Besky, Sarah. The Darjeeling distinction: labor and justice on fair-trade tea plantations in India. xxii, 233 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2014. (original) (raw)

This book is important in a number of ways: firstly, because it gives reason for hope, providing a positive counter-balance to anthropological literature that describes life for native peoples in this region – the far north of Siberia – in terms of a discourse of either cultural extinction or ‘futurelessness’ (P. Vitebsky, ‘Withdrawing from the land: social and spiritual crisis in the indigenous Russian Arctic’, in Postsocialism: ideas, ideologies, and practices in Eurasia (ed.) C.M. Hann, 2002). The book explains how extreme postsocialist crisis, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, has led, among the Eveny reindeer herding population, to the withdrawal of state subsidy, a decline in transport connections and infrastructural support, economic breakdown, and a growing sense of despair and abandonment. However, despite this depressing outlook, the narrative testimonies collected here, concerning young people's ideas about and representations of their future lives, portray a youthful defiance and active determination to bring about self-organizing change and improvement for personal, familial, and community benefit. Secondly, the book is important because of remarkable ethnographic analysis that explains young people's future autobiographies in terms of a specifically Eveny spatio-temporal logic. Using in-depth case studies of particular young people who have grown up mostly in either the sedentary village or the nomadic locations of the forest environment, the book outlines the various spatial possibilities and different, gendered ways of becoming an Eveny person. At the same time, it explores the cultural particularities of the temporal frameworks for potential action, which are given by the schema for movement of a herding and hunting life-world. From this perspective, it becomes clear that the brave assertions of young people about their future success, which depends on travelling far away, to the modern city, and the predicted salvation that their success will deliver to their families and communities, take the same form as mythical narratives about Eveny cultural heroes. In times of extreme crisis, these cultural heroes are seen to leave their people, risk their own lives to seek help in the outside world, and, eventually, after a dramatic struggle, manage to return, bringing back the means to save the community. The narratives about the future of Eveny youth can be understood, then, as mythical endeavours, that is, extraordinary efforts that are attempts to rescue their people at a time of extreme crisis. In contemporary times, therefore, when crisis takes the form of postsocialist transformation and associated despair, this ethnography of young people's heroic efforts to bring into being a different future marks an important contribution not only to the anthropology of this region, but also to the anthropology of postsocialism. Without doubt, the book will become a widely read ethnography in both of these fields of specialization, but it should also be read as an important addition to the growing body of work on the anthropology of childhood and youth. Ulturgasheva is inspired by Christina Toren's methodological innovation in the anthropology of childhood (Making sense of hierarchy, 1990), in which data gathered from long-term participant observation research are supplemented by data derived from specific tasks designed to elicit the sense children and young people make of the relations defining adult sociality. Ulturgasheva asks children and young people to write essays about their future lives, and it is her content analysis of these essays that proves so fruitful to her analysis of the everyday lives of Eveny people. The work is distinctive with respect to the analysis of narrative form partly because Ulturgasheva refuses to treat narrative as subsequent to the events of which these are supposed to be the retrospective account. Rather, she approaches the narrative accounts given by youths as constitutive actions, explanations of what is possible or what must be brought into being that actually bring about what they try to imagine. Remarkable here is the way that Ulturgasheva relates the constitutive power of narrative to an ethnographic concept among the Eveny of djuluchen – or foreshadowing – such that a person, perhaps a hunter or herder, who plans a journey immediately imparts to the destination a trace, a forward-moving shadow, a part of his/her spirit, as if to prepare the way. Ulturgasheva goes so far as to suggest that the research process itself, in which she elicited these future-orientated accounts from Eveny youth, activated a djuluchen process such that what the young people aspired to had then to be brought into being, making of her research informants the culture heroes of the future. This is a strong argument, and an intriguing one. Only twenty-eight adolescents were interviewed, so it would be important to know what became of the other adolescents whose accounts of their future were not sought. Of those interviewed, Ulturgasheva found, on her return to the field several years later, that all the young people had made significant progress in terms of the future trajectory they had imagined for themselves, but this then raises the question of how it is that some young people fail to make their ideas about the future manifest. What about those young people condemned to a condition of stagnation and hopelessness in the village, haunted by the ghosts of the Gulag past? How will their futures unfold, and what part will the research process play in those futures?