Evenki Economy in the Central Siberian Taiga at the Turn of the 20th Century: Principles of Land Use

Evenkis comprise the largest ethnos among the ‘numerically small’ peoples of Siberia. They are unique in having been the only people that historically inhabited an enormous territory from the Yeniseu to the Pacific shore in longitude and from the forest-tundra line to the southern borders of the taiga in latitude. This volume describes the economic principles that characterize the dynamics and main forms of interaction between Evenki hunting groups and the environment, and ultimately to identify subsistence strategies employed within the inhabited territories. Its innovation entails both in putting new ethnographic material into scholarly circulation and in the freshness of the research objective–to examine the traditional economy of the Evenkis in a cultural-ecological context, considering it as a relatively closed system within their ethnic hunting and gathering culture.