The Spring 2003 issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly is devoted to the indigenous peoples of the eastern taiga. It is titled ‘The Troubled Taiga: Survival on the Move for the Last Nomadic Reindeer Herders of South Siberia, Mongolia, and China’.
The reindeer-herding peoples who make up the South-Siberian and Mongolian Reindeer-Herding Complex include the Dukha of northwestern Mongolia; the Tozhu, Tofa, and Soyot in south Siberia; and the Evenki, who range throughout south Siberia and into the northern tip of China’s Inner Mongolia province. They use reindeer predominantly as pack and riding animals to facilitate their hunting, and as a source of milk products. While each of these peoples is ethnically and culturally distinct, they are all confronting threats to their cultural survival, including transitions to market-based economies, land privatisation, mineral extraction, tourism, global warming, language endangerment and loss, and assimilation into the dominant Russian, Mongolian, and Chinese cultures.
This issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly is a collaborative effort among Russian, western, and indigenous experts to give much-needed exposure to these endangered cultures and to initiate discussion about some possible solutions.
Contact:
Sofia Flynn, Cultural Survival, 215 Prospect Street,Cambridge, MA 02139, USA |
