Rooting in the Subterranean: Underground Dwellers in Northern Indigenous Narratives and Metropolitan Anthropological Theories

To what extent do Indigenous narratives from Siberia recorded by anthropologists move beyond the borders of national disciplines and engage in a more transnational conversation?¹ To answer this question, I explore how Indigenous narratives and material artifacts intersect with academic ideologies and frameworks, resulting in the emergence of the concept of Indigenous ethnohistory. For this purpose, I focus on discussions in Russian/Soviet ethnography regarding Indigenous origins, also known as ethnogenesis (ėtnogenez), ethnic history (ėtnicheskaia istoriia), or sometimes paleoethnology (paleoėtnologiia).²