Future autobiographies and their spaces -- Research in the field: introducing case studies -- Contact for case studies and sampling -- Gender and kinship -- Age cohorts -- Oral and written -- Narrative and 'future autobiography' -- Eveny childhood and adolescence -- Djuluchen: the composition of child and adolescent personhood -- Childhood and narrative -- Coming of age -- Forest and village -- Forest and village in local cosmologies of movement -- The social world of the forest -- The village: social context today -- Complexities of engagement with antagonistic spaces -- Three future autobiographies -- The story of Tonya, a forest girl -- The stories of village adolescents: Vera and Grisha -- Vera -- Grisha -- Reindeer and child in the forest chronotope -- Reindeer as a nonhuman component of child personhood -- Reindeer as child: Tonya on learning and teaching -- The forest chronotope in narrative -- The village as domain of unhappiness: broken families and the curse of the Gulag -- Wandering spirits of the dead and the curse of the Gulag -- Unhappy families: children's futures and parents' pasts -- Cosmologies of the future in the shadow of djuluchen -- Personhood: hero and shaman -- Time: cycles with and without destination -- 'Future autobiography' as an activator of djuluchen
Summary
The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian Indigenous peoples, it presents the young people's narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study
