Abstract

Abstract: What connects the post-Soviet Chechnyan wars to indigenous Nenets reindeer herders living in the Nenets Autonomous District (NAD) in northwestern Russia? What effect have French documentary makers had on interactions between these herders and Russian oil workers, extracting oil from an island in the Barents Sea since the late Soviet era? Considering that these patriotic workers have spent most of their lives extracting oil in the Arctic for a state-owned company, how do they view the potential privatisation of their company and their transfer to extraction sites situated off the shores of Vietnam? Based on a year’s doctoral field research in the NAD , this presentation will discuss ways in which Nenets herders, Russian settlers and current oil workers engage with the land in the district, and with each other, in the context of an oil-thirsty global economy and of a Russian state “addicted to oil-revenues”. I will show how the interactions between these different groups are marked by the co-presence of different codes of conduct: the Nenets “law of the tundra”, Soviet-inherited patriotism and reindeer herding management practices, as well as values inherited from the global market economy.