Introduction

To collect data for my research during the period from 2010 until 2019, almost every year I made one or two trips to the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, Western Siberia. Quite often, I was in the Priural’skaia tundra near the Polar Ural Mountains and in the Yamal tundra on the Yamal Peninsula. In the Yamal tundra, I lived with Nenets families near the Yuribey, the Mordy-Yakha, and the Ob Rivers. I conducted part of my fieldwork in villages, especially during the Reindeer Herders’ Festival days, which bring many reindeer herders together into villages. I attended this festivity mostly in Aksarka, the administrative centre of the Priural’skii Municipal District, and Yar-Sale. Altogether, I made around 300 hours of audio recording of Nenets stories and narratives about the past.

The preliminary analysis of the linguistic situation among the Tundra Nenets in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District revealed three groups of language speakers. In the first group are Nenets elders who mostly speak Nenets in their everyday life. In the second group are middle-aged Nenets elders. They represent the largest number of my respondents. I collected most of my interviews in the tundra from reindeer herders who live and migrate in the tundra with reindeer, but there is also a smaller group of fishing Nenets. Furthermore, I collected interviews in settlements from Nenets elders who moved from the tundra to live in the Russian-speaking villages or towns. Many of my respondents were bilingual Nenets-Russian speakers. During my research, I noticed that the Nenets are very skilful in code switching, using their bilingual skills selectively to speak in Nenets or Russian. As in many other multi-language communities, the Nenets categorize the functions of their languages. The choice of one of these two languages during face-to-face communication or interviewing orients people as to the topics about which they can talk openly (Halai 2007; Deckert and Vickers 2011:161). The young Nenets who live in Russian-speaking environments speak only the Russian language, while Nenets children who have spent their early childhood in the tundra and are studying at the boarding schools can speak Nenets. However, they prefer to speak Russian, which is the language of their education and everyday communication with their peers (Laptander 2008, 2011).

When I conducted interviews with Nenets elders and young people, I spoke both Nenets and Russian. This allowed me to evaluate the different position of these languages in Nenets society. For all of my interviewees, Russian is the official

language of communication, even though Nenets may be the everyday language of communication between family members and friends. Yet, while some important parts of people’s private stories can be told in Russian, for many of my Nenets respondents it was easier to tell stories in their vernacular language. I recorded a diversity of individual and traditional Nenets songs performed in the Nenets language. Additionally, I managed to collect very old Nenets legends and myths.

During my interview collection, I talked to narrators when they felt comfortable speaking in a natural and spontaneous way. I conducted the interviews in my respondents’ chums or in their apartments with people they knew well. It is a pity that I did not make video recordings; this was because tundra people usually do not like video cameras. However, when I used a voice recorder, people were more relaxed telling stories and they did not even pay attention to the recording equipment.

Of course, there are interviews in which people asked me to leave their stories anonymous. There were also cases in which narrators asked me to stop the recording when they did not want their words to be recorded.

The tundra was the most preferred place for my respondents to tell me their stories. In the tundra, people feel more comfortable and free to speak in Nenets.

They prefer to use this language to tell their personal stories and historical narratives about life in the tundra, its people and the stories about them. I also noticed that the Nenets traditional way of narrating the past helps them remember stories about the past.

During my work, I came across many nuances and difficulties collecting narratives from Nenets people, even as a member of their society. Sometimes people did not want to reveal personal stories that they have tried to keep silenced. In place of their personal life stories, some elders chose to tell me stories about other people.

It is common everywhere. People prefer to talk about other people’s secrets than to reveal their own! This phenomenon made me look for an explanation for why people would try to keep some of their stories silenced. I should say that it was not always possible to determine the reason for silence in stories when people were silent during interviewing. Especially during my first interviews with elders, I did not know why they would suddenly stop talking and make a long pause, apparently as if thinking about something. I thought that I was not correct in asking them my question, so I would attempt to change the topic of conversation. However, I later realized that I would have better respected this silencing by remaining silent myself, waiting for people to continue their story or to move on to another one – that is, recognising their silence as a necessary part of their telling.

Nenets personal stories and collective narratives have many important meanings in Nenets society. It is important to note that my Nenets background gave me several advantages in understanding and describing the Nenets specifics of speaking and silencing stories and narratives about the past. However, it took me a long time to understand the place of silence and silencing in stories. Due to

the specifics of my work on collecting interviews, I was also a main listener of all recorded stories.

It must be admitted that studying silence in situations of communication, even, or perhaps especially in the insider position, was challenging. It is not an easy task to describe all the possible moments and roles of silence and silencing during communication. Moreover, I must say that all findings and conclusions in this research were made from the perspective of my interpretations of Nenets texts and individual songs. I observe and describe in this thesis the types of silence which got my attention, as I wanted to understand already from my early youth why Nenets elders did not want to tell us young people all the truth about the past. However, since I collected some stories about the past, I was astonished, because they do not tell the same information that I knew from my Soviet childhood about the historical past of the tundra. This work developed also my critical way of thinking about what is written in the official historical texts and narratives, but also what people can say between the lines, which also represent a special type of the silencing of the half-said.

This work is not dedicated to psycholinguistic studies of speech. Here I studied the life of ordinary people, told in their everyday stories and narratives, and have retold them to the wider audience of world people, who can also be familiar with similar situations and circumstances of keeping silence. This in turn, helped to clarify the possible contents and meanings of the unsaid by observing the occasions of silence during the acts of communication.

Therefore, my work developed my personal ability to listen to other people and their stories. How I collected these stories also gave me a better understanding of why people did not reveal everything in their stories, leaving something unsaid, silenced.

During my work of analysing and describing stories and narratives, I also paid special attention to Nenets traditional norms of speaking and silencing in personal stories, and individual songs, observing the occasions of silence during narration. In this way, my work of analysing Nenets stories and narratives helped me to formulate a description of the specifics of speaking and silencing the past in Nenets culture. In the dissertation, I have tried to concentrate on the concept of meaning, why people could keep unsaid some parts of their stories, even if other people around could know them. Therefore, for me, it was helpful to talk to other people and ask why this or that person did not want to tell his or her life story. Here in this work I describe my position of an insider and try to understand different meanings of such silencing from a personal perspective. I should say that my Nenets background helps me to understand the possible reasoning for keeping silence and silencing. However, only specialist literature gave me the theoretical explanation and description of silence, as part of cultural communication, which helped me to describe and explain the Nenets types of silence in Chapter 3.