Customer Reviews:
 Gripping travelogue about Siberian culture August 9, 2007
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Written by an anthropologist but as readable as a novel, Reindeer People is a seductive invitation into the world of the Eveny - the scattered nomadic herders of Siberia's far north. Part travelogue, part biography, it opens a window into the remote and ancient wilderness culture that flowed around the Soviet gulags.
Cambridge professor Piers Vitebsky was the first westerner to live inside this long-closed community. He brings a poet's insights to a world on the margins where half-forgotten shamanistic ritual is still tangled with the mechanisms of a semi-dismantled socialist state -- and vulnerable to the shortcomings of an infant market economy.
These people have always needed remarkable inner resources to withstand the extreme cold and punishing conditions of the taiga, as well as the Stalinist repression that broke up traditional family groups and tried to eradicate their native spirituality. But Vitebsky also shows them struggling to maintain their dignity in the face of more modern challenges - corporate corruption, cheap vodka and foreign TV.
Full of vivid characters and evocative prose, Reindeer People offers some unforgettable glimpses into a vanishing world.
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