Ethnicity: Sustainability and Changeability (the Case of the North)

Abstract

The article critically examines the history of formation of the nomenclature of indigenous peoples of the Russian/Soviet North, and the part that personal preferences and ideological attitudes of politicians and scholars had played in it. The author analyzes the connection between aspects of modernism and postmodernism and the theoretical construction of ethnogenesis. He discusses various clichйs that had formed in the Soviet rhetoric and the opposition of stability-changeability as applied to the people of the North.