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Agnieszka E. Halemba, The Telengits of Southern Siberia: Landscape, Religion and Knowledge in Motion. London, New York: Routledge, 2006. 222 pp.
The Altaian researcher of her own people and region Svetlana Tyukhteneva, who Agnieszka Halemba generously cites, told me a moving story in the mid-1990s that can be seen as an allegory of indigenous hopes for cultural revitalization. One of Svetlana's close kin was a young singer of popular music who had shunned traditional cultural spirituality. He was in his bathtub one day belting out a song when suddenly he was consumed by an uncommon string of epic poetry that seemed to just pour out of him. Feeling inspired, literally in-spirited, he adapted his career to include traditional epic singing in public, helping to sponsor the revitalization of Altaian musical arts. His respect for shamanic ways of knowing, and for elders "who know" increased dramatically. For Svetlana, his story meant that shamanic prayers, epics, and seances are not as dead as many Altaians had feared, after decades of Soviet rule and previous Russian Orthodox influences.
Cambridge-trained anthropologist Agnieszka Halemba's monograph captures some of the same hopes and debates about cultural revitalization, but with more cynicism and critical analysis than Svetlana's account from a decade earlier. The difference is both in the timing and approach to Altaian experiences of post-Soviet political and cultural life. Halemba constructs her monograph around two major themes: "landscape and movement," and "ritual and knowledge." These themes serve her well as she foregrounds the importance of refined, long-term multi-village fieldwork, and sensitivity to values that her interlocutors would recognize. While her work focuses on the Telengit of the Altai mountain region [near the Russian border with Mongolia, sharing an inner border with the Republic of Tyva (Tuva)], she mostly avoids generalizations about all Telengits, much less all Altaians. Nonetheless, one of her crucial conclusions is that Telengits, and the larger, more eclectic Altaian group, are straining toward some sense of cultural-political unity in a postSoviet context that both enhances and impedes this....