Tatiana Vagramenko

Indigenous Christianity

Missionaries, Modernity, and Marginality in the Siberian Tundra

This book traces the story of a Nenets indigenous community in Siberia and how their lives were transformed by religious conversion in post-Soviet and Putin’s Russia. Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in a region now largely closed to outsiders, it offers an intimate account of faith, power, and endurance in one of the Arctic’s most marginalized communities.
Nenets nomads, long shaped by Russian colonialism and Soviet modernization, experienced sweeping conversions in the mid-1990s, culminating in the creation of a tundra church tied to a radical evangelical movement. Amid Putin’s tightening control—when indigenous peoples and minority faiths faced renewed surveillance and harassment—the book follows Nenets and missionaries whose encounters across the tundra sparked tensions between converts and non-converts, faith and state. Through stories of hope, loss, and resilience, it reveals how global evangelical Christianity intersects with local traditions, reshaping kinship, belonging, and modernity in the Siberian tundra.

Author

Tatiana Vagramenko

Tatiana Vagramenko, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at University College Cork and Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, works at the intersection of anthropology, religious studies, and digital humanities. She studies religion and surveillance in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts and is co-author of The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents (2025).

Title: Indigenous Christianity
Subtitle: Missionaries, Modernity, and Marginality in the Siberian Tundra
Author: Tatiana Vagramenko
Price: € 134,00
ISBN: 9789048575152
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 310
Language: English
Publication date: 30 - 06 - 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5117/9789048575152
Dimensions: 15.6 x 23.4 cm
Series: Anthropologies of Eurasia - CEU Press
Categories: Contemporary History; Eastern Central Europe; Political Science
Discipline: Academic - Religion and Philosophy
Imprint: CEU Press
Also available as: eBook PDF (Open Access)eBook ePub (Open Access)

Table of Contents

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Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration and Terminology
Part 1. Ethnography of Marginality in a Difficult Field
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Nenets Conversion Story: Voices, Choices, and Ethical Dilemmas
Part 2. Religion, Power, and Modernity: From the Soviet Era to the Putin Regime
Chapter 2. Modernity: Russian, Unequal, Contaminating
Chapter 3. The Politics of Religion After Socialism and the Predicament of Religious Life in the Russian Arctic
Chapter 4. Religion and Power: The Rise of the Putin Regime
Chapter 5. Contested Identities: The Rise and Fall of Indigenous Movements in Russia
Part 3. Continuity and Rupture: Nenets Christianities
Chapter 6. Burning the Sacred: Christian Conversion and Cultural Discontinuity
Chapter 7. The Nenets Christian Project: Ethnotheology and Re-Indigenization
Chapter 8. The Production of Christian Fundamentalism in the Nenets Tundra
Part 4. Lived Religion in the Nenets Tundra
Chapter 9. Blood and Faith: Rethinking Kinship Through Christ
Chapter 10. More About Love: Gender, Family, and the Return to Tradition
Conclusion
Bibliography