Abstract

‘Siberian hunters have never been able to get used to our insistence on pressing our God on everyone else, nor to our way of abasing ourselves before him when they see us as masters of all - conquering the bear and the elk with our rifles, using our knowledge and power to conquer the indigenous people, who have always been determined to hang on to what little they have. How crazy the shaman would be to put his penny in the collection during mass without knowing whether it would be effective or not, whether the ritual would “work” this time - since only the result, here and now, matters to him. Why thank the priest and his God, why let them prosper, when in the end the famine did take hold and the sick did die?’