Reindeer, Predators, and Gold: Multispecies Livelihoods and Trust among the Evenki of Siberia

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Indigenous Evenki
reindeer herders and hunters in Eastern Siberia, this presentation
examines mistrust and predation as key analytical lenses for
understanding contemporary multispecies relations in the taiga.
Drawing on material from a book manuscript in progress, the talk
explores how relations among humans, reindeer, wolves, bears,
landscapes, and institutions are negotiated under conditions of
ecological degradation, extractive expansion, and political
abandonment. The presentation presents the ethnography of mistrust,
showing how predation functions not merely as ecological violence but
as a diagnostic principle through which Evenki assess moral imbalance,
broken reciprocity, and relational breakdown. Wolves and bears—once
regarded as communicative partners and kin—are increasingly described
as gluttonous and unpredictable beings, a transformation that
parallels Evenki experiences of state withdrawal, mining encroachment,
and conservation regimes that sever access to land.

Donatas Brandišauskas is a social anthropologist specializing in the
ethnography of nomadic Indigenous peoples of Eastern Siberia, the
Russian Far East, and Mongolia. His research interests include
human–animal relations, animism, perceptions of rock art, Indigenous
knowledge systems, and nomadism. He is a senior researcher at the
Lithuanian Institute of History and a professor at the Institute of
Asian and Transcultural Studies at Vilnius University. His current
research focuses on Indigenous land use, resistance to gold mining,
and human–predator relations.