Producers' cooperation within or against cooperative agricultural institutions? The case of reindeer husbandry in Post-Soviet Russia

With the advance of economic neoliberalization along with the green economy paradigm that aims to alleviate rapid climate change, discussions of the rationale of cooperative organization of food production have come to the fore. This paper contributes to the scholarly understanding of motivations for cooperative organization of production by taking up empirical illustrations from the European North of Russia, where despite expectations of privatization after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the cooperative organization of reindeer husbandry often persists, as a heritage of the Soviet state enterprises (sovkhozes). The paper aims at advancing the analysis of cooperative reindeer husbandry and its rationales employing ideas within the field of substantivist economic anthropology of postsocialism that started with Karl Polanyi's vision of the embedded economy (Polanyi, 1944). Further, I have employed the ideas of the renowned study by Caroline Humphrey of Soviet state farms as total social institutions (Humphrey, 1998) as well as Stephen Gudeman's dialectical approach to the economy (Gudeman, 2001). The analysis shows that the cooperative organization of reindeer husbandry reproduces the economic and social patterns that were developed in the Soviet period, perhaps also adapting and incorporating elements of traditional indigenous social orders. Such social arrangements and the accompanying moral values are embedded in the reindeer herding economy, and it is their persistence that indigenous people achieve through adhering to cooperative values.