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The village of Djarkhan is in the heart of Russia’s Sakha Republic, on the Central Yakut Plain. The world around Djarkhan, with its extreme subarctic climate and intractable permafrost, seems an unlikely place to look for a rich, historic, and exotic efflorescence of human life, and yet this is precisely what the authors found. Their book is a remarkable account of how the people of Djarkhan have created their own distinctive place through their unique relationship with a severe and demanding land.

Die Autoren führten in Djarkhan, einer ländlichen Siedlung in der russischen Republik Sacha/Jakutien im östlichen Sibirien eine Fallstudie durch. Die Hauptaugenmerke richteten sich auf die Veränderungen der Landnutzung, der Bevölkerungs- und Siedlungsstruktur, der traditionellen Kultur und des Lebensstandards seit dem Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion im Jahr 1991. Djarkhan ist entlegen, isoliert und urtümlich. Das Klima ist rauh und die Siedlung gehört in jeder Hinsicht zu den marginalen Gebieten Sibiriens. In nur sechs Jahren hat Djarkhan den Untergang seiner Sowchose, Aufstieg und Zerfall einer bäuerlichen Kooperative, den Tod der kommerziellen Landwirtschaft, eine Zunahme und darauf folgend eine starke Abnahme seiner Bevölkerung, den Abbruch aller Bus- und Flugverbindungen zur Außenwelt, das Wiedererstehen einer Klassengesellschaft, das Aufleben einer weitreichenden familiären Kontrolle, die wachsende Verfügbarkeit über verschiedene Konsumgüter und andere Veränderungen erlebt. Die Bewohner haben eine starke Verbundenheit mit ihrer Heimat beibehalten und sind stolz auf ihre Kultur. Die Zukunft von Djarkhan und vergleichbarer Siedlungen ist ungewiß. Die bereits greifenden Elemente verschiedenartiger Anpassungsstrategien könnten es Djarkhan und ähnlichen Dörfern erlauben, die gegenwärtigen grundlegenden Veränderungen zu überleben. /// The authors conducted a field-based case study of Djarkhan, a farm village in the Russian republic of Sakha/Yakutia, in eastern Siberia, focusing upon the changes in land use, demography, settlement morphology, traditional culture, and living standards that have occurred since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Djarkhan is remote, isolated, and ethnic. Its climate is severe, and in every sense the village belongs to the \"marginal lands\" of Siberia. In only six years, Djarkhan has witnessed the death of its sovkhoz, the rise and fall of a peasant cooperative, the demise of all commercial agriculture and reversion to private subsistence farming, an increase and subsequent major decrease of its population, severance of all bus and airplane links to the outside world, re-emergence of a class-based society, revival of extended family power, and increased availability of diverse consumer goods, among other changes. The villagers retain a deep attachment to place and pride in ethnic culture. The future of Djarkhan and similar villages remains uncertain. A diversified adaptive strategy, most elements of which are already in place, could allow it and similar places to survive the profound changes presently underway.

Djarkhan, Bella Jordan’s birthplace and ancestral home, lies deep in the “snow-muffled forests” of southwestern Sakha, where the solitude of the boreal woodlands is broken only at wide intervals by such isolated farming villages (Maps 1.2 and 2.1).¹ In this remote settlement, she was born in the dark depths of December, near the time of the winter solstice, in the year 1961. Her mother, Olga Danilovna Tikhonova, had returned to Djarkhan shortly before her birth so that Bella could be born in her village. At that time Olga worked as a dentist in the town of Suntar, the county seat,

The migratory path followed by Bella’s ancestral Sakhalar to reach the Vilyui Bend and the shores of Lake Oybon, with its lush haymeadows, was both lengthy and unlikely. Yakuts belong to a pastoral culture of “deep antiquity” and originated in a faraway country. In ancient times, they lived among other Turkic nomadic tribes on the endless steppes of central Asia, far to the south of modern Sakha, near fabled Lake Baikal. Their language reveals as much, for it bears a close kinship to Kazak, Kirghiz, and Uzbek.¹ The legends and folk epics of the Sakhalar tell of military defeats at

Profound change came to Russia in the wake of political liberalization, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the collapse of Communism. These changes reached remote Djarkhan with startling speed, transforming rural life in less than a decade. The result has been a modified land-use system, changed living standards, a restructured settlement morphology, an altered demography, and a revised socioeconomic order. Change continues and even intensifies at present, with no new equilibrium yet established. Only the collectivization of the 1930s, which created Djarkhan, brought comparable upheaval and change. Djarkhan well represents post-Soviet Russia’s demographic instability. Its population has fluctuated disconcertingly

Djarkhan, in its present episode of instability and restructuring, faces a “chaotic and unknown future,” in common with many other Siberian rural places.¹ The trends today are diverse and in some measure run counter to one another. We can view the situation in Djarkhan at the dawn of a new century and plausibly suggest several very different outcomes, ranging from abandonment to village viability. Predicting the future is a hazardous undertaking, particularly in times of rapid change, and while social scientists have an abysmal prognosticative record, we feel that we know this place and people well enough to make some

Deep in the boreal forests of subarctic Asia, a hardy people—the Yakuts, or Sakhalar as they call themselves—wrest a living from an unforgiving polar land as sedentary cattle and horse raisers. They carried this ancient Eurasian livelihood farther poleward than any other people, a remarkable feat, considering the extreme severity of the regional climate. The Sakhalar reside in sizable permanent villages, the northernmost such agrarian settlements in the world, perched on the very outermost margins of the agricultural habitat in Eurasia. Our book concerns one such village, a representative Yakut settlement named Djarkhan. We endeavor to present a

Ethnogenesis is the event and process by which new cultural and ethnic groups originate and evolve through time. Previous research on ethnogenesis, whether by geographers or anthropologists, has been mainly focused on discovering universal principles of this process. My dissertation is devoted to the proposition that much can be learned about ethnogenesis by approaching it in a particularistic way, employing such traditional cultural geographic principles and concepts as homeland, diffusion, incremental change, cultural landscape, preadaptation, and, very importantly, field research. These I applied to one particular group, the Turkic-speaking Sakha (Yakut) people of northeast Siberia, who live far from other Turkic peoples. The beginning of this people has been shrouded in myth and mystery, and though some scholarly research on the origin of the Sakha has been conducted by Russian and Soviet scholars, it has been fragmented and inconclusive at best. By using a particularistic approach; by using the tools, techniques, and concepts of cultural geography; and by focusing on a single ethnic group, I was able to resolve the question of how the Sakha (Yakut) nation came to be and survived through time. The discovery of the ancient hearth of the Sakha (Yakuts); their pre-historic migration route to a new homeland; adjustment to a new environment of the boreal taiga, while preserving their ancient Neolithic way of life of cattle and horse herders; their adaptation to Russian and Soviet colonization without losing a distinct ethnic identity; and ethnic revival in the post-Soviet times—all these major stages of the Sakha (Yakut) ethnogenesis—are presented in my dissertation through the idiographic methodology of cultural geography. These are the major achievements of my work. My overriding conclusion is that accident, chance, and individual decisions—in a word, unpredictability—plays a dominant role in ethnogenesis. Universal principles, while helpful, do not possess complete explanatory power. Each ethnic group is formed under the influence of a unique combination of factors and must be studied separately.

Veränderungen in einer jakutischen ländlichen Siedlung in postsowjetischer Zeit