Ethnicity and Bureaucracy: Notes on Solidarity Among Indigenous People of Altai Republic

The issue that inspired this paper lies in the specifics of social life of indigenous people shaped by laws. The specificities of the legal status of indigenous people not only influence the creation and keeping of ethnic identity but also directly impact the sense of solidarity of indigenous people. These people readily set up non-commercial organizations -institutions capable of influencing the life of indigenous people on a par with more "traditional" ones, e.g. kinship and/or local groups. The place of such non-commercial organizations among the tools used to maintain solidarity among indigenous people, as it seems, may be of greater significance in urban environments against the backdrop of the erosion of social ties that had been established as a result of the non-urban way of life mainly led by indigenous people. However, the real situation differs from what is expected. Legal rights of indigenous people, through law enforcement and law enforcers, create a specific area of social relations in which an active part is played by the executive and the judicial power. This produces not only a special context in which non-commercial organizations operate, but an isolated semantic field. Such organizations gain social importance, participating in the system of bureaucratic relations, whereas solidarity within groups of indigenous people is maintained thanks to less formal institutions. The main material for the paper was collected by the author during the field research in 2010 in the city of Gorno-Altaisk of Altai Republic.

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