Chapter 1 presents the central research subject and the main research questions of this work, with a special focus on silence and silencing during narration. Here I introduce my personal role in doing research on Nenets oral history narratives and on my key co-authors.
Chapter 2 presents methods and collected empirical material. This part of the work describes the specifics of my fieldwork among tundra reindeer herding and fishing people on the Yamal Peninsula. In this chapter, I discuss my work as a native anthropologist/researcher in the field, laying out the specifics of doing research among the Nenets people and the ethics of doing research in the community of one’s own origin.
A section of this chapter is dedicated to describing the analysis of the data: the transcribing, transliteration and translation of the Nenets texts. Here I give examples of Nenets stories about the past, providing details of Nenets verbal and nonverbal communication in the narration of stories about the past.
The relationship of the theoretically grounded and introduced concept of
“silence” in the formulation of a pre-planned set of research questions and results emerging from the analysis of the data could be explained by the following structure.
Chapter 3 is the theoretical part of the research where I present the role of silence in oral history. In addition, I compare scholarly oral history terminology with Nenets words for life stories and historical narratives. Furthermore, this chapter introduces the role of narrative analysis in describing the ways that Nenets tell their stories and narratives with special attention to different strategies of speaking and silencing during narration. I explain here why the Nenets describe special events in the tundra using special messages. For example, this alludes to possible communication with spirits of the tundra. I describe people’s silencing of personal names and how it helps them to remember their family kinship. Since I have a Nenets background, this made me familiar from early childhood with the main concepts of silence, common in Nenets culture. This present research gives me a chance to describe it using the scientific approach. This chapter includes a discussion of the Nenets rules of performing collective stories, with connection to individual songs and personal life stories. Furthermore, I describe the role of Nenets individual songs for remembering and forgetting stories about the past.
The significance of this part of the work lies in its typology of silence that can be noticed in Nenets everyday communication.
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 present a series of case studies that reveal a range of situations in which stories are silenced. In particular, these examples develop our understanding of the roles of three types of silence within spoken narratives.
In Chapter 4, I introduce the notions of telling and silencing a special type of knowledge, based on four examples of Nenets personal stories, individual songs
and historical narratives. Here I discuss how Nenets people share knowledge and remember their main conception of living and surviving in the tundra. However, the Nenets consider individual songs to be private, following strict rules governing their performance. While these individual songs comprise an important part of Nenets collective memory stories, they cannot be told openly to everyone. These songs describe special events with special messages, for example, about possible communication of human beings with spirits of the tundra. Stories about individuals discuss the importance of supporting one another, and the rules of hospitality and forgiveness.
Chapter 5 represents a collection of stories about one historical event in the tundra. This chapter shows how the Nenets describe their past as a collection of family stories and collective historical narratives about one particular tundra family tragedy. This example shows that societies remember their past not only by personal stories, but also as collective memory narratives. Here I discuss the relevance of speaking or keeping silent when it comes to stories of local Nenets community history in connection with stories about individuals and their family members. Such stories also introduce the Nenets’ traditional customs for hunting in the tundra and fishing in the sea. From these stories, people learn lessons about possible dangers that humans can incur by way of punishments from the spirits. In this chapter I describe how the Nenets collectively opened a silenced story, not for remembering - but for forgetting it, by this way they broke their silenced agreement to keep it safe.
Chapter 6 shows how the tundra people may silence their stories due to fear of the state. Here, a series of interviews is presented about two recent tragedies in Yamal:
the icing events and the anthrax outbreak in the tundra. Based on selected examples of interviews, I show the difference among Nenets people in terms of how extreme situations such as tragedies of reindeer loss are discussed. During my work, I noticed that tundra people are very careful about discussing their problems on the record. I think the possible explanation is that tundra people consider this to be dangerous for their safety. On the one hand, they believe that the icing was a natural disaster that nobody can intentionally create. On the other hand, reindeer herders believe that the anthrax outbreak was a special action of the state to reduce the number of reindeer. Yet, reindeer herders are hesitant to say this on record because they cannot prove it. In addition, they speak overcautiously with the regional authorities about the difficulties and problems of working with reindeer and fishing.
In Chapter 7 I discuss the meaning of contemporary silence and silencing, which were detected during research with a detailed explanation of their nature and different roles in the Nenets life.
In the conclusion (Chapter 8) I summarise my research results on Nenets spoken and silenced history, mainly illustrating the transformation of the Yamal Nenets’
individual memories about special tundra events into contemporary collective memory narratives with different roles of silence and silencing. In addition, my work
on ‘unpacking’ silenced stories helps to describe the role of religion, the meaning of emotions, and the importance of forgiveness, embarrassment, protest and fear in the life of the Yamal Nenets.