Viliui Sakha Post-Soviet Adaptation: A Subarctic Test of Netting's Smallholder-Householder Theory

The Sakha of northeastern Siberia, Russia, are the highest latitude contemporary agropastoralists practicing horse and cattle husbandry. In the last 100 years their rural livelihood has gone from household-level subsistence food production in clan clusters of single-family homesteads scattered acros...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Human ecology : an interdisciplinary journal 2003-12, Vol.31 (4), p.499-528
Main Author: Crate, Susan A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agribusiness
Agricultural production
Animal husbandry
Children
Ethnology
Food production
Herds
Homo sapiens
Households
Human ecology, environment
Kinship
Meats
Milk
Minority & ethnic groups
Morphological source materials
Older adults
Parents
Rural areas
Social life & customs
Theory
Time management
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Summary:The Sakha of northeastern Siberia, Russia, are the highest latitude contemporary agropastoralists practicing horse and cattle husbandry. In the last 100 years their rural livelihood has gone from household-level subsistence food production in clan clusters of single-family homesteads scattered across the landscape, to village-level state agribusiness farm production in compact settlements dependent on Soviet socialist infrastructure, to the presentday post-socialist reliance on household-level subsistence food production. This paper explores how Viliui Sakha are adapting in the post-Soviet context. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the concomitant dissolution of the centralized state farm system, rural inhabitants have developed household and interhousehold food production capacities based on keeping cows and relying on exchange among kin. One of the basic tenets of Robert Netting's smallholder-householder theory is that in times of change, the household system is the most resilient subsistence production unit because of specific qualities including intimate ecological knowledge and implicit labor contracts. This research shows in what ways Netting's householder theory applies for subarctic agropastoralists.
ISSN:0300-7839
1572-9915
DOI:10.1023/B:HUEC.0000005512.92263.a6