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Material culture and sacred landscape: The Anthropology of the

Siberian Khanty By Peter Jordan

Article  in  Public Archaeology · January 2005

DOI: 10.1179/146551805793156112

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PUBLIC ARCHAEOLOGY (2005) VOLUME 4 PAGES
Material culture and sacred
The Anthropology of the Siberian Khanty
By Peter Jordan
Review by Peter Sutton
Peter Jordan's approach to his subject is to recognize
a kind of primacy for the material conditions of
social and cultural reproduction, without making
those conditions into an over-privileged engine that
drives how it all works. He thus walks a line that is
far from economic or environmental determinism,
and almost as far from the faddish mentalism of
much recent social theory, but at times this is a
delicate balancing act. He has to .juggle his own
observations and knowledge with a theoretical
apparatus that he wishes to support, yet that at times
he is led to contradict. Some of these contradictions
between espoused models and ethnographic
experience remain unresolved in the book.
Overall, Jordan's descriptive material is more
impressive than his attempt to theorize it, and it is the
former that most makes the book a positive
contribution to scholarship in the longer term. Given
there is such a limited English literature on indigenous
Siberians, and Jordan's work offers not only a
literature analysis but also original observations and
insight, the book is bound to make its mark
internationally. (It is a pity, then, that AltaMira, the
publishers, failed to have it properly edited (cf. p.
xxii). The text is more than usually burdened with
typographic and spelling errors and missing words.)
jordan's sources include a substantial literature,
much of it in Russian, as well as a period of fieldwork,
and library and museum research trips that totalled
ten months between 1996 and 1999 (p. xxi).
While Jordan focuses on material culture and
economy, wisely treating cultural landscape
geography as a dimension of material culture rather
than locating it as the 'environment' somewhere in
the background, he also locates the Khanty in
ISSN 1465-5187 © 2005 JAMES & JAMES (SCIENCE PUBLISHERS)
276-280
landscape
history, sketches their social order, examines their
religious practices and beliefs and gives an account
of their land tenure and land use patterns. The more
convincingly detailed and rich chapters are those
dealing with the religious topics (the role of animals,
Chapter 5; sacred places, Chapter 6) and the way
places, including settlements, are 'enculturated'
(Cha pter 7). Among the best passages are those in
which he shows how cosmological concepts and
ritual values are both embedded and reproduced in
various forms of collective and routinized actions,
giving us specific observations to work with (e.g. pp.
184-187, cf. 150).
The presentation on land tenure and occupation
(Chapter 8) suggests a very neat match between the
system as ideology and the system as practice, with
land being communally held by patronymic groups
(p. 244), and occupied by communities and
households based rather rigidly on 'patrilocal social
structures' (p. 261), under a rule of virilocal post-
marital residence (p. 75). Although territories may
be re-negotiated each generation, there is much
stability (p. 261). Gathering and fishing locations
are under much more constant negotiation than
meat- and fur-hunting territories (p. 262). This
interesting point would be lost had Jordan trendily
observed merely that all 'spaces' were 'contingent'
and 'negotiable', for example.
Yet conflict over tenure and use rights, and in fact
politicking in general, are remarkable by their
scarcity in Jordan's account, although there is a hint
of such things in his reference to the 'divisive social
relations' that characterized one particular yurt (p.
247), and a brief mention of an angry reaction to a
secretive territorial encroachment on the land of
LTD
 PETER SUTTON
another clan (p. 263). Jordan's mapping of hunting
territories was based on drawings by informants,
plus some field visits (p. 247), so I wonder if more
exha ustive field mapping with a wider range of
informants and a longer period of exposure to local
political undercurrents, which people often wish to
keep obscure to an outsider, might have altered this
picture of relative unanimity and calm. Relations of
'power and domination' do get a mention in the
book, but mainly in dealing with the colonial
relationship of Russians with the people of the
region (p. 94). While there is substantial material
on gender-based conventions (e.g. pp. 59-67), the
possibilities for a discussion of inter-gender power
relations are not exploited. Khanty men clearly
maintain dominance.
The distinction between persistence of ethnic
identity and persistence of economic mode is
drawn somewhat unclearly. Although Jordan
frequently categorizes the Khanty as 'hunter-fisher-
gatherers' (e.g. p. 1) he grapples more than once
with the problems of such classifications, engaging
critically with the work of Tim Ingold at several
points (e.g. pp. 124, 185, 235, 236-240). In short,
the Khanty fit into no simple scheme of economic
types. Hunting and fishing remained important to
the people with whom he worked (e.g. p. 84), but
these are also people with a long history of rather
stable base accommodation in yurts consisting of
substantial, if fairly simple, buildings (p. 73). Log
huts have been used for at least 200 years, and
Jordan sketches four main kinds of dwelling in
historical sequence (pp. 188-189). The Khanty use
summer yurts, winter huts and tents, and fishing
camps, and hunt and forage through the landscape
(pp. 194, 196) but, in recent times, have moved
from having both winter and summer yurts to
having one base yurt only (p. 186). The Khanty
thus practice 'fixed-point nomadism' (p. 185), a
phrase that makes one wonder if it would be
preferable to or different from, say, 'multiple-
point sedentism'. They strike me as more sedentary
than nomadic, Ihave to say, on Jordan's description.
Over time there has been a transition to an
increasingly sedentary way of life by the Khanty,
one causal element of which has been the
domestication of horses and cattle and the need to
cultivate meadows for their feed (p. 85). Thus the
Khanty are or have been hunters, fishers, foragers,
277
pastoralists, fur traders, growers of vegetable food
or fodder, and some, more recently, paid workers.
They have probably bred horses for a long period
(p. 147). They used to herd reindeer, but since 1965
the people with whom Jordan worked have not kept
domestic reindeer (p. 89). They lately have sheep,
goats and chickens as well as horses and oxen (pp.
125, 139, 147). They have potato gardens (p. 200)
and collect, store and trade in cedar nuts (p. 257).
They have, for centuries, been users of metal,
including copper cauldrons and iron forks (p. 129),
and their archaeological sites contain items of cast-
metal, lead, brass and copper (pp. 141-142), all
suggesting ancient trade relations with distant
peoples of a different economic type. Imported
alcohol, in the form of vodka, has been part of their
way of life for several hundred years (p. 51).
This all suggests that their economy, whilst
major daily food needs may have been met by
hunting and foraging, has long been operating
within wider economic networks involving a variety
of economic types. The persistence of an indigenous
land tenure system as distinct from a Russian
administrative system of land areas for tax and
similar purposes, a duality also maintained over
several centuries, is made clear, but the
administrative system was based on the indigenous
one and it is difficult to imagine that there was no
influence in the reverse direction as well (see pp.
241-245). The economic and political networks of
which the Khanty have so long formed a part cannot
themselves be defined as forager economies or any
other single type. Any economic classification
restricted simply to local modes of production and
severed from their articulation with wider networks
is likely to produce an artificial uniformity.
For all these reasons there is a major contrast
between the Siberian Khanty and, for example,
Australian Aborigines of the Western Desert, both
in terms of the historical depth of their engagement
with other kinds of political economy, and in
terms of how their own political economy might
be reconstructed for the archaeological past. To
classify both as 'hunter-gatherers' leaves a lot
unsaid, and leaves many other kinds of society in
between. Most Aboriginal groups, until
colonization, only had regular contact with other
nomadic hunter-gatherers, the exceptions being
the abutment of Aborigines with Torres Strait
278 NOTES AND REVIEWS: MATERIAL
Islanders at the tip of Cape York Peninsula and a
seasonal relationship between coastal people and
trepangers from the Indonesian archipelago in
part of the Top End of the Northern Territory.
I became intrigued by a particular pattern in
Jordan's book whereby he puts forward a theoretical
model or proposition drawn from recent
developments in anthropological theory, appears
to espouse it, but then proceeds somewhat in the
other direction. He knows, for example, that it has
become a mark of outdated theory to consider any
foraging people a 'pristine isolate' or 'primitive
isolate', and takes paios to reject this kind of
description explicitly (e.g. pp. 28, 54,. 93). And yet,
historically speaking, the Khanty's long situation of
enmeshment in wider relations perdured along with
a tremendous degree of relative isolation. In the late
19th century most Knanty had little contact with
outsiders, no more than a few days a year at times
of· trade fairs and tax collection (p. 88). In the
'colonial' era, a long-term situation of 'default
apartheid ... severely constrained the potential for
face-to-face contact with non-I{hanty' (p. 97). With
only one exception, mea of the Iugan River, .living
or deceased, obtained all their wives from within
the same' river basin and, in ethnic terms,. the river
remained entirely. Khanty at the time of Jordan's
field work (p. 77). It would have been better, then,
to make it clear that, while there may have been no
'isolates' in the world" it is better to use a scale of
relative isolation versus enmeshment rather than
erase the distinction altogether. In any case I
suggest that extreme· isolation does have· to be
recognized for certain island peoples such as· the
Tasmanians and to a lesser extent the Tiwi off north
Australia, among others.
Jordan also knows it is theoretically passe to
suggest that there is any such thing as 'cultural
equilibrium', and accordingly denies its existence
(p. 28). All is change and dynamism (p. 53). The
'praxis-based' approach that Jordan himself
espouses in the book is what he describes as one in
which 'structures and society are in a constant
state of flux, "structuration" ... or "becoming" ...
The key difference with these praxis based models
is that cultural meanings and social structures are
not fixed but negotiated by actors through time ...
society is now cast in a perpetual state of negotiation
and improvisation'(p. 8).
CULTURE AND SACRED LANDSCAPE
Yet on the other hand Jordan is happy to inform
us that Khanty community composition is
remarkably stable over the long term (p. 79) as,
also, is yurt location and yurt naming (pp. 73-75).
The constitution of hunting, fishing and gathering
tasks, their biological focus and ecological contexts,
have 'not changed radically in centuries, possibly
millennia' (pp. 97-98). There appears to have
been 'significant continuity in Khanty social
groupings from prior to the 1581 conquest through
the Czarist and Communist periods' to the 1990s
(pp. 42-43). In other words, short ,.of some kind
of very wooden and absolutist definition of
equilibrium, the Khanty have enjoyed a period
of great relative equilibrium until recently. To say
that this equilibrium has been reproduced by
repeated processes of 'becoming' and 'negotiation'
constitutes no contradiction. On the other hand, to
say that it belongs to a process of continual 'flux'
and 'improvisation' does seem to be a
contradiction. In other words, one must maintain
a distinction between dynamic processes that result
in relative cultural cqntinuity and those that result
in relative flux and innovation.
Jordan seems to recognize this problem of
contradiction, as he feels constrained to say: 'This
assertion of historical continuity is worthy of more
detailed analysis, if only because it may appear to
present certain Khanty groups as existing in a
conceptually rather worrying state of suspended
animation' (p. 42). How could evidence of cultural
'suspended animation' for a period of some
centuries· in and of itself constitute grounds for
worry? Isuggest it is because of theoretical pressure,
and has nothing to do with the empirical evidence.
The 'worry' seems to be that Khanty stability does
not fit the recently popular model of perpetual flux
that Jordan has subscribed to in deference to the
works of the great post-modernist theorizers, or at
least his grasp of them. Fortunately his better
judgement shines through in several convincing
descriptions that make it clear that 'flux' is not a
constant but is contextually variable, as also is
'negotiation' - along with their opposites.
Recent theoretical pressure within the social
sciences - if the latter is not by now a deceased
term - can carry certain moral imperatives, or at
least be coloured by them. Attempting to cast one's
findings.in terms of what that pressure demands is
 PETER
not just a matter of kowtowing to scientific
authority, but can be a genuflexion towards a
particular ethical and sometimes politically tinted
stance. Intimations of disloyalty to the ruling tribe
of theoretical cognoscenti can follow one's failure
to genuflect appropriately. In that sense to be out
of tune with post-modern theory is to threaten the
solidarity of a certain moral community. Some,
however, can bear an awkward belonging. They
remind me of 19th-century Reverend geologists
who thanked the Lord for their counter-Biblical
discoveries, or those Chinese scholars during the
Cultural Revolution who felt obliged to include
references to Engels or Lenin in works on primate
dentition in order to keep the censors happy.
One identifiable tendency of post-modern
theoretical pressure is to discourage a cumulative
or .accretive model of anthropological knowledge
in favour of a relativistic view of knowledge itself.
Accretive models are thus often associated with
'linear' and 'progressivist' views of knowledge that
are stained by the association they will forever have
with European expansionism and American cultural
domination. This view covertly, sometimes overtly,
links colonialism, loss of tradition and creeping
modernization inextricably with conservative views
of the knowledge business as accumulative and as
being aimed at continual refinement, improvement
and expansion. Jordan's book makes it clear that he
does not subscribe to such a relativistic or politically
simplistic view of his task. He has added to 'what
we know'. And he uses empirical evidence to test
theoretical models. By contrast, much recent debate
over theoretical models in the social sciences
proceeds largely in terms of intellectual, moral and
other '.envelope' features of the theories themselves,
while the rub between theory and ethnography
often takes second place or sometimes never even
gets a look in. It is alarmingly uncommon for
critiques of theories to actually use ethnographic
evidence as the mainspring of their attack. I hope
this is just another apogee of the pendulum swing
between scholasticism and empiricism that has
seemed to characterize Western thought since at
least the time of the ancient Greeks.
Jordan is refreshingly empirical in his approach.
He is critical of 'normative and objective' accounts
of cultural practice (e.g. p. 150), on general
theoretical grounds based on a shift from the
SUTTON 279
normative to the behavioural and the defeat of
positivism. On the other hand some might see a rub
between this theoretical position and what he has
seen and heard himself and how he chooses to
represent it. He is happy to say, for example, that
'events at the sacred sites appeared habitual rather
than negotiated ... There were particular norms of
conduct for all those present ... repeating ... broadly
prescribed practices' (p. 164). And indeed that is
what made such events conjoint, ritualized and
customary, as Jordan himself observes. Many of
jordan's descriptions are put in terms of norms, and
he gives his own account of things he knows about,
which is one definition of an objective account.
After all, even an anthropologist's description of the
emic is always irretrievably from an etic point of
view. Again, Jordan succeeds in trusting his own
experience rather than helping the facts conform to
sweeping global models he does not really follow.
He has very properly included the normative in an
account that is not, overall, normative in character.
Each different phase of anthropological history
tends to leave at least some theoretical residue of
enduring usefulness, long after its era is over. It is
tempting to be dismissive of the demodes. It is
harder to erase their better insights. Jordan,
summarizing the work of Christopher Tilley but
with apparent approval, says that to recognize the
central role of metaphor and metonymy in human
thought patterns 'is not to advocate a return to the
analysis of binary oppositions and the rigid,
ahistorical, deterministic structuralism of Levi
Strauss' (p. 20;cf. pp. 3-4). Anthropological
fascination with binary oppositions may have waned
- they now even seem to have· some unacceptable
whiff of patriarchy about them - but the interest of
the Khanty in binary oppositions certainly has not.
To his credit, Jordan lays out quite a swathe of
them. They include male:female (e.g. birth carvings,
p. 211; trees pp. 205-206), local:non-local (face-
covering rule, p. 210), life:death(pp. 191, 210),
upstream:downstream (p. 191), construction:decay
(p. 191), new houses:old houses (p. 191),
village:cemetery (p. 191), residents:immigrants
(p. 191), sunrise:sunset (walls, p. 210),
protectors:protected (spirits:people, p. 211), and
internal:external (p. 272). Several of these are
linked together in ways that integrate geography
with cosmology, such as the upstream:life,
 280 NOTES AND REVIEWS: MATERIAL
downstream:death multiplex OppOSItion, and a
similar one to do with south:life, north:death (pp.
136, 138, 191). I thought Jordan's 'return to the
analysis of binary oppositions' in these cases sounded
very true to the ethnography and underpinned some
of the more insightful parts of his analysis. It is good
evidence for the view that one should not confuse
the passing of structuralism, as a dominant paradigm,
with the disappearance of structure.
In the end, Jordan is actually most at home with
a kind of ethnography that lies closer to those that
have arisen under an empiricist and structuralist
tradition than he is with the post-structuralist chaos-
friendly trends of the 1980s and 1990s to which he
gives so much discursive space. Key terms from this
recent literature occur with some frequency
throughout the book, including hermeneutic (e.g. p.
20), totalization (p. 77), habitus (e.g. pp. 14, 93),
praxis (e.g. p. 8), communitas (p. 213),appropriation
(p. 233), agency (e.g. p. 234), longue duree (e.g. p.
191), palimpsest (p. 191), the synoptic illusion (p.
278) and enculturated spaces (e.g. p. 278). Criticisms
exposing the shortcomings of these popular tools of
sociological trade, such as those made by Bourdieu
expert Richard Jenkins (1992), are not generally
flagged by Jordan (although cf. p. 14). He does,
however, make a useful critique of textual models
in material culture studies (see pp. 18-21, 191).
The extent to which the often complex ideas
signposted by these baggage-carrying mouthfuls are
intellectually integrated with the book's ethnographic
description is inconsistent. At one extreme the terms
remain undigested, cropping up like nodules of flint
in limestone. I thought this was a good thing. It
implied that Jordan did not allow his ethnographic
knowledge and experience to be distorted by being
too accommodating to the lens of global theory.
That is not to say that ethnography and interpretation
are kept separate by Jordan, or indeed can ever fully
be. Again, this is not a simple dichotomy. One can
keep them relatively separate or make them relatively
more integrated. Where ethnography is thoroughly
suborned to theoretical argument, the ethnography
may be used to illustrate a paradigm, but the reader
is not very free to explore the ethnography from an
alternative theoretical perspective, and there is always
the suspicion that the reader is being fed only the facts
that suit the author's model. Such ethnographies
have a more limited shelf-life than those that layout
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CULTURE AND SACRED LANDSCAPE
the observational facts relatively separately from the
intellectualizing of them.
Jordan's descriptive work, like anyone else's, is
permeated at an underlying level by certain
theoretical orientations. It benefits greatly, for
example, from his interest in action and process,
in behaviour as against folk models, and in the
undivided mesh of materiality with mentality that
constitute a way of life. It also benefits from his
interest in routine patterns, in the continuous or
repetitious structuring of similar relationships, in
how social practices function to do things for
people, and in the way a tough environment
consistently imposes its limitations on cultural
options. These severally reflect, to some· degree
each, the emphasis of a particular past development
in anthropological theory. They expose residual
strata of enduring value taken from broader
paradigms to which no one below pensionable age
any longer subscribes. To those who hold a non-
cumulative, relativistic and thus circular vision of
the anthropological enterprise, none of this would
matter even if true. I thought it important, and as
it should be. I found the book a stimulating read.
Material Culture and Sacred Landscape. The
Anthropology of the Siberian Khanty. Peter Jordan.
AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek CA, 2003. ISBN:
0759102767, cloth, $82.00; ISBN: 0759102775,
paper, $32.95.
Peter Sutton is an anthropologist and linguist who
has worked in Aboriginal Australia since 1969,
has published on Aboriginal land tenure, material
culture and languages, and was formerly Head of
Anthropology at the South Australian Museum.
He is an Honorary Research Fellow, Institute of
Archaeology, University College London and
visiting Professor, School of Social Sciences,
University of Adelaide.
Con tact address: Insti tu te of Archaeology,
University College London, 31-34 Gordon Square,
London WC1H OPY, UK. Tel: + 44 20 76794608;
email: PeterSutton1@compuserve.com
REFERENCE
Jenkins, R. Pierre Bourdieu, (1st edn). Routledge, London
(1992).