Soil and Soul : How Russia's Minority Communities Create Meaning and Identity

By landmass, Russia is the world's largest country, due mainly to centuries of military expansion and colonization. As a result, it contains people of many ethnicities, nationalities, and religions—and yet social minorities have been mostly disregarded or repressed by governmental policy and ignored in scholarship. This volume explores how ethnically non-Russian peoples develop and sustain their local and ethnic identities through embodied relations with nonhuman elements such as land, animals, and sacred sites rather than through discourse or state institutions. In fact, these local efforts challenge the Kremlin's "master narrative" of Russian cultural superiority. These nonhuman entities persist undeniably as an ever-present source of meaning and identity creation in spite of an autocratic centralized state. Using decolonial, anthropological, environmental, sociological, linguistic, and geographic case studies, this volume reframes minority agency as ecosocial practice embedded in local ecologies and postimperial power asymmetries.