Oil, Marginalization and the Eastern Khanty

Petroleum development in Western Siberia has had profound impacts on the Khan-ty of Surgut region, Khanty-Mansiyski Autonomous Okrug-Iugra. This shift to a legal and economic approach to land tenure and land use, leading to the commodification of land and use rights, has increased Khanty politicization, hastened social disorganization, and promoted consumerism and an emergent classism based on a relative disparity of income from compensation agreements. These effects have been exacerbated by the simultaneous collapse of Soviet structures that formerly organized Khanty life. All this has happened within a generation. Such rapid change scenarios induce a slippage or disjunction between the objective conditions of one's world and one's culturally-shaped predispositions that today is generating a broad-based anxiety among the Khanty, affecting not only the cultural formation of feeling and of morality but also that of intelligibility. The land-based religious practices which buttressed the hunting / fishing / herding economies of the Eastern Khanty have also been undermined, paving the way for effective and divisive proselytizing by Protestant evangelical denominations. Although ideological resistance to acculturative pressures has occasionally erupted in revitalizationalist or nativist forms, and Soviet-style programs are being funded to conserve specific cultural elements, it is clear from this rapid change scenario that after mille-nia of occupancy, Eastern Khanty communities and the cultural formations which, protected by their isolation, have remained more or less intact during the first five decades of the Soviet era, have been irreversibly transformed and are near collapse.

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