Product Description: Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer combines extensive field research with historical inquiry to produce a dramatic study of a minority people in Russia, the Khanty (Ostiak) of Northwest Siberia. Although First Nations, indigenous peoples, have often been victims of expansionist state-building, Balzer shows that processes of acquiring ethnic identity can involve transcending victimhood...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The resurgence of national and historical awareness among the people of what was once the USSR has been nowhere stronger than among the Russians themselves. Some of the larger projects of rediscovery amount to a reinterpretation of traditional culture...read more