A Tale of Two Sisters: Age, Agency and Tradition among the Yugan Khanty

Categorical oppositions such as Tradition and Modernity are oftenemployed to explain conventional behavior, because there is a presumed consonance between the goals of the agent and the values of the context in which the agent acts, but such categorical oppositions do not seem to effectively model acts of choosing. An individual Khant experiences a sense of participating in several social identities, each providing a context for forming intentions to act, mobilizing resources, seeking legitimation, and following through on commitments to act. Among the Khanty the sense of belonging to an age cohort differs from other biologically-marked categories such as clan, patriliny, even gender, by having no particular prescriptions associated with it. It is a ‘modern’ phenomenon in two senses of the word: first, historically, it seems to have been brought into being through a modern institution, the boarding school; second, it is ‘modern’ in the sense that it is perceived as an empowering category, liberating one from the constraints of tradition. This paper, based on the authors’ fifteen-year-long association with two Khanty sisters, raised in a taiga settlement, explores the values implicit in choices they make as they begin to define for themselves a path towards an adult identity.