Introduction: Growing research on youth in Siberia

This special issue of Sibirica comprises a selection of papers presented at the conference “‘Everything is still before you”: being young in Siberia today’ (Halle, November 2003). This introduction opens with a short review of the conventional social-sciences approach toward youth (especially indigenous youth) as an ‘object of concern’. A brief summary of the subsequent papers follows, highlighting several crosscutting themes: (1) the concept of youth, the process of becoming an adult and the expectations connected with it; (2) acquisition of knowledge within and outside formal education; and (3) sports, music and games as meaningful and creative spheres of social interaction. The introduction concludes with the argument that the ambit of ‘Siberian’ anthropology can be significantly enlarged through the integration of sociological and cultural studies approaches and methods into ethnographic inquiry.

Keywords:

• Russia
• Siberia
• youth
• education
• anthropology
• sociology
• cultural studies