A Review of Ludek Broz, Evil Spirits and Rocket Debris: In Search of Lost Souls in Siberia. New York: Berghahn Books, 2024, XIV+240 pp.

Abstract

Ludеk Broz’s monograph Evil Spirits and Rocket Debris (2024) stems from the author’s many years of fieldwork in the Altai Republic at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s. Broz addresses the problem of the perception of indigenous ontologies and of their representation in anthropological writings. Two protagonists of his book, the spirits inhabiting the Altai and the rocket fuel heptyl, elements of which end up in the Altai along with the falling components of rockets launched into orbit, demonstrate the disparity in fears created by technogenic and magical dangers. The difference in perception of these dangers, the possibility of discussing one and the almost complete blindness of outside observers to the other allow us to discuss the power relations underlying these fears and the stigmatisation of indigenous ontologies. Broz argues that the ontological agnosticism many anthropologists used to practice is a continuation of this stigmatisation; further, he asks how we can become more sensitive to the ontological position of our interlocutors, where the boundaries of this sensitivity should be drawn, and how we can take their position seriously without becoming esoteric or metaphysical.