Ethnic profiles in personal and family histories of the Nanai people (1990s – early 2000s)

The paper covers the data of the field studies carried out among the Gorin, Amur and Kur-Urmi Nanai peoples in the Khabarovsk Krai in 1990 through 2014. The paper presents the memories of the parents and childhood of the interviewees, their reflections on the past and changes in society. The picture reconstructed from the stories makes it possible to clarify how the Nanai people identified themselves and differentiated their surroundings over time and across generations. Looking back at family stories, some interviewees noted that the Amur people had initially used territorial, linguistic, economic and cultural signs to recognize insiders and outsiders. The "others " were assigned certain associative images primarily based on their activities and affiliation to relatives or neighbors. The Amur long-term residents stereotyped nearby peoples and regarded the Evenks as "deer people", Manchurians and Chinese as "relatives" or "vegetable gardeners". The image of Russians was superimposed on agricultural activityfiguratively expressed in bread, milk, and cows, and later on features of modernization, such as wooden houses with stove heating, new arrangements of settlements, and "kolkhoz " uniforms. Since the 1990s, there has been a trend in the Nanai society to return to the cultural values of the pre-revolutionary period, which is reflected in family histories. The Nanai intellectuals correlate their parents’ stories with the sequence of historical events including references to ancestors. These narratives go beyond family stories into the spheres of education, culture, and leisure.