“ETERNITY SMELLS OF OIL”. THE OIL AND THE KHANTY: RESISTANCE OR OPPORTUNISM?

The author of the paper shows how differently oil mining affects the Khanty who live in different Western Siberia state administrative districts. According to the opinion taken in the international anthropology, extraction of raw materials within the Russian “mining course” is able to give rise to conflicts and create “crude domination”. The author agrees with Florian Stammler’s opinion that the concept of conflict cannot describe the current situation in the West Siberian region (the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area or “Yugra”; the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area) for a number of reasons. The examples given by the author show that oil-industry workers’ presence did not result in conflicts for the Khanty of the Tomsk region. The reason is that mentioning oil industry in the local discourses means, first of all, a possibility to survive, and secondly, because the forced migration the Khanty’s “lost generations” met with the oil miners as early as Stalin era. Oil industry did not cause any fundamental changes for the Khanty, it just became another manifestation of the dominant society majority. Thus the relationship between the majority and the minority in the Tomsk region is not a conflict one in spite of oil industry dominance in the region’s life.