"Refuting essentialist notions of Nenets culture, the author explores the dialogue between reindeer nomads and the surrounding world and shows how global processes and concepts such as culture, property, and market are expressed in local practices. He demonstrates how reindeer nomads move freely between subsistence and commodity production; state-owned and private reindeer; animism, communism, and market relations; and territorial defence and cooperative knowledge of the land. This study makes an original and significant contribution to wider debates about nomadic pastoralism and to anthropological studies of trade, barter, property, and territoriality."--GoogleBooks