From Mammoth to Miniature: ‘Model of a Summer Festival of the Yakuts’ as a Narrative Object

Classic anthropological accounts of miniature objects have focussed on their spatial and aesthetic dimensions, with more recent work addressing their communicative potential, connections with play, and role in protecting threatened cultural knowledge. This article analyses responses to a miniature landscape model of yhyakh, a festival celebrated in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Russian Federation, carved from mammoth ivory in the mid-nineteenth century and now in the British Museum. Based on fieldwork with artists following the model’s loan to the National Art Museum, Yakutsk, and in the British Museum, I demonstrate that while the model’s reduced scale is part of its fascination, its material and temporal dimensions and its cultural associations – its ‘mammothness’ – are inseparable and enhance its narrative capacity. Mammothness adds to the model’s complexity, challenging assumptions that small-scale objects are simplistic and therefore easily dismissed, and prompting consideration of the temporal dimensions of materials as well as of objects.