Perito continues its series with anthropologist Dmitriy Oparin, a researcher from the Passages laboratory (Bordeaux Montaigne University) and co-creator of the podcast Tozhe Rossia (“Russia Too”). In this interview, Dmitry talks with Victoria Peemot, anthropologist, researcher at University of Helsinki, author of The Horse in my Blood. Multispecies Kinship in the Altai and Saian Mountains, about her nomadic childhood in South Tyva, anthropological studies of the border with Mongolia, and a repressed family horse, as well as overcoming the coloniality of social research and what it means to be an indigenous scholar.

About a childhood with horses and anthropology of Tyvan horse breeding

Dmitry Oparin: Tell me, please, where did you grow up?

Victoria Peemot: When I was less than a year old, I was given up to my father’s parents, so I grew up with my grandma and grandpa. When they retired, they started tending their own herd. I spent all of my weekends and holidays with them, I’d skip class because I was at the encampment [A yurt and cattle pens. Sometimes several related family units will share one site] and didn’t make it on time to Kyzyl, where I studied at the national school. Mongolia was across the river from our encampment. At that time, there were no border posts there; we simply crossed to the other, Mongolian, side of the river and sunbathed, because the sands there were better.

Incidentally, my mother’s parents were well known nomadic leaders, and my maternal grandfather was an active communist who represented Tyva in Moscow. His name was Ivan Simchitovich Danzurun (1927 - 2018); he was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet from 1966 through 1970.

Did you learn to ride horses young?

I started to ride late for Tyvan kids—probably at around eight or nine. At first I rode on the croup of my grandfather’s horse, holding on to the saddle, and then I started riding myself. I really loved it. My grandfather gave me horses for my birthdays. I rode a horse to fetch water, drove cows to pasture, and tended a flock. The yurts were already being transported on trucks, and we drove all the cattle on horseback.

I’m a little surprised by European horse riding. I went horseback riding near the city of Tampere, Finland, and it was unusual for me for various reasons. First of all, the horses were Icelandic—they require completely different seating positions and entirely different movements, even the way they hold the bridle is different. It was difficult because that wasn’t the way I rode in Tyva. When you sit on a horse in Tyva, you have a practical goal and you’re riding to accomplish something. When you are a child, your goal may be just to go swimming in a river or lake, of course, but you still have some sort of purpose. There’s a Mongolian anthropologist, Bat-Ochir, who noted that among Mongolian children, horses are strictly associated with work, but the child wants to ride the horse, so they start doing work and helping the adults, becoming a part of the household.

What was your relationship to horses?

When I was at the encampment, my day started and ended with horse work. You wake up and the first thing you do is go get your horse, which has been grazing in the nighttime pasture, not far from the yurt. You bring your horse home, get it ready for work, saddle it. Then you drink tea and go do other things: sometimes you need to milk the cows or drive the sheep to their daily pasture, again on a horse. And in the evening, when all the work has already been completed, all the cattle are already at the encampment, then the working horse must also be given a rest, and it must be taken to pasture. The day starts with a horse and ends with a horse.

There are also gender differences. In Tyva, girls can be owners of individual horses. But when they talk about a herd and ownership of the herd, they always name a man. That is, the entire herd belongs to the man, but the individual horses in this herd belong to his wife, daughters, and sons.

How many horses did your grandma and grandpa have?

The number varied, because my father’s parents, who had worked in the villages in Soviet times, only started shepherding after they retired. At first, relatives who were shepherds looked after their livestock, and then grandparents took their livestock and began to gradually increase the herd. They had fewer horses compared to cows and sheep. But you don’t usually ask our people a question like that, Dima.

No?

“How many horses do you have?”, yes. Tyvan horse breeders, when asked this question, prefer to answer: “My horses are mostly chestnut.”

They deflect.

Yes, in response to the number they usually tell you about the coat. But people usually know who has how many horses. This is considered an indecent question, sort of tactless, and then, one should not usually boast about their number of livestock. And all the same, people who live in this area know how many horses their neighbors have—you can just ride over and see how many of them there are. People can determine whose herd is whose from afar simply by looking at the dominant coat color of the horses.

It’s like asking: how much money do you have in your bank account right now?

Yes.

And you say: I have such-and-such bank.

Something like that.

I had several horses, and one fine day in the mid-nineties they were all stolen across the border to Mongolia—at that time horse theft was booming in our country, on both sides of the border zone. I won’t say who stole more from whom, but that’s where my horses went.

What was your PhD thesis about?

I started my graduate program at Helsinki in 2015. At first I thought I’d write my thesis on absolutely all the Tyvan traditions associated with horses. And then, when I started to gather materials and piece together my thesis, I realized that I could probably only describe a tiny portion of all the traditional practices. I wanted to talk specifically about the relationship between people and horses; I was interested in how, in post-Soviet times, herd owners very quickly began to build their identity around their horses. That is, in Tyva, being the owner of a champion horse of the republican races is very cool. Usually everyone knows the name of the champion horse’s owner, and they also know his horse’s name.

I have a family story related to that. During Stalin’s repressions, one member of my clan was the owner of one such famous horse named Ezir Kara, or “The Black Eagle.” When the owner was arrested in 1938, all property, livestock and horses were confiscated. The owner himself was later sentenced to death. And a couple of weeks after the owner’s execution, the horse was also killed, because it was too famous, and it was impossible to keep it and run it in the races. In post-Soviet times, my uncle, journalist and writer Choodu Kara-Kuske, made a great contribution to popularizing the story of this horse. In 1993, a festival dedicated to this horse was held for the first time, in our summer pasture near Lake Shara-Nuur.

And I was interested in how people associated with their horses and how they understood their own stories through them. Because thanks to this horse and thanks to the efforts of Chood Kara-Kuske, the expression “they did not spare even the horse” appeared in our language—the times were so difficult, cruel that even the horse was not spared, that even the horse became a victim of human cruelty.

Have you conducted fieldwork in your region?

I conducted fieldwork practically in my backyard. I went straight to my native Tes-Khem District and worked with my father’s relatives—uncles, cousins, second cousins. And then, for comparison, I made trips to other areas along the Mongolian border.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of conducting fieldwork with your relatives?

We can start with the minuses. Sometimes it’s difficult to convince people that you need information. My relatives would constantly say, “Well, Vika, you already know that.” It helped me then that for the first three years of fieldwork I usually traveled with the American ethnomusicologist Robbie Beahrs. And when I asked a question, people began to explain it to Robbie, and began with the phrase: “Vika, explain to your colleague that this is how it is.” That is, I had to change my position as an insider who grew up there, to an outsider who is interested in learning new things or understanding something.

On fieldwork in the border areas

You just recently started working with the Tukha reindeer herders of northern Mongolia. Are they Tyvans too?

Across various media and in anthropological literature they are known as Dukha, which begins with a voiced sound [d], or Tsaatan, which when translated from Mongolian means “reindeer herder.” They call themselves Tukha—with an unvoiced [t]. I consider them Tyvans, because their language is Tyvan, just a different dialect. And they pronounce the word “Tukha” with a voiceless “t,” and they use this word to refer to themselves, to me, and to Tyva— “Тukhа.”

Was it still possible for them to safely cross back and forth across the border?

The taiga’s huge, Dima, there are simply no border posts. Until recently, it was possible to cross, but now, they say, drones have appeared and it has become more difficult. Border guards are now using drones for surveillance. And before that they drove quietly. My Tukha interlocutors told me where this mountain was and where the mineral springs were on the Tyvan side. Of course, they did not cross the border through official checkpoints.

Approximately how many Tyvans or Tukha are there in Mongolia?

According to official estimates, there are about 500 Tukha people, but in a conversation they had with me they said that there are no more than 380 of them, around 400. And in the west of Mongolia there is another group of Tyvans. There, several thousand Tyvans live in the Bayan-Ulgii and Khovd aimags [provinces]. I work with them too.

Is the fact that you started working with Mongolian Tyvans connected with the beginning of the war?

The answer is not so clear, because I started my fieldwork in Mongolia all the way back in 2016. I’d been there before, but not in the context of research. In 2003, I went to Ulaanbaatar to film a series of documentary films about the Naadam festival for the Tyvan broadcasting company. In 2016, I needed to see where my clan used to live, where our ancestral mountain Khaan Kogei—“Khan Khökhii” in Mongolian, situated in the Uvs aimag of Mongolia—I was finally able to do it. And then we went to western Mongolia, met people, then the pandemic happened, I couldn’t travel anywhere, even to Tyva, and then the war started. And, of course, Tyva is closed to us, and so I concentrated on Mongolia.

There’s another reason as well. I work with Finnish archives. In the beginning of the 20th century, the Finns were actively traveling to Tyva, but at the time, it was still part of Qing China [Tyva was part of the Qing Empire, which was ruled by the Manchu dynasty from 1758 - 1912], and, of course, there was no border between Tyva and Mongolia, and in these archival sources that I study, there are also no boundaries. And I’m interested in visiting precisely the places where these researchers were working in western and northern Mongolia.

Do these international border areas create difficulties when conducting your fieldwork? For example, I didn’t face any particular problems in Chukotka, but I nevertheless had to constantly communicate with the border guards, report where I was, and they, in turn, sometimes reported to me about where I was, what village I had arrived in.

In 2016, when we crossed the border between Mongolia and Russia in the Altai Republic, there’s a checkpoint in Tashanta [Tashantа́ is a village on the border with Mongolia in the southeast of the Altai Republic, in the Kosh-Agach Region. The administrative center of the Tashanti rural settlement], and they detained us, interrogated my American colleague for a long time, about an hour, and then asked why we had so much recording equipment. He is a musicologist, so there was a lot of audio equipment. It wasn’t very pleasant.

In 2017, we worked in one of the western regions of Tyva, also on the border with Mongolia, and we stayed in a hotel. And at one point I opened the door to my room and saw two border guards sitting right outside our door, literally directly outside the door, two young men sitting there silently. They saw me and said: “Let’s go to the military base to talk.” We had to go. For four hours they interrogated us, took all our equipment away at the entrance “for safe-keeping,” they said. We later worried that maybe they were doing more than just saving it for us. In 2018, back in Kyzyl, we also had an encounter with FSB agents. Also not very pleasant.

Half of Tyva is a border zone, and you can’t travel in these areas. Even when I travel for family reasons with children, I have to obtain special passes for traveling through the border regions for myself and my children. And you do it online, send an application—it used to arrive in a month and a half, then they reduced it to 2 weeks, probably for those who live abroad. And this is done by the border department of the local FSB. You give them all your data in advance, your entire plan of where you will go.

Besides, Tyva is small, everyone knows each other and sees each other around. Imagine a bare steppe, you can see a car coming from really far off. And the border guards can distinguish between local cars and those from out of town. If the car is not local, then they usually make a visit after the people have left and ask who was there, for what purpose, if they had a pass or not. My uncle told me: “We can’t even invite guests to our place without turning toward the Kremlin.” That’s how it is. After I left, FSB agents came to see my shepherd uncles and asked who I was with and what I was asking about. Unpleasant. I wouldn’t go to Tyva now, I wouldn’t take the risk.

Does Mongolia feel foreign to you?

No, not at all. I have already said that the ancestral lands of my Soyan family line are on Mongolian territory, Mount Khaan Kogei, which I saw every day at our seasonal stops from spring to autumn; it is visible on the horizon, across the border. You see this mountain every day, you hear talks about this mountain, your grandparents talk about this mountain, but usually in Soviet times people did not go there.

In Mongolia, I work not just with Tyvans, but with Mongolian-speaking groups living directly on the border, who have a history of being neighbors or interacting with Tyvans specifically from my family line, which are the Bayads and Dörvöds. [Ethnic groups living in western Mongolia]. Some of the Bayats speak Tyvan. For example, last year I stopped by the main office of the Uvs Nuur Nature Reserve [Transboundary Russian-Mongolian UNESCO World Heritage Site “Uvs Nuur Basin,” located in Mongolia and Tyva, in the basin of Uvs Lake] and in the city, I was worried about my poor Mongolian skills. And the first person I came across, a biologist, spoke Tyvan very well and knew my relatives on the Tyvan side. In Tyva, on the border, people sometimes speak Mongolian; some of my relatives who speak Mongolian. And now I’m interested to see how the beginning of the war has become the impetus for more intense interactions. People began to travel intensively to Mongolia, to more actively build contacts or strengthen old connections.

Are Tyvans emigrating to Mongolia?

I think there is no large-scale emigration. There are students there, many travel to Mongolia just to buy cars, for example, and register them there so as to not pay the Russian customs tax. And they drive around Tyva with Mongolian license plates. Or they go to private clinics in Mongolia.

Is the medicine there better?

The medicine there is better. Before the war, people went to Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk, but now some of these people now began to travel to Mongolia, because there is good private medicine there. And then, many who have apartments in Ulaanbaatar are now trying to send their children to schools in Mongolia. And those who have money send their children, teenagers, to boarding schools in South Korea. But this started precisely with the outbreak of war.

During Soviet times, Tyvan identity was constructed in such a way so as to distance itself from Mongolia. But this is probably not so much a natural process, but rather a process of purposeful construction of identity. That is, there were a people who lived alongside the Mongols, whose entire history for several hundred years was shared with the Western Mongols. And then suddenly a state border appears between Tyva and Mongolia, and they find themselves citizens of different countries. Ideological work was done to make people start viewing Mongolia as a foreign country and the Mongolians as foreigners. ‘Foreign’ has some negative connotations associated with it, but I noticed that this attitude is less prevalent among those who live along the border or on the border, and who have personal contacts, family contacts across the border, and more among Tyvans who are less likely to encounter Mongolians.

What did your research in the border zones entail?

I was interested in how people were reviving their cross-border contacts. Illegal crossing occurred even during Soviet times, but then it intensified. In the 1990s, there was rampant cattle theft on both sides. As a Tyvan, I felt uncomfortable talking about this topic in the border areas of Mongolia. In 2016, for example, I talked with Mongolian livestock herders, and I had to ask people directly: “Have your horses been taken across the border?” I was told that yes, they had been.

I would like us to get through these difficult moments and start being friends again.

On the other hand, cattle stealing can be approached as a specific form of interaction that has its own ethics.

It’s like anthropologist Michael Herzfeld. He worked with shepherds in Crete, and there stealing a ram was a sign of a real man, this act was not viewed as negative. But in Tyva, until the mid-1990s, there were unspoken laws regarding cattle theft, and after that these laws disappeared and were no longer observed.

Back in the early 1990s, a herd of cows was stolen from us at night. In the morning all the milk cows had been returned. My grandmother explained that even cattle thieves do not take such cows, because the calves they left behind will suffer. You couldn’t just take away the livestock and not leave at least one cow for the owner.

When I meet with anthropologists who work in the regions neighboring Tyva, they ask specifically about cattle stealing. Let’s say a person worked in Altai and immediately chimes in with: “But the Altai people are very afraid of Tyvan cattle thieves. They say that they come naked at night, on horseback, so that nothing rings or rattles, and they smear themselves with some herbs so that the dogs don’t smell them.”

The Cult of Shoigu and absence of nostalgia for Soviet times

When I was in Tyva in 2018–2019, I noticed that the population was becoming increasingly critical of the authorities. And our government then consisted of Sergei Shoigu’s henchmen. I thought: well, good, they finally started to be critical of their officials.

I am from the south of Tyva, and in Soviet times, the south of Tyva was considered insufficiently loyal to the authorities. Why were Southerners less loyal? Firstly, because of the border issue: the borders divided the traditional clan territories, people constantly crossed the border, and because of this we came under repressive measures. Many men from the clans who lived along the new border were repressed, sent to prison or executed. The generation of repressed people are the parents of my grandparents. There is a living memory of the repressions.

When I started doing research, we asked the livestock herders: “Do you miss Soviet times? Maybe your situation was better in Soviet times?” The answers surprised me: everyone said that they didn’t miss Soviet times. Many of the livestock herders I work with are children and grandchildren of those who were repressed.

People remember their lost ancestral lands. And the herders said that in post-Soviet times, on the contrary, things were better, because everything then depended on how hardworking the person himself was. Hardworking meant you had a lot of livestock and lived comfortably, you could send your children to study, buy an apartment. When asked about help from the government, they answered that they did not need any help, as long as the government did not interfere. But in recent years, programs to support young livestock herders have also appeared and funds have begun to be allocated.

Why do the people of Tyva go to the front, do you think?

The media usually say that the economic situation there is bad and people go to earn money. But in Tyva it was simply about one man, half Tyvan, who was the Russian Minister of Defense.

And he has a sort of cult-of-personality in Tyva?

He does. In 1999, Sergei Shoigu became one of the three leaders of Unity (Yedinstvo), the party that arose before United Russia (Yedinaya Rossiya). And then the entire republic, 98%, voted for Unity’s proposals, and Unity’s candidates were always elected to Tyva with high support. At that time, Shoigu was the head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which he created from scratch. People respected him, and, of course, he was a savior back then.

And then he headed the Ministry of Defense. And many began to send their children to military schools. Newborn boys were called Shoigu in his honor, or Shoigu Maadyr “Hero Shoigu” or “Bogatyr Shoigu.” Shortly before the start of the war, a music video for a Tyvan-language song was released. In it, people in clothes reminiscent of the military clothing of Genghis Khan’s army of the Mongol Empire were riding horses. And at the end there was a sentence saying that we believe that Shoigu is a reincarnation of the Mongolian army general Subutai.

Decolonizing academia and indigenous studies

In the Western academic environment, there is such a thing as an indigenous scholar. Sometimes I think that I have no right to deal with indigenous cultures. I am Russian, from Moscow in particular, I come to Chukotka, and this situation is a priori colonial. The more indigenous scholars there are, the better, because it is the indigenous scholar who can understand what an outsider cannot understand, who have great social capital that an outsider will never have, and knowledge of the language (most often). Then the thought occurred to me that it is wrong to divide scholars into indigenous and non-indigenous. I was constantly in a painful internal dialogue with myself about this. What is your opinion on this issue?

Many people are now thinking about working with people outside their own group, ethnic or otherwise. In Helsinki I work in the indigenous studies department, and I am very glad that I can focus on indigenous research methodology.

But it’s not that simple. Probably, for all non-Tyvans I’m just a Tyvan, but when I find myself in Tyva, I understand that there are so many identities that it’s not easy to feel like you belong to a specific group. In the west of Tyva I am always a southern Tyvan, in the south of Tyva I am always a Tyvan from a specific small place with my own family history.

And even in my family, my insider-outsider positions are constantly changing, not only with men, but even with women, because we have different experiences. During the day I talk about horses with men (and among them I am an outsider, as a woman), and at night I talk with women—about family matters, children, everyday life, and with them, I am also not quite at home.

Do you ever feel like you’re paid special attention in academic settings as an indigenous researcher, that you may be invited to a conference or a collective publication solely as an indigenous researcher?

I have received invitations to take part in events where the stated topic is related to indigenous peoples. Apart from me, there were no indigenous authors or speakers. And then I began to worry: why were they calling me? But I wouldn't say it’s a particularly difficult experience. In 2017, I met Sven Haakanson at a conference. He is an Alutiiq [member of the Alaska Native people. — Ed. note], an anthropologist from the University of Washington. And so we discussed how to do research together with our people and for the benefit of our people. The Tyvan people help me in my work, and they have the same motive: to help their people, preserve knowledge or share it.

Does it ever seem to you that this is nothing more than pretty words? That anthropology never helps anyone and the researchers who say that it does people good are simply flattering themselves? It doesn’t do these people any good, it’s published in English, so none of the participants will read the studies.

Just today I was thinking about Natasha Fijn, an Australian anthropologist working in Mongolia. And she wrote about another field school in Mongolia for students from an Australian university. I thought it was wonderful. Natasha did her thesis on Mongolia, worked with herders, now she is the head of the center for Mongolian studies at her university in Australia and is actively involved in cultural and scientific cooperation between two countries.

This is a very positive example. And there needs to be more people like Natasha. She speaks Mongolian, published a book in Mongolia—not even a scientific work, a children’s book.

But such cases are rare. You’re right, what good does it do the people when someone comes over, collects data from them, publishes it in different languages, and then never returns? I hope this bad practice becomes obsolete. And this is where indigenous studies departments help, because they are trying to develop research protocols in collaboration with Indigenous peoples.

Indigenous New Zealand scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith says that any research is by default colonial, that you’re coming from a different place with different levels of opportunity—medical, informational, financial. You ask questions, and a question is always a demand. Even if you ask the most polite questions, you’re still demanding a response, you anticipate it. I sometimes break down internally because I realize that any participatory, ethically verified anthropology is colonial, there is no escape.

I should say that I travel to Tyva using money from a Finnish foundation and represent a Finnish university. And yes, inequality immediately accumulates here, of course. And I, too, break down internally, and then try to build myself up again.

What do we do then? Stop doing research? I think that research still needs to be done. We have to acknowledge that research is inherently collaborative and researchers depend on their collaborators from Indigenous communities. We need to make sure that the interests of our collaborators are also secured and that we, the researchers, aren’t the only ones getting paid for being part of the same research project. But there needs to be some kind of equal conditions.

I also have internal discomfort. That’s why it was no coincidence that in the first year of my field work I went to my native area specifically, because it was more comfortable for me to ask people for help there. Because these were my kin, close, distant—absolutely the entire region there is made up of relatives to one degree or another. And since my parents were the first from our village who moved to the city, who had their own house there, many relatives from my father’s and mother’s villages lived with us, stayed with us, the children of relatives studied in Kyzyl and lived with us.

That is, the first time I went, I felt comfortable and I continued this relationship built by my parents. And the second time, I began to think: how many times can I come to people like this, ask for help, and even bring foreign colleagues with me? So that they would accept not only me, but also my colleagues, so that they would help not only me, but also them.

Memory

What are you writing about now?

I went to Japan on a grant from a Japanese foundation. We have a joint project with Professor Takakura Hiroki, director of the Center for Northeast Asian Studies at Tohoku University. I am writing a book based on my work with Finnish archives on Tyva and western Mongolia.

I’m interested in how, using these Finnish archives, I can learn more about a place, about a particular landscape. For example, I arrive in Tere-Khöl: in the photograph there was a mountain, and next to the mountain there was a large monastery complex. Where is it now? The monastery was burned down before 1932, and people could not even remember where it stood. Historian Ivanna Otroshchenko writes about the repression of the clergy and the destruction of Buddhist khürees [monasteries]: “Since 1929, the number of Tyvan monasteries and the lamas living in them began to decline catastrophically due to the political line of power inspired by the Soviet side and the Communist International.”

For me it was very scary, because Tyvans are simply obsessed with kinship through the land, with building their belonging to the land. And suddenly people don’t know where in their region, not far from the seasonal encampments, there was a large monastery complex. We drove around and found the place—there were still traces of the buildings and fences.

In this way, it is possible to restore history from archives, which was lost due to the repressions of the 1930s, when people were afraid to speak.