The Reindeer People

In this acclaimed work, the anthropologist Piers Vitebsky offers a unique account of the Eveny, nomads who live in intimate partnership with an extraordinary animal. For centuries reindeer have provided the Eveny with food, fur, transport, and spiritual sustenance, enabling them to survive in the world's coldest inhabited region, the Siberian taiga, where winter ice freezes six feet thick and the temperature drops to ninety-six degrees below zero. The book presents a gallery of unforgettable personalities, including shamans, psychics, wolves, bears, dogs, Communist Party bosses, daredevil aviators, and the spirits of fires and rivers. Based on nearly two decades of fieldwork, The Reindeer People is an enthralling and moving testimony to a Siberian native people's humor and endurance at the ecological limits of human existence.

PIERS VITEBSKY is the head of anthropology and Russian northern studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. His previous books include Shamanism and Dialogues with the Dead: The Discussion of Mortality Among the Sora of Eastern India. The Reindeer People has been selected as a finalist for the 2006 Kiriyama Prize in nonfiction.