Product Description
In this acclaimed work, the anthropologist Piers Vitebsky offers a unique account of the Eveny, nomads who live in intimate partnership with an extraordinary animal. For centuries reindeer have provided the Eveny with food, fur, transport, and spiritual sustenance, enabling them to survive in the world's coldest inhabited region, the Siberian taiga, where winter ice freezes six feet thick and the temperature drops to ninety-six degrees below zero.

The book presents a gallery of unforgettable personalities, including shamans, psychics, wolves, bears, dogs, Communist Party bosses, daredevil aviators, and the spirits of fires and rivers. Based on nearly two decades of fieldwork, The Reindeer People is an enthralling and moving testimony to a Siberian native people's humor and endurance at the ecological limits of human existence.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 7 reviews)

For a very very limited audience

This book is NOT like a novel it's like a textbook. You will not find this interesting unless you have a liking to caribou.
March 04, 2008

History Education

My son is a history major at college and needed this book for class. The price was affordable and a book he will have for many years to use in his teaching career.
February 23, 2008

BonTon

Fascinating historical and factual account of the animal itself but more over, an incredible view of how they have influenced the social evolution of a huge part of the world. Very informative. Affords the reader a rare glimpse into a world (mostly Siberia) that so few us have any comprehension of.
January 19, 2008

I didn't know the Russians sent Reindeer to Alaska

I learned here that Reindeer herding for the commercial meat market has been a staple of Artic communities throughout the 20th Century (hence the effort to translpant it to Alaska in the 1920s).

This is an amazing story of a British anthropologist's 25+ years visiting and documenting the life of some of the last indigenous Siberian people to herd domestic reindeer. We meet many keenly individual men women and children, from the university-trained to the descendants of shamans. I was reminded of the Mongul family in the documenary movie "The Weeping Camel," and of Amundson's antarctic expeditions, which used native skills while Scott died using modern mechanical aids. We learn what it was like to live under Soviet rule (when labor camps drove the meat markets); we watch Perestroika as it affects both animals and people, and we witness the region's disastrous ecological and economic decline under Putin's Russia.

August 15, 2007

Anthropological Fieldwork at its Finest!

For someone who has only traveled so far as a few hundred miles in a sedan, my world is mind-numbingly small. Logistically, I rely on MapQuest to get me from "Point A" to "Point B"... and hopefully back in one piece. Without truly comprehending the land and life enveloping me in a "rural-suburban" town located somewhere in the cesspool of Bowash, I sorely needed a wake-up call to the raw emotion and spirit that has been inherently ingrained in the Eveny people, their reindeer, and their relationship to the expanses of Sakhan Siberia. As Vitebsky relives such experiences in The Reindeer People, his strikingly vivid account of living side-by-side with the Eveny not only intrigues, but brings to light the troubles faced by indigenous people that have been perpetuated by the Soviet era as well as its horrendous aftermath. Vitebsky's tale of the inevitable downfall of what was once a pristine way of life for these people offers a poignantly bittersweet glimpse of what is becoming all but history. Without a doubt, this is one of the greatest books to come my way in a long time!
May 26, 2007

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