about the past determine the present nature of being silent among indigenous people of the Arctic.