Dividual in Zaimka, and Zaimka as Dividual: Ethnography of a Siberian Hut through the Prism of Female Absence

Abstract

The article explores ethnographically how taiga and river huts in the Middle Ob River, which exist in their rhythms in parallel with rural and urban forms of life, transform gender roles and qualities that do not fit into the notions of proper behavior and practices of men and women – neither as understood by local residents nor from the researcher’s point of view. On the one hand, zaimka, which includes various buildings, is a landscape phenomenon, remarkable for its non-trivial position in the space between the wild taiga, the village, and the city. On the other hand, where a masculine world order seems to reign, zaimka problematizes gender divisions and shows that it is the female “constitutive” absence that is critical and influential. Drawing on the experience of shared hut visits, conversations, rumors, and joking, I show how gender duality is dismantled not through the notion of the “individual” at the hut, but through the distribution of masculine and feminine elements in the space of hut life with the help of the notion of “dividual” as a “distributed personhood” in the spatial dimension and “distributed self” as a language for describing different forms of subjectivities.