Among a number of topics that were opened for research by James Scott's influential work Seeing Like a State (1998), the study of how the state modifies informal “traditional” practices in order to make them controllable occupies a prominent place (see Busch 2000; Brunsson and Jacobsson 2002a; Lampland and Star 2009, to name just a few). As already formulated by Scott, this modification can involve four principal procedures that are usually referred to in the current literature as standardization, formalization, quantification, and classification. The main purpose of these procedures is to get rid of the situatedness and entanglement in the general stream of action, which is an essential characteristic of any informal practice (see, for example, Ingold 2013) and to reduce fuzziness to a universal schema easily perceivable, recognizable, and controllable by state administrators independently of any social context. Standardization and formalization, although the difference between them is somewhat complex, represent effective mechanisms of restricting and controlling people's activity by themselves (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2002b), while the closely related processes of quantification and classification (reducing the rich reality “on the ground” to a limited set of quantitatively measurable categories) refers more to how the practice and its results are perceived and assessed by the officials. However, as many researchers have suggested (e.g., Porter 1986, 1996; Desrosieres 1998; Bowker and Star 2000) and as the authors of this article have demonstrated in one of their previous works on the example of reindeer herding statistics in the Soviet Union (Istomin, Laptander, and Habeck 2022), quantification and classification often directly affect and modify the phenomena subjected to them. This fact is usually denied by the administrative bodies, which employ these procedures exactly for “producing objectivity,” as Theodore Porter (1996) has stated. Generally, it seems to be widely accepted that standardization, formalization, quantification, and classification play a significant role in effecting transformations in the everyday lives of many human groups and, therefore, understanding these processes and the effects to which they lead would contribute significantly to understanding both the current human condition and the historical process by means of which we have arrived at it (see, for example, contributions to Lampland and Star 2009).
It is this understanding, however, that we still lack. For example, it has been claimed by Scott (1998) and others (Bowker and Star 2000; Epstein 2009) that the four procedures lead to progressive de-individualization of people and things, stripping them of any unique attributes and pigeon-holing them into impersonal categories. Although it certainly makes sense that such a de-individualization and reduction of individual subjects to categories makes administration processes easier, it seems to be at odds with the well-known tendency of the state to extend the sphere of its administration down to the level of individuals. Thus, an important trait of the modern state consists in its efforts to reach every individual by means of various automated personal accounts, individual numbers, individual codes, and so forth, which can be seen as a means of individualizing subjects in the “eyes” of the state. Furthermore, this “administrative individualization” process is not restricted to human beings: individual numbers and accounts in various administrative databases are given to cars, property parcels, pets, and a growing number of other items. Arguably, this is a relatively recent phenomenon made possible by modern information technology. Does this mean that the progress of technology has cancelled the de-individualizing effect of the four “classic” procedures?
A good way to answer this question and enrich our understanding of the abovementioned procedures at work is through studying concrete cases of “traditional” informal practices being modified and incorporated by the state. That is the purpose of this article. The focus of our study is the traditional practice of reindeer marking among reindeer herders of the north of European Russia and Western Siberia. Two reasons make this focus particularly suitable for a study on the topic described. First, as is well known, the practice of animal marking is present in all or nearly all nomadic pastoralist societies and can be as old as nomadic pastoralism itself: thus, unambiguous evidence of animal marking is present in Pazyryk burials, which are 2,500 years old (Rudenko 1970). One of the best-known practices of animal marking in Eurasia is the Mongolian-Turkic horse (and, sometimes, camel) branding called tamga. According to Caroline Humphrey, who studied this practice among contemporary Mongolians, tamga is first and foremost used to identify the property rights of a certain person over an animal; however, its elements, its position on the animal body, and the way it is inscribed conveys important information on the social position of the person and their kinship relations to other persons in the area (Waddington-Humphrey 1974). Spread throughout Eurasia with the Mongolian conquest, tamgas started to play an important role in the successor states of the Great Mongolian Empire: the tamga came to be used to identify its owner in all kinds of official relations in the manner in which the signature is used in modern states. This concerned also the rulers of these states: their tamgas were engraved on coins and buildings and featured on the stamps they used to validate their edicts.1 The tamga of Gerai-Khan is still used as a symbol of Crimean Tatar people (Smirnov 1887), while the flag of Mongolia features the soyombo symbol composed of the elements used in Mongolian tamgas (Waddington-Humphrey 1974). Since property relations are among those the state has been striving to regulate most—Marxists go as far as stating that the regulation of private property is the primary reason for the state's existence—animal marking represents one of the objects par excellence for modification and incorporation by the state. Thus, the tamga system experienced a good deal of standardization and formalization already in medieval times, even though its degree varied from one region to another.
At the same time—and this is the second reason to focus on the practice of animal marking—the ability and willingness of the state to modify and incorporate it depended, on the one hand, on the degree of control it had over the nomadic pastoralist communities (which, up until recently, was generally rather low), and on the other hand, on the role this practice played in the given society. Thus, apart from the tamga system used mainly for horses, the Mongol and Turkic nomadic pastoralists of central and eastern Asia also use earmarks (im in Mongolian—Fijn 2011: 91) for sheep, goats, and cattle. This practice of earmarking has always been and in many places still is much less formal and, surprisingly, it is almost never described in detail in anthropological texts. The reasons for that are complex. One of them is the fact pointed out by Fijn (2011) that cattle, sheep, and goats, in contrast to horses, are pastured under direct surveillance of a shepherd from the family of their master and, therefore, have less need for explicit marking of their belonging. However, the most important reason probably is that, for Central and Eastern Asian nomadic pastoralists, horses are much more expensive and symbolically important than the other species, and property rights to them were more important to regulate. To be sure, some attempts to modify and incorporate earmarking practices have been made by Russian, Mongolian, and Central Asian states. In contrast to the formalization of tamga, however, these attempts are much more recent and, therefore, can be reconstructed and observed in more detail.
The practices of reindeer marking among reindeer herding nomads to be described in this article have many similarities with the im marking. These similarities are partly in form: just as the Central and Eastern Asian nomads do for their sheep and goats, nomadic reindeer herders use mainly earmarks (although fur marks, which can be treated as analogous to skin marks of the tamga system, are also present and are analyzed later in this article). More importantly, just like Mongolia, the Russian state, to which these reindeer herders are subjected, had neither the means nor the will to formalize and incorporate them—up until relatively recently. The incorporation occurred mostly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which enables us to trace it in detail. Even more importantly, the incorporation occurred independently in several places and followed different trajectories. Comparing them opens a unique possibility to differentiate between general and particular traits in the modification process and the application of the four procedures.
This study is limited to analyzing the process of appropriating traditional informal practices by the state. We do not touch on another topic that features prominently in the works of James Scott and his followers, namely the practices of resistance to such appropriation on the part of the state's subjects. There are three reasons for that. First, we believe that these two topics, despite being clearly related, are separate and can be studied independently. Second, although our informants indeed complained against the appropriation of their practices by the state, we do not have evidence of passive or explicit acts of resistance. Third and most importantly, we believe that under the current conditions, any analysis of resistance to the Russian state by its subjects can be harmful for the latter.
This study is based mainly on material collected by the authors during their respective fieldwork among reindeer herders in the eastern part of the Kola Peninsula (the reindeer herding enterprise “Olenevod” and the settlement of Krasnoshchel'e), the eastern part of the Bol'shezemel'skaia Tundra in northeastern European Russia (the reindeer herding enterprise of Inta), and in the Priural'skaia, Yarsalinskaia, and Tazovskaia Tundra areas of Western Siberia. Fieldwork was conducted independently by each author within the framework of various research projects between 1998 and 2021. None of them, however, was focused on reindeer marking.2 The empirical material we present here, therefore, is a byproduct of various other research topics. Its retrospective interpretation and comparative analysis have been done in the framework of the CHARTER project (see acknowledgements). In terms of the positionality of our research, we would like to stress that we have always strived to work independently of the interests of the state and of administrations of the reindeer-herding enterprises mentioned in the article and, therefore, we do not see any conflict of interest involved in our analysis. Furthermore, two of us, Roza Laptander and Kirill Istomin, grew up in the respective cultural context (Nenets and Komi) and later came to study reindeer herding as part of academic work.
When this article had passed the first round of reviewing and we worked on its revision, we learned that James Scott, whose ideas inspired our analysis, has passed away—a great loss for the scientific community. We hope that our article may contribute to the further development of his ideas even after his death, which is probably the best any researcher can hope for.
Reindeer Marking as an Informal Practice
Although reindeer herders of the North of European Russia and Western Siberia belong to different ethnic groups (Nenets, Komi, Saami, Khanty, and Selkup), their reindeer herding practices have a common origin: the practices of breeding and using reindeer were developed by Nenets approximately two thousand years ago and later adopted by Khanty, Komi, and Selkup (Klokov and Khruschev 2004; Fedorova 2006; Klokov 2020; Istomin 2023). Ownership and private property among reindeer herding societies was always an important and essential part of their culture (Paine 1971: 166; Beach 2007). Although Saami of the Kola Peninsula had their own ancient tradition of reindeer breeding, their main occupation was fishing and hunting, with reindeer serving mostly for transport (Kiselev and Kiseleva 1987). When some Komi and Nenets reindeer herders migrated to the Kola Peninsula in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Konakov and Kotov 1989, 1991), the Saami reindeer herding tradition was replaced by the one based on Nenets reindeer herding practices, which the local Saami adopted, albeit hesitantly (Kiselev and Kiseleva 1987). The practice of reindeer marking as it existed before modification and integration by the state (and as it still exists in many places throughout the region) is part of this common reindeer herding tradition. Therefore, although certain local variations of this practice have always existed, it shows essential unity throughout the region of our study. In this section we describe this practice as unified, based on the field material we have.3 As is the case among Mongolians (Fijn 2011), the reindeer herders of this region have two kinds of reindeer marks: fur marks and earmarks.
Fur Marks
The fur marks—pidte”mia (from the verb pidna(sy), “to shave, to cut”) in Nenets, gön pas (lit. “fur sign”) in Komi—are shaved by a knife on the flank or the left shoulder of the animal in the autumn (Kostikov 1930; Khomich 1995; Stammler 2012). Note that only the fur is cut away in the process, while the skin of the animal stays intact. In contrast to the nomadic pastoralists of Central and Eastern Asia mentioned in the introduction, reindeer herders seem to never have had a practice of burning or cutting out brands on the skin of their animals. Indeed, such important elements of animal marking as branding sticks (see Waddington-Humphrey 1974) did not exist here. Consequently, the fur marks on reindeer have to be renewed after each summer molt. Otherwise, however, the role of the fur mark (usually referred to as kleimo or tavro in Russian sources) at certain periods was not dissimilar to that of tamga as described in the introduction to this article. Thus, one of the earliest ethnographies of Nenets, produced by Vasilii Krestinin in the late 1770s, included in the multivolume academic publication by Ivan Lepekhin, states: “Every Samoyed (Nenets) has a habit of inventing and using his personal fur mark (kleimo)… They write this fur mark by their own hand on agreements and petitions written in Russian, and these signs are regarded as their true signatures” (Lepekhin 1805: 224, our translation).
Furthermore, the ethnography contains depictions of manifold fur marks that were left by the Nenets informants from different European tundra areas as a confirmation of the correctness of the information they provided (see Figure 1). The resulting collection of such marks is not only the earliest but also one of the biggest ever published. It shows, among other things, that the marks varied greatly from one tundra to another. Thus, in the westernmost Kaninskaia Tundra and the Timanskaia Tundra they often took the form of Cyrillic letters from Russian or (more rarely) Church Slavonic alphabets, often the first letters of the owner's first name and surname. This forces us to doubt the statement sometimes made in the literature (Sidorov 1932; Stammler 2012), that, in a manner completely similar to Mongolian and Turkic tamga, the marks always passed from the father to the youngest son, whereas older children modified their father's mark by adding elements to it.4 We do not deny, however, that this may be a correct description of some local practices, for example, that of the Yarsalinskaia Tundra.
Reindeer fur marks taken from the “confirmation pages” of Lepekhin (1805: 285–288). Figure 1a (top) shows fur marks from the region east of River Pechora (Pustozerskii and Ust’-Tsilemskii areas), Figure 1b from the west of River Pechora (Timanskii and Kaninskii areas). Note that the brands from the western areas (1b) resemble Cyrillic letters. The book is available at the Russian State Library and in several digital versions, e.g. on https://viewer.rsl.ru/ru/rsl02000028292 (accessed 14 November 2024).
Citation: Sibirica 23, 3; 10.3167/sib.2024.230301
Evidence of fur marks utilized by Komi is much less graphic. Probably the most definitive of them comes from a work by Aleksei Sidorov:5
In Izhma raion, where reindeer herding is practiced, the household pas signs carry the name gön-pas (fur signs) because their main use is in marking the reindeer, in which a piece of fur is cut out of the side, according to the form of the pas symbol, which is peculiar to the household in question (Sidorov 1932: 7, our translation).
The reindeer herders in Izhma use their gön-pas sign to designate, apart from their reindeer, various objects of reindeer husbandry, for example the reindeer sledge (utitśa), the rods (horei) for steering the reindeer, the bones on the lassoes (ńartala) by which the reindeer are caught, the boats and oars, the floating sticks of the trawls and other nets, and the sheath of the knife that is hung on the belt. […] In addition, the gön-pas symbol can be found on fur clothing, on outer furs, etc. (ibid: 10, our translation).
Although fur marks are still used nowadays, the scope of this use, so it seems, has significantly decreased. The reason probably is that fur marks are not used any more as identifying symbols in official relations, while their use as signs of possession/property is less practical in comparison to earmarks: fur marks become invisible with the molt and have to be renewed, which, of course, can be used for changing them in order to hide traces of theft. Thus, among modern Komi reindeer herders of the Bol'shezemel'skaia Tundra, fur marks (usually in the form of Cyrillic letters reflecting the owner's name) are used as temporary marks for special cases. Thus, reindeer herders can use them to mark reindeer they are going to slaughter for food later in the year, give out to others as a present or payment (in this case, the animal can be marked by the initials of the new owner), castrate and train as a transport animal (in this case, the mark is a sign for the duty herder to monitor the behavior of the animal and its position in the herd, which is believed to be important to assess the quality of the animal as a draft reindeer), in order to signal the corral workers that the animal should not be caught for vaccination, and so forth. In the Tazovskaia Tundra, the use of fur marks by the local Nenets was observed to be quite similar to that just described for Komi with two important exceptions: the fur marks did not take the form of letters; and they were sometimes used to mark animals the herders were planning to sacrifice on special occasions (cf. Kostikov 1930). On these animals, the kleimo/tavro could be renewed for several years until the herders would get to the sacrificial place or the occasion would come. In both places, only a minority of the animals had the fur mark. On the Kola Peninsula, no use of fur marks has been recorded whatsoever. Fur marks can have wider use in the tundra areas of the Yamal Peninsula and in the tundra on the eastern side of the Polar Ural area. For the Nenets, reindeer property is the most valuable thing in their lives.
Ear Marks
In contrast to fur marks, earmarks—kha (lit. “ear”) in Nenets, pel'pas (lit. “ear sign”) in Komi—are worn by almost all (semi-) domesticated reindeer in the region, including those who bear fur marks. An important difference between fur marks and earmarks is that the latter are used exclusively as sign of property. In contrast to Stammler (2012: 80), we believe that women can own reindeer among all groups of reindeer herders of European Russia and Western Siberia (on Yamal Nenets specifically see Brodnev 1959). However, we agree with him that, at least among Nenets and Komi, women usually do not have their own earmarks and use the earmarks of their fathers and sometimes their deceased husbands instead (Kola Peninsula represents a notable exception, to be discussed later).
Earmarks are cut with a knife into the ears of calves during their first summer/autumn (that is, when they are two to five months old) and usually stay with the animals for their whole life. Marking a calf with an earmark represents an act of claiming ownership, which is usually not disputed afterwards. In the northernmost part of the Yamal Peninsula, if wild reindeer mix with a herd of domestic reindeer, reindeer herders avoid putting any signs of ownership on them. There is a superstition that if a herder marks a wild reindeer with his personal mark, that wild reindeer will steal his entire herd of domestic reindeer. In accordance with some ethnographies of the region from the early twentieth century (e.g., Kertselli 1911), if a reindeer changed hands during its life, its ears could be cut out in order to eliminate the former mark. Nowadays, however, eliminating earmarks in such a way is associated by reindeer herders mostly with reindeer theft (data from the Tazovskaia Tundra; cf. the description of reindeer theft by Stammler 2012: 94–95). In cases where the change of ownership occurred in a socially appropriate way, the initial mark of the reindeer is usually left intact, while the new ownership can be sometimes signified by a collar of a particular color on the animal's neck or by a fur mark (more on this below).
In the informal marking system, ear marks consist of a limited set of elements. Thus, Komi herders of the eastern part of the Bol'shezemel'skaia Tundra use six elements, each of which has its own name (see Figure 2, where the right ear is taken as an example). An earmark is produced by combining these elements on the right and the left ears of the animal. Figure 3 gives an example of a complete earmark consisting of these basic elements. The ability to represent an earmark as a combination of elements allows the herders to easily learn and recognize them. Moreover, it allows the herders to describe the earmark easily by naming its elements. Among Komi reindeer herders, the commonly accepted schema for describing an earmark is the following. The description starts with the word shuiga (left), which is followed by naming the elements of the left ear from top to bottom and from the front to the rear. This is followed by the word ves'kyd (right) and naming the elements of the right ear.6 Therefore, the earmark depicted in Figure 3 would be described as follows: “shuiga tutsh da vodzs'an’ ydzhydtor, ves'kyd vodzs'an’ kyk tor da börs'an’ tor” (“left—tutsh and vodzs'an’ ydzhydtor, right—two vodzs'an’ tor and one börs'an’ tor).
The six basic elements used in earmarks by reindeer herders of the Bol'shezemel'skaia Tundra and the Priural'skaia Tundra with their names in Nenets (upper row) and Komi (lower row), as well as translations of their Komi names. Based on information from several reindeer herders interviewed by Kirill Istomin and Roza Laptander.
Citation: Sibirica 23, 3; 10.3167/sib.2024.230301
An example of a complete earmark (the earmark of the third brigade, Bol'shaia Inta enterprise)
Citation: Sibirica 23, 3; 10.3167/sib.2024.230301
An example of how herders themselves categorize and use earmarks is given in Figure 4, based on an interview conducted by one of the authors with herders in Novikbozh (the former sovkhoz Ust-Usinskii). The use of elements that go beyond the six-element system—notably the diagonal cut named kösiak—may be explained by the family's mixed Komi-Nenets background.
Earmarks of the fifth, first, and third brigades (abbreviated here as CT.) of what was then sovkhoz Ust’-Usinskii, along with terminology of earmarks (correct spelling of tuch would be tutsh). Drawn by J. O. Habeck, Novikbozh, November 1998.
Citation: Sibirica 23, 3; 10.3167/sib.2024.230301
In contrast to Mongolian tamga, the elements of earmarks do not seem to have any semantic meaning of their own and the same can be said about the earmarks themselves. In most cases, the connection between an earmark and its owner is completely arbitrary. Sometimes it is claimed (e.g., Sidorov 1932; Stammler 2012) that, just as it was described by Humphrey for tamga (Waddington-Humphrey 1974), the mark of a father is inherited by one of the sons (usually the youngest one), while other sons used their father's mark with modifications (usually by adding one element). This even allowed claims (Korolev and Savel'eva 2002) that the marks signified semantically the clan belonging and the clan identity of the owner (ironically, these claims were made about Komi, who, in contrast to Nenets, do not have clans at all).7 However, when one of us (Kirill Istomin) mentioned this view when discussing the question of earmark inheritance with Komi reindeer herders, they said that such a way of inventing new marks would indeed be practical, because it would allow the sons, who usually get their first private reindeer from their fathers, to easily re-mark them as their own by cutting the new element on their ears. At the same time, they denied that this way of inventing the new marks represented a standard practice. Instead, they claimed that every herder invents an earmark for himself “as he likes” using his own set of criteria, but that the two criteria that usually feature highly are (1) that the mark should be different from other marks used in the area, and (2) that the mark should be easily visible and recognizable. As the herders explained, “you should be able to recognize the mark from far away in order to easily catch your reindeer with a lasso or point it out in a corral.” Therefore, the simpler the mark and the bigger the elements it consists of, the better. Among Nenets herders of the Tazovskaia Tundra, we observed that earmarks belonging to members of the same extended family could have similar combinations of elements, but not necessarily so. Therefore, even if the rule of earmark inheritance (similar to that of tamga) indeed exists among Nenets, it does not seem to be applied systematically.
Interestingly, the relation between the form of the mark and its owner is less arbitrary in cases of reindeer belonging to a reindeer-herding enterprise (former sovkhoz). Thus, the earmark depicted in Figure 3 is actually the mark of reindeer belonging to the third brigade of the sovkhoz “Bol'shaia Inta”: the cuts on its left ear (tutsh and vodz'sian’ ydzhydtor) represent the sovkhoz (all reindeer belonging to the enterprise would have the same mark on their left ear), while the number of cuts on the right ear signify the number of the brigade. Thus, reindeer belonging to the fourth brigade would have vodzsian’ kyk tor da börsian’ kyk tor (two vodzsian’ tor and two börsian’ tor) on their right ear. Interestingly, the reindeer of the fifth brigade (which, however, no longer existed at the time of this research) used to have a simple vozha on their right ear (it resembled the roman numeral V), while the reindeer of the sixth brigade (also nonexistent at the time of this research) used to have vozha and vodzsian’ tor. It is, however, not clear if this non-arbitrariness should still be counted as part of an informal system or rather as an early sign of its numeric formalization by the administration of the former state enterprise converted into a semi-state one after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Interestingly, the classification of reindeer by individual ownership that is created by this practice essentially violates two out of three criteria for “good classification” as established by Bowker and Star (2000, 10–11). First, it is not complete: the number of earmark elements used by Komi as described above is small, many elements do not combine with each other, and the number of earmarks that can be produced is limited. Even more limited is the number of easily visible earmarks, which the herders prefer. Therefore, earmarks can and do repeat, which means that any particular earmark does not identify its owner unequivocally even on the level of subregion, let alone the whole region of study. In fact, the earmarks are invented in such a way as to reliably identify an owner whose reindeer are pastured together with neighbors (e.g., in the same brigade herd) or are pastured close enough to another herd that they might get mixed with another owner's animals. Note that even this rather limited purpose can be served by earmarks of the Komi herders in the Bol'shezemel'skaia Tundra only because the number of reindeer owners in the area is relatively small. In the more populated northwest Siberian tundra areas, the number of mark elements in use is larger. Thus, for example, the local herders, besides using the tutsh element, have two elements where the tip of the reindeer ear is cut off diagonally, either ascending or descending to the front. However, even in such cases each earmark is reliably unique only inside a relatively limited territory.
Secondly, the earmarks as markers of property are not mutually exclusive. As mentioned, each herder usually starts his herding career with a herd of animals inherited from his father. These animals bear earmarks of the herders’ father rather than those of the herder himself. To these animals might be added animals brought in by his wife as her dowry, usually bearing the earmark of her father. Later in life, the herder might receive animals as a present, as a loan from his relatives to be repaid much later, as payment for something, as bride price given for his married daughters (in the case of Nenets herders), and so forth. All these animals come with the earmarks of their former owners. Furthermore, the number of reindeer owners is always greater than the number of reindeer herders: virtually each herder we interviewed during our fieldwork kept animals belonging to individuals who live sedentarily in a settlement. Quite often, the herders considered a part of these animals their own—acquired as a payment for taking care of the settled persons’ animals. Consequently, some of the animals belonging to any one herder always bear earmarks of other people. Similarly, part of the animals that do bear the herder's earmark are commonly recognized as belonging to other people: his sons, husbands of his daughters, other relatives and non-relatives. Such “mismatch” between the animals bearing a herders’ earmark and the animals actually belonging to the herder tends to be particularly great in the initial stages of a herder's career, when a significant, even predominant part of the herder's animals does not bear his earmark, and in its late phase, when a significant part of the animals who bear his earmark do not, in fact, belong to him. However, this “mismatch” occurs throughout the herder's career. As mentioned, it can sometimes be rectified by additionally using collars and fur marks. However, these rectifying measures are usually taken only in the case of transport animals or of animals bearing some rare earmarks that few people would actually know.
Of course, any formal system that would violate its basic requirements to such a degree would be completely unworkable. The system of earmarks just described can work only because it is informal and, therefore, is local and embedded into a wider system of social ties and connections. One essential trait of this wider system—a trait it shares with many other systems of social interaction in rural areas—consists in constant communication about any exchange or other operations with property. Similar to rural inhabitants all over the world, reindeer herders know about who gave what to whom and in what context, at least as far as close and semi-distant neighbors are concerned. As a result, when they encounter an animal bearing a particular earmark, they are always able first to establish the range of its possible owners and then pick up the most likely owner of the animal out of this range. To give an example, let us suppose that a duty herder has suddenly discovered that a small group of animals bearing the earmark known to the herders as belonging to a certain herder X have joined the herd. Of course, all other things being equal, the earmarks would point to herder X as the most likely owner of the animals and his son Y, who has recently separated from his father, as the second most likely owner. However, the duty herder knows that herder Z, the nephew of X who migrates in the neighboring brigade, has received a dozen animals from X as a support in building up his own herd. The duty herder also remembers that a strong wind was blowing toward that brigade yesterday, and he knows that reindeer like to go against the wind, which means they could have easily switched from that brigade to this herd. On the basis of these considerations, the duty herder would decide that the reindeer discovered actually belong to Z. In practice, the reindeer under question would most probably come to the herd in the company of other animals belonging to the brigade or its other members, which would make the decision even more certain and easy. In other words—and generalizing a little bit—any encounter with an earmark by reindeer herders occurs in a social context, and this context usually allows for interpreting the earmark unambiguously, despite the factual absence of equivocal connections between the earmark and the particular herder on the one hand, and the herder and the animals bearing his earmark on the other. In this way, the informal practice does its job for the herders—but not for the administrators, let alone the state.
Informal Practice Turned Formal: Three Attempts to Incorporate Reindeer Marking into Official Practices
It may seem rather surprising, but reindeer marking in the region under study remained a completely informal practice until the last decades of the twentieth century. The reason was that both in the Russian Empire and in the early years of the Soviet regime (before the 1930s), all questions and conflicts concerning property among nomadic “aliens” (inorodtsy) were left to be solved by the “aliens” themselves as represented by their elected “heads” (golovy) during the imperial time and “indigenous councils” (tuzsovety) and “nomadic courts” (kochevye sudy) in communist Russia and the Soviet Union (see for example Slezkine 1996). Even Komi reindeer herders, who officially belonged to the “peasant” (krestiane) rather than the “alien” category of citizens, preferred to apply to the tundra heads and courts exactly because the Russian administration consciously refrained from regulating reindeer property.
The situation, of course, changed drastically with collectivization, a process that started in the study region in the 1930s and lasted until the late 1950s (Laptander 2017; Laptander 2020). The main purpose of collectivization was elimination of private rights of property in reindeer rather than an attempt to regulate them somehow. Certainly, some reindeer—termed “personal” (lichnye) rather than “private” (chastnye)—remained the property of reindeer herders who now worked for the collective (in fact semi-state) enterprises; besides that, small groups of reindeer herders managed to escape collectivization by artfully migrating between administrative districts (Vallikivi 2005; Istomin 2022; Vallikivi 2024). However, the very existence of the latter was denied by the state, while the number of the former was very insignificant up until the late 1960s (in the Bol'shezemel'skaia Tundra, for example, an average reindeer-herding family had 10 to 25 personal reindeer, mostly for transport purposes—see Istomin 2019). It seems like the state did not see, therefore, much urgency to establish formal practices of differentiating between “collective” (which, after the 1960s, officially became “state-owned”) and “personal” reindeer property as well as between “collective” reindeer managed by different enterprises. The enterprises (kolkhoz and sovkhoz) themselves probably did feel some urgency, as the practice of marking enterprise-owned reindeer described in the previous section suggests.8 This urgency probably grew stronger as the number of personal reindeer significantly increased during the last two decades of the socialist period. However, either due to bureaucratic inertia, rather low interest toward problems of effectiveness, or the spatial distance between herders and accountancy clerks (Habeck 2005), no attempt of incorporating marking practices had been made until the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, once the new economic order was established, these attempts started.
Formalization by the Enterprise: The Case of Bol'shaia Inta
The collapse of the Soviet Union, followed by the crash of the sovkhoz system, changed the relations between reindeer herders on the one hand and the state officials and enterprise administrations on the other. Thus, from the viewpoint of the herders, the enterprises—former sovkhozy now re-registered as agricultural cooperatives, stock-share companies, or “unitary commercial enterprises”—clearly failed to perform their duties toward them: not only were salaries delayed for months, but the supplies of food and materials regularly delivered by the enterprises during the Soviet period ceased to come (Istomin 2020). The herders reacted to these developments in different ways. Some (particularly in northwest Siberia) split off from the enterprises and started to migrate independently. Some, particularly in the European tundra areas, continued as enterprise herders pasturing their “personal” reindeer mixed with the animals belonging to the enterprise, but usually shamelessly helped themselves to sovkhoz animals (and particularly calves) to get food and items to trade, and to ensure the increase of their personal herds. As one informant told Istomin in the late 1990s, “We pasture sovkhoz reindeer but do not get paid for that. That's not just, is it? Therefore, we get our salary from the sovkhoz ourselves. That's just, right?”
Of course, from the viewpoint of the administrations in charge of the enterprises, this behavior was far from being just. These administrations were sure that they were working hard for the survival of the enterprises; “stealing” reindeer by the herders did not make this task any easier. Therefore, strengthening control over the herders was becoming the key question and making reindeer property easily recognizable for the administration was an important element of this strengthening.
In the administration of the enterprise Bol'shaia Inta,9 the person directly responsible for interactions with reindeer herders and for reindeer counting was Sergei M., the senior zootechnician and reindeer-herding manager. Here we draw on interviews with him and some herders. Originally from Ukraine, he had arrived to the North after completing his higher education, and it was only then that he saw a reindeer for the first time. He, however, immediately recognized the importance of earmarks and their potential role in controlling the reindeer herders’ manipulations with the property of the enterprise. The herders smilingly talked about the first attempts by Sergei M. to learn the earmarks by literally drawing them in his notebook. However, he soon learned the principles of earmarking as a combination of elements and developed a novel system of graphic notation, which, on the one hand, allowed him to record any earmark within seconds and, on the other, was intuitively understandable to anyone who knows the basic principles of earmarking in the region. Thus, the earmark depicted in Figure 3 would be recorded as shown in Figure 5.
The earmark of the third brigade depicted by Sergei M.’s notational system.
Citation: Sibirica 23, 3; 10.3167/sib.2024.230301
The next step was an order by the director of the enterprise calling everyone who had reindeer in the enterprise's herds to come and report their earmarks to Sergei M. The reindeer owners were warned that any reindeer found during the autumn counting whose earmark had not been reported to the enterprise would be counted as an enterprise-owned reindeer and could be sent to slaughter immediately. The same destiny was awaiting any dz'on’ pel'a (a reindeer without an earmark). This order resulted in a register of earmarks—a handwritten copybook with a list of names of reindeer herders (and other reindeer owners) on the right side of each page and their earmarks written down using the notation system on the left. Already at this early stage, however, it turned out that some reindeer herders had more than one earmark registered for them, and there were also some shared earmarks (probably these were fathers and sons or herders who acquired their animals through marriage or inheritance). It was announced throughout the enterprise that any newly invented earmark was to be registered with the senior zootechnician.
Note that the case of Bol'shaia Inta was not the first case of this kind. As far as we know, attempts to formalize the informal practice of earmarking were made in the 1990s in many enterprises and by some local state authorities of agriculture throughout the study region. The attempt by Sergei M. is particularly interesting for its effective notation system—as we discuss below, in other places the system was much less effective. Yet in many other respects this example is valuable as it shows what typically happened. Thus, Sergei M. immediately discovered that the register of earmarks did not bring him much closer to unraveling the complicated issues of reindeer property, let alone controlling it, due to the situated and embedded nature of the informal practice of earmarking.
Sergei M. did not give up easily, however. The material evidence for this are two other copybooks with earmarks that were compiled one year later. One of them, just as the first one, contained a list of reindeer owners, but each name was associated with several earmarks, each of which was followed by a number. As he commented, in that copybook he tried to list all the earmarks that reindeer belonging to that particular person might bear, together with the number of reindeer bearing such an earmark. In the second copybook, which, as he explained, was supposed to be used during the annual counting procedure, when the brigades went through a counting corral one after another (Istomin, Laptander, and Habeck 2022), earmarks of reindeer that could be found in this brigade were listed, along with information about their number and owner. The herders also recall that at one point Sergei M. tried to force them to report any transfer of reindeer from one brigade to another, whether deliberate or accidental, and to provide the administration with data on how many enterprise-owned and personal reindeer were transferred and which earmarks they bear. However, this cumbersome attempt for accounting failed. Sergei M. described this failure in the following way:
You know, reindeer constantly move around, particularly the personal ones. They are given from one brigade to another. Exchanged, lost in card games, presented, transferred temporarily to someone because the pasture was too poor and then taken back a year later. Or some person who lives in the settlement suddenly decides that he does not want his reindeer to be kept in the [local] sovkhoz and wants them to go to someone in Bol'shaia Inta. You can trace all this, to be sure, but this takes too much energy and disrupts relations with the herders. I tried for several years and then decided: to hell, I am not actually paid enough for doing this!
It is interesting to note that by the time the attempts were abandoned, Sergei M. himself owned several dozen reindeer, distributed among three of the four brigades of the enterprise.
The failure of the attempts at formalization by Sergei M. as well as other similar attempts can be easily explained by the limited means the enterprises had to influence the herders. Thus, in conditions when the resources to pay salaries to the herders were limited, the enterprises could not—or at least were not willing to—confiscate the personal reindeer of the herders in order to enforce whatever modifications of the informal system they would find necessary. Even in Bol'shaia Inta, despite the threats, no reindeer were actually confiscated or slaughtered on the basis of unreported earmarks. The enterprises could—and did—demand information and use it to develop their own means of control. However, even this was only just barely possible for most of them, and experts like Sergei M., willing to invest so much energy in the project of formalization, were in demand. State officials, however, seemed to have less of a time problem and proved to be particularly inventive, as shown in the following examples.
Formalization through the State: The Kola Peninsula
The two reindeer-herding enterprises (former sovkhozy) of the Kola Peninsula experienced in the 1990s and early 2000s the same problems with reindeer pilfering as Bol'shaia Inta, described above. Here, however, these problems were aggravated by the fact that intensive reindeer herding, when reindeer herders migrate with their animals throughout the year, was replaced by extensive herding: reindeer roam freely without any observation by the herders during the period without snow (Konstantinov 2023). This replacement started already in the late 1970s and, by the time of the collapse of sovkhoz enterprises, it was already accomplished. Neither the herders nor the enterprises’ administrations knew the whereabouts of the animals from early June to early autumn: the herders started to collect the reindeer in late October, when enough snow for snowmobile travel would have accumulated, but the operation could easily last until January or February (Konstantinov 2015). The herders had plenty of possibilities to acquire as many sovkhoz reindeer as they wanted. Besides that, as the economic crisis in Russia progressed, an increasing number of reindeer were shot and consumed by local settled inhabitants and military personnel based on the Kola Peninsula. Without an established formal system of indicating reindeer property, it was difficult for enterprises as well as for herders to claim compensation for poaching.
The experience of neighboring Norway and Finland, where formalization had already taken place, also played certain role. In fact, the managers of the two Kola Peninsula reindeer-herding enterprises (the main “lobbyists” of formalization) argued that a formal system of property marks should be introduced, “like in Finland.” The state responded positively and ordered the enterprises to compile an official register of earmarks: only reindeer with earmarks registered to a person or enterprise would be officially recognized as that person's or company's property. In fact, the two enterprises ended up developing two registers (one for each enterprise), which specified earmarks of reindeer pastured in the herds of the respective enterprise. All reindeer herders and other reindeer owners who had their personal reindeer in the corresponding enterprise were to register their earmarks or, if an earmark was already claimed by someone else, have a new earmark ascribed to them. The result of this work can be seen in Figure 6, which depicts two pages of the register created by the enterprise “Olenevod” (Krasnoshchel'e).
Two pages of the Krasnoshchel'e register. The first page shows the earmark assigned to private owners (note the earmark not claimed by anyone, which can be assigned to a new reindeer owner), the second page describes earmarks of reindeer belonging to different brigades of the enterprise. For the reasons of maintaining privacy, surnames of the owners are omitted from the first page. Source: Register of sketches of earmarks of domesticated reindeer belonging to the kin-based enterprises and individual owners who have their animals in the herds of the Agricultural Production Cooperative [...] “Olenevod.” Photos: Kirill Istomin, Krasnoshchel'e, 6 December 2017, by courtesy of Aleksandr V. Terent'ev.
Citation: Sibirica 23, 3; 10.3167/sib.2024.230301
The first thing one can see from the register is that Sergei M.’s notation system does not have any parallel in the Kola Peninsula: the register features pictures of reindeer ears, even though the way they are drawn leaves little doubt that the designer was aware of earmark elements. However, these pictures, as well as the general organization of the register (name, horizontal picture of the left ear pointed to the left, horizontal picture of the right ear pointed to the right,10 additional remarks), make the register look quite similar to registers from Fennoscandia. This can well be a deliberate borrowing of the form, which explains, among other things, the general system of depiction. It is also easy to note that the earmarks in the register contain more elements than presented in Figure 2. One can note, for example, the element on the left ear in lines 57 and 58 of the second page (the local Komi name is kyk vozha—double vozha) and the elements on the left ear in lines 47 and 59 (tutsh dzyn—half tutsh). It seems like the main purpose of these new elements is to enlarge the possible number of earmarks and, therefore, to enable each reindeer owner on the peninsula to have his or her own unique earmark.
The introduction of the registers on the Kola Peninsula was not by force: the herders were not required to re-mark all their reindeer with the mark registered to them. However, after the registers were introduced, it was announced that the enterprises and administration would support herders’ claims on animals (including protests on poaching, claims on animals that were rounded up by other brigades or in the other enterprise, etc.) only if these animals bear a registered earmark; otherwise, the officials would not support the case, although the herders still could appeal to customary law. In other words, the herders were told that their property in animals bearing their registered earmarks was more secure, which is, of course, quite a valuable asset in a region where reindeer roam freely half of the year and it is far from certain where they will be rounded up in the autumn. Therefore, the herders made deliberate attempts to increase the number of reindeer with registered earmarks.
At the time of field research, ten years after the introduction of the registers, virtually all personal reindeer have registered earmarks. Of course, these were not always the earmarks of the person who actually managed the animals: on the Kola Peninsula, it is common to register earmarks for one's sons and daughters, reindeerless siblings, good friends, and so forth, and then build up their herds by marking some of one's calves or tseloushka (literally: “full-eared”—the local name for a reindeer older than one year without a mark)11 with their earmarks. This practice resembles the role of gifts, inheritance, and dowry in the eastern tundra areas; simultaneously, it leads to a very high percentage of female earmark owners in comparison to the eastern regions.
Therefore, the most immediate consequence of the formalization of earmarking on the Kola Peninsula was the elimination of its situatedness and embeddedness in the wider system of social relations, bringing it instead in line with the two requirements of a “good” categorization, which the informal system is lacking: (1) completeness; and (2) mutual exclusivity of categories. The new system is complete in the sense that any earmark can be attributed to one and only one person; the earmarks of two reindeer owners nowadays cannot be identical. The system features the mutual exclusiveness of the categories because, at least from the official point of view, all the reindeer belonging to a particular owner have the same earmark. This theoretically leads to the possibility of establishing which reindeer belongs to which owner without being involved in the local web of social relations and information exchange, just by consulting one of the two registers (or, in complicated cases, both registers).
Of course, as is always the case with formal systems maintained by the state, the reality is more complicated than it appears if looked at through the lens of the registers. Thus, the seeming completeness of the categorization is constantly subverted by the existence of tseloushka animals, the adult reindeer without earmarks. Their status as property cannot be established by the registers and reindeer herders do not hesitate to use this to their advantage. Similarly, the exclusivity of the individual property categories is achieved only because a whole set of property relations (such as building up herds for one's children and friends) is deliberately ignored; furthermore, such an important yet complex property relation as inheritance, despite being officially recognized, is not easily accommodated in the formal system. These obvious shortcomings notwithstanding, the process of formalization on the Kola Peninsula has been much more successful and has advanced further than in Bol'shezemel'skaia Tundra. The reason is, it should be repeated, because the state of reindeer herding is less favorable for the smooth working of the traditional informal system, the involvement of the powerful administrative resource, and the abundant use of—and even more abundant appealing to—the international (Fennoscandian) experience of formalizing reindeer marking.
This success, however, has come at a certain price. First, the new system is obviously more complex in the sense that it contains a greater variety of earmarks, which has made it necessary to use more earmark elements. It seems like the size of the new system is at odds with the memory capacities of most of the reindeer herders. In fact, aged informants who were interviewed about earmarks said that previously people always could establish the owner of a reindeer by glancing at its earmarks, which now is no longer the case: when reindeer are put through a corral, some animals bear earmarks that nobody knows or remembers, so that people have to consult the register to find out whom the animals belong to. The register is now always in use during corral work. The second aspect of the price paid, in our opinion, consists in the fact that reindeer owners have become more visible as individuals. Indeed, nowadays any single owner can be identified by the earmark. Property relations thus become individualized.
Formalization by Computer: The Case of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug
In contrast to the European part of Russia, in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (henceforward abbreviated as YNAO) things went differently after the end of the Soviet Union: here, reindeer herding enterprises (former sovkhozy) quickly ceased to be the main organizational form of reindeer herding and private ownership in reindeer became predominant. Currently, there are three institutional types of reindeer herding in the YNAO. Besides the enterprises that receive considerable economic support from the state, there are independent reindeer-herding families as well as families that are organized into obshchiny. The latter are institutional entities that allow Indigenous people to petition for lands to practice traditional livelihoods and can thus be conceptualized as units for land claims (Fondahl et al. 2000). The YNAO has a specific Act on Reindeer Husbandry adopted in 1998, aimed at securing the legal, economic, natural, and social bases for reindeer pastoralism; in 2016 it was revised (Government of YNAO 1998; 2016). However, while reindeer-herding enterprises and obshchiny are recognized as legal entities, independent reindeer-herding families are not (Turi 2016). In 2011, 17 percent of the reindeer in YNAO were owned by sovkhozy, 42 percent by obshchiny and similar entities, and 41 percent by private families (either members of brigades or independent reindeer-herding families); the number of reindeer owned by the sovkhozy has remained stable over the most recent years, while the number of reindeer in independent households and obshchiny has increased (Klokov 2012).
The Department of Agriculture of the Administration of the YNAO is the body responsible for developing policies for reindeer pastoralism, by organizing subsidies and supporting the economic development of reindeer herding. The need to introduce a formal system of marking reindeer ownership was felt by this body for quite a long time. However, instead of reforming the traditional system (as was done on the Kola Peninsula), the YNAO department chose a different way: probably taking the ear tagging of cattle and sheep as an example, a system of reindeer ear tags was introduced here.
The first experimental work on the development of this system started in 2009–10 (Yuzhakov 2012). However, it was not until the anthrax outbreak in 2016 that the development of the first plastic ear tagging system really took off. In the summer of 2016, more than 2,500 reindeer died due to an anthrax outbreak in the central part of the Yamal Peninsula. The diagnosis was also confirmed in 24 inhabitants of this region who ate unprocessed reindeer meat. Altogether, 97 people who happened to be in the epicenter of the outbreak were hospitalized (Popova et al. 2016). One quite logical consequence was the decision to vaccinate the entire population of semi-domesticated reindeer in Yamal against anthrax. In line with the struggle against this anthrax outbreak, the state authorities argued that successful vaccination policies can work only if the vaccination status of all reindeer could be traced. One way to achieve this would be based on plastic tags in reindeer ears containing the individual number of the animal. The numbers were recorded in an electronic database; it also included information on sex, age, vaccination status, and ownership of the animals. This explains why the work of spreading the new system among reindeer herders was delegated to the veterinary service, which remains responsible for it up to the present.
The first wave of the reindeer ear-tagging campaign started in 2017 in the Priural'skaia Tundra and was later extended to the Yarsalinskaia Tundra (Khaimina et al. 2021). During this time, more than 250 thousand reindeer were registered and labelled. For reindeer herders, this procedure was free of charge. The official propaganda insisted that this would allow solving the main problems of reindeer breeding and zootechnical accounting, tracking the movement of animals between herds, and carrying out anti-epizootic measures. The electronic databases with data on individual reindeer gathered in this process could be used for speeding up the breeding process, organizing breeding work, improving the breed, and regulating the health of the reindeer herd, which would undoubtedly increase both productivity and economic efficiency of reindeer breeding as a whole. In addition, since 2019, reindeer herders have been required to contact the local veterinary services to ensure that the ear tags were suitable for their reindeer by color. The same year, the YNAO regional media announced a project of introducing electronic identification of reindeer using electronic chips, which, however, has not been implemented throughout the whole area.
Since 2020, it has no longer been allowed to sell reindeer to the regional slaughtering houses without the tags. Selling reindeer to these slaughterhouses was the most efficient way for the herders to get money for their work and, therefore, the prohibition had palpable consequences. In November 2022, some Nenets reindeer herders took animals for slaughter to the regional slaughter facility, but they were refused because of the lack of tags. The herders were told to contact the authorities to obtain reindeer tags, but to no avail: the veterinary service said that tagging was possible only in the subsequent year. The herders had to take their emaciated animals back to the tundra and incurred considerable loss of income. This example shows that, from the Yamal reindeer herders’ point of view, the formalization entails additional difficulties in their livelihoods. In addition, labelling reindeer with plastic ear tags was necessary for reindeer-herding enterprises and obshchiny to apply for state support. In 2021, the draft federal law on mandatory labeling of domestic and farm animals was developed by the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation.
To summarize, currently, every Yamal herder must label their reindeer with ear tags. They are allowed to combine the tags with traditional ways of earmarking reindeer, but only the information contained in the tag (or, more correctly, in the electronic database entry to which the tag refers) is recognized officially. In practice, however, reindeer herders tag mostly those animals that go up for sale. One can sometimes see tags in the ears of female animals in the herd (see Figure 7), but transport animals and the most productive female animals are almost never tagged if they do not belong to an enterprise. The reason is that the veterinary service provides tags only for the animals it vaccinates. At the same time, the percentage of animal deaths due to vaccination remains substantial and private herders do not risk the lives of their most valuable animals. However, one can always find traditional earmarks on these reindeer. As a result, the new and old systems coexist in practice, with the old system being in many instances ignored by the state. The new system of identification of reindeer, however, is not accessible for many private reindeer herders because it does not make sense without access to the electronic database, which is not possible in the tundra due to limited internet access and poor computer equipment. Even though the Yamal herders are supposed to comply with the state's requirements, the system itself is not transparent to them: it is technically so intricate that herders still see themselves as forced to rely on the old system in addition to the new one.
A female reindeer bearing a plastic ear tag and a traditional earmark. Photographed in Nadymskaia Tundra by Konstantin Serotetto, a local reindeer herder, in March 2024.
Citation: Sibirica 23, 3; 10.3167/sib.2024.230301
Conclusion
The three cases of attempted or realized formalization described above exemplify what happens to informal practices when they undergo bureaucratic scrutiny. We can see the classic procedures at work: the system of earmarking gets standardized, the “bad” categorizations that violate the basic principles of completeness and categorical exclusivity get replaced with “good” ones that comply with these principles, and finally, in the case of the YNAO, the system becomes digitized, which allows new technologies of electronic processing and data storage to be used. In this process, the informal system, which used to be situated and embedded in the set of social relations and informal communication and was designed to work under exactly these conditions, progressively gets stripped of this situatedness and embeddedness. However, the more it gets stripped, the more it loses the main asset of that very embeddedness: its ability to reflect the social and natural reality “as it is,” taking into account the whole complexity and natural resistance to rigid categories. In the course of formalization, this ability is progressively lost and gives way to rigid schemas characteristic of the “state's view.” Every reader of James Scott can immediately recognize these procedures and processes at work in our cases.
However, the cases discussed point to some further, less discussed modifications that occur in the process of reindeer-marking practices being progressively appropriated by the state. The essence of this modification is the progressive replacement of what can be regarded as prototypic categories with Aristotelian ones (see Taylor 1995 for discussion of these terms in relation to linguistic categorizations). Interestingly, it has long since been proven that Aristotelian categories are poorly suited both for communication and practice, and the old viewpoint that they represent (or should represent) the minimum logical entities of human thinking is now considered outdated (Taylor 1995). Still, it seems like the state wishes to use Aristotelian categories in its documentation, despite all the problems this creates.
In the informal system, the earmark born by the reindeer pointed to its owner as a “best example” in a way quite similar to how words point to linguistic categories. Thus, the word “chair,” when heard by an English speaker, points to a certain prototypical chair, the “best example” of all chairs, and objects in the real word would be classified by the speaker as “chairs” on the basis of their physical or functional similarity to this prototype (Taylor 1995). In the same way, the earmark in the informal system of reindeer marking in fact points to the prototypical owner of the reindeer (the person to whom the earmark “belongs”) and implies looking for potential owners among those related to this prototypical owner in this or that way. By employing the knowledge they have about ever-changing social relations around them, as well as concrete circumstances of the place and the moment, the herders usually can pick out the concrete person to whom the reindeer should belong.
Note that the same categorization principle works also in the opposite way. For every reindeer owner, the herders can point to the prototypical reindeer (in terms of the earmark it bears) as object of their property as well as to the set of bearers of other earmarks, who can also belong to this owner but would not be the best examples of their property. The result is a system of categories that is flexible, functional, and economic at the same time, just like a natural language. And, just like a natural language (as any lawyer would readily attest), this system poorly fits the formalisms of the state. Instead of using prototypes as central for categories, the state demands a set of unambiguous Aristotelian attributes, which would allow, on the one hand, to relate the object in the real world to a particular class of things and, on the other hand, to differentiate it from other members of this class. In other words, it needs Aristotelian categories, ones that can be defined through genus and specification. This becomes particularly urgent when it comes to the relations of property, the classic object of regulation by the state. This desire for Aristotelian categories, we suggest, is behind the other tendency that is visible in the examples above: the tendency to progressive individualization of both people as subjects of property and reindeer as its objects. Indeed, since any object in the world is unique, the Aristotelian categorization of this object taken to its logical limit would produce a category with only one item, the object itself. Note that the desire for individualization as an element of formalization seems to be so strong that it overcomes the well-known desire for simplification and schematization as the elements of “state vision.” In fact, in the cases described above, appropriation by the state has made the systems much more complex.
Indeed, in the case of YNAO and, up to a lesser degree, the Kola Peninsula, the systems have come to be so intricate that their use by the herders is impossible without access to specific databases, notably the paper register in the case of the Kola Peninsula and the electronic database in the case of Yamal. The sequence of digits engraved in a plastic reindeer tag cannot be interpreted by anyone who does not have access to the database. Since the herders do not have this access due to their limited possibility to use modern technologies in the tundra, the use of tags does not make sense to the very people by whom and for whom this system was created. The decision of the Yamal herders to use the traditional earmarks together with the tag is the only solution possible. Importantly, this solution gives the best insight into the irony and controversy of the process of appropriation of traditional practices by the state.
Acknowledgements
Data for this article were collected by the authors individually. Compilation, comparison, and conceptualization of the manuscript all took place in the framework of the research project “Drivers and Feedbacks of Changes in Arctic Terrestrial Biodiversity” (CHARTER), financed by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (grant 869471). We express our gratitude to colleagues in this project who commented on earlier drafts of this text. Our particular thanks go to the reindeer herders from Priural'skaia and Yarsalinskaia Tundras who gave as advice on certain details about earmarks.
Notes
In Russian, the word tamga—originating from the times of Golden Horde rule—means “possession and identity mark” and “khan's edict,” although the second meaning is usually considered outdated.
Roza Laptander has conducted ethnographic field research in the Yamal Nenets Autonomous Area since 2000. She grew up there and has returned to Yamal repeatedly. Kirill Istomin has studied reindeer herding in the Komi Republic and adjacent areas (including the eastern part of Kola Peninsula) since 1999. Joachim Otto Habeck studied reindeer herders in the Komi Republic and adjacent areas from 1998 to 2006.
Our fieldwork took place among Nenets and Komi reindeer herders and we used Nenets and Komi languages during this fieldwork. The few interviews with Saami and Khanty herders containing information on the topic were conducted by us either in Russian or in Komi languages. Therefore, in this article we report only Nenets and Komi technical terms related to the practice we describe. This does not mean that the other three groups necessarily also use these terms.
Stammler does mention that modern fur marks among Nenets often take the form of the owner's initials, but he thinks that they started to take this form once “indigenous peoples of Siberia adopted the Cyrillic alphabet” (Stammler 2012: 83). As our materials indicate, however, this happened at least 150 years earlier.
Although Sidorov is one of the best-known scholars of Komi language and culture, this study, published in German in a Finnish journal several years before the scholar was arrested, is not particularly well known. That is a pity, because this work is the only one we could find that focuses directly on property marks among Komi. Unfortunately, it describes and analyzes mostly just those marks of the southern, settled Komi.
Note that the “canonic” position of reindeer ears for Komi (the position from which the “frontal” (vodz’) and the “rear” (bör) part of the ears are determined) is the one when the ears are erect and look outwards in relation to the reindeer head, that is, in opposite directions. This means that on the picture of the ears (where their back sides face the observer), the frontal part is on the right side for the left ear and on the left side of the right ear. In other words, the left ear's “front” and the right ear's “front” are facing each other in the center of the figure.
Stammler (2012) makes a similar claim, although in a much milder form, about Yamal Nenets. Since Nenets indeed have clans, his claim is, of course, much more realistic.
It is, however, difficult to assess when and where this practice emerged and how widespread it was. Thus, in accordance with the field data of Roza Laptander, this practice was not spread in the Yarsalinskaia Tundra and the Priural'skaia Tundra; there the “collective” reindeer could bear the mark of one of their previous owners, which became the “brigade mark.”
The full name of the enterprise at the time of this study (2002) was “Sovkhoz Bol'shaia Inta” Stock-Share Company. Nowadays, after several amalgamations with other enterprises, it is part of the “Agrokompleks Inta Pripoliarnaia” Company.
One advantage of depicting ears horizontally in this way is that the “front” of both ears is on the top and the “rear” is on the bottom of the picture. This makes the picture intuitively clearer than the vertical depiction, which is used in Sergei M.’s notation system.
Since calf marking usually happens in winter, after the herds are rounded up, the bond between mother and calf is difficult to use for establishing the descent of the calf. Therefore, the basic rule is that each reindeer owner can mark one calf for every two female reindeer bearing his or her earmark that are found in the herd (which actually reflects well the actual calf mortality), while the rest of the calves are marked for the enterprise. Of course, the owner can mark the calf for themself or for another person. It also rather frequently happens that some reindeer, including unmarked calves, escape the autumn roundup and slip from the herders’ control for one or even several years. Therefore, it is not uncommon to find a relatively mature reindeer (yearling or even two years old) without a mark in the rounded-up herd. Although these reindeer are claimed by the enterprise, the herders who round up the herds in the autumn frequently mark such reindeer for themselves or their relatives without informing the enterprise about them.
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