All interviews were collected on the Yamal peninsula and in the Tundra Nenets language. The data of narratives provides a reliable source of information with common benchmarks or touchstones that represent the old and recent historical events in the tundra. This thesis emphasizes that oral history performed in the original language serves not only to convey information and knowledge about the past, but it also reflects the specifics of its narratives and the cultural features of narration.
My work on collecting, documenting, describing and analysing Nenets oral history stories and narratives is a multi-layered process. I explain these specifics of the narrative research process as developed by Catherine Riessman in Figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2. Levels of narrative research process by Riessman (1993).
The work of collecting research data depends on one’s role in observing, attending and participating in the life of people during fieldwork. Working with interviews means not only making recordings, but also listening to people’s stories and making notes. Normally it is good to make transcriptions of the interviews after the field trip, with further translation texts into the target language for subsequent analysis.
The importance of a language as a research instrument and its distinctive role in anthropological studies was acknowledged specifically at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the American anthropologist Franz Boas who argued that only through living with a people and learning their language that one could develop an accurate understanding of culture (McGee and Warts 1996:129). He believed that information, collected in local languages can help in getting better anthropological results (Boas 1904; Rohner 1969). Boas spent long periods of time studying the groups of Native Americans and trained his students to collect during their fieldwork, detailed empirical data about material culture, as well as, language and social behaviour. His works became known in cultural anthropology under the term cultural relativism, which argues that every culture has different ideas about the world, which can only be properly understood in terms of the people’s own standards and values (Hendry 1999:9-10). Every world language has its own cultural norms of thinking, talking, remembering and silencing. This fundamental approach about relationships of language and representation were further developed by the Boas’ students, who discussed in their works the norms of the language categories, which people use to think. Edward Sarip and Sapir’s students studied this also in connection to the analysis of cognitive specifics of speaking in native languages and bilingualism (Sapir 1983; Whorf 1956; Lakoff 1987; Pavlenko 1999). This sagacity that a researcher should learn and speak the language of people with whom he or she works was mostly oriented to Western and Russian researchers who travelled to small communities of unknown people. However, since the development of a new generation of indigenous researchers, this concept gives more possibilities
to describe the specifics of the individual culture through the instruments of its language, specifics of communication and talks.
The Labovian narrative analysis method provides us with a better understanding of the structure of narratives (Labov and Waletzki 1997). The main motivation and consequences of using this narrative analysis is based on the aspect of selective performance of narratives, when during the process of narration any person pays attention to the focus about what to tell or not, because narratives or other discourses forms usually emphasize emotion and behavior in a culture (Linde 1993:47-48). As a result, the Labovian structural narrative analysis method allowed me to follow every narrative in the way of how people tell the main events, with further development of the events in narratives and their conclusions. In the original Labovian narrative analysis considering oral narratives of personal experience, Labov assumes the factuality of the events described or takes the degree of factuality as a problem for the analysis (Labov 2013). The present study is not concerned with postulating the independent existence of the actual events of the speaker’s life or with the study of their relation to the narratives of the events. I am not concerned here with whether the narratives of the life story describe events that actually occurred, or whether people describe occurring events accurately. More important is the fact of how the speaker presents this presentation (Linde 1993). Martin Cortazzi refers to the same approach of narrative analysis by Labov and writes about the two social functions of narrative, “referential” and “evaluative” (Cortazzi 1993). Therefore, for me, it was important to evaluate a place of silence in texts and develop an explanation for the role of silence in narratives.
My curiosity to study the Nenets stories came without a plan to check the truthfulness of these stories, as for my work it was more important to find out how people evaluate their past and tell it to others. The analysis of the Nenets oral history narratives was done on the translated text in English. The other original stories in their original language are presented at the end of this dissertation in the Appendix.
Later I came across the work of prof. Robyn Fivush, who describes the distinction between being silent and being silenced: “when being silenced is contrasted with voice, it is conceptualised as imposed, and signifies a loss of power and self. But silent can also be conceptualised as being silent, a shared understanding that need not be voiced” (Fivush 2010:88-89).
According to Fivush, stories serve as an important cultural tool for expressing feelings and beliefs in the ways in which it is possible to construct a story about any past event, which can be related to the internal representation of that experience.
This phrase led me to think that for Nenets culture it is also quite normal not to say things, which are thought to be known to other people, family members and friends. People can understand the meaning of the message of the other person, just because it is part of their shared knowledge. As in Nenets spoken history there are still parts that are silenced selectively by many people. Such stories usually have a
historical background which explains why people want to keep their stories silenced.
Such ways of being silent can be quite normal in the tundra. While, in turn, being silenced can have different reasons and explanations, which I am going to describe later in Chapter 3.