The Performative Machine: Transfer of Ownership in a Northwest Russian Reindeer Herding Community (Kola Peninsula)

The article is based on longitudinal fieldwork with reindeer herders in the Kola Peninsula, northwest Russia. Its main ethnographic focus is SKhPK 'Tundra' (sel'sko khoziastvennaia proizvoditel'naia kooperatsiia - agricultural producing cooperative) of Lovozero. The main argument is that a state of communal affairs under the dominance of the state farm (sovkhoz), during the Soviet period, privileged domestic economies of the farm workers to be supported by the collective assets of the farm. The authors see this state of 'private-in-the-collective' arrangement as 'sovkhoism' and view the present variety of rural organisational forms in Russia as greater or lesser departures from it.