The Nenets. Demographics (population dynamics, urban/rural population, gender and age breakdown, youth cohort)

The total number of Nenets, according to the 2020 All-Russian Population Census, is 49,787 people (23,521 men and 26,266 women).

Demographically, the Nenets have the highest numbers among the indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North, Siberia, and the Russian Far East. In 2002, the Nenets numbered 41.302 persons, and in 2010, they numbered 44.640 persons. The Nenets are certainly demographic leaders among the indigenous small-numbered peoples (nomad Nenets have particularly high reproduction rates). The Nenets’ recent population has been growing steadily by 1 % a year on average. This fact causes concerns that soon, the Nenets may exceed the 50.000 people cutoff line required to be counted as an indigenous small-numbered people.

Today, about 81 % of the Nenets live in small hamlets and nomadic camps, the rest live in cities and large urban-type settlements. The 2002 Census recorded 33.458 rural Nenets (16.087 men and 17.371 women) and 7.844 urban Nenets (3.180 men and 4.664 women).

The Nenets themselves distinguish the tyu-yna mena (literally “those above”) or tekhena mena (literally “living among reindeer”) group and the ta’sina mena (literally “those below”) or khardakhana ilenya (“living in houses/village”) and the tyu” unyany yakhana ilenya (“living in large houses/ major villages”) groups. For the Nenets, “above,” in the upper reaches of rivers, means in the areas of traditional reindeer herders, while “below,” in the lower reaches of rivers, means lands of the settled population. 

As the Tundra Nenets still continue their nomadic way of life and reindeer herding, they have preserved their traditional language and culture. For tundra reindeer breeders, living standards in villages run contrary to the main principles of their traditional way of life. The Nenets traditionally believe settled way of life to be a sign of disaster, destitution, or general incapability. During the Soviet era, people who came to live in villages were reindeer herders who had gone broke, families who lost their patriarch, or else people who had learned professions atypical for tundra dwellers, or else received vocational or higher education. The latter group ultimately gave village communities a new status that had its own prestige, although the tundra still retained its significance as the main food source and locus of traditions. In time, villages formed their own communities with mechanisms of life largely different from the tundra ones. Villages developed major clan communities that took important places in the village hierarchy. 

Nenets traditions survived in fragments in the settled (village and city) environment, but the connection with the tundra where traditions are still going strong allow many city and village residents to participate in economic and sacral and ritual life of the nomadic community. If the Nenets living in villages and cities have their own reindeer and/or reindeer herding relatives, they also have traditional clothing they wear to holiday celebrations, trips to the tundra, when then go fishing or hunting; village children wear traditional fur clothing in their regular everyday life, too. When visiting relatives, they join in family and clan rites and rituals. The tundra provides village and city population with fresh meat and fish via their hunting and fishing nomadic relatives. The older and middle-aged Nenets in cities and particularly in villages perform certain rituals and follow certain taboos (women do not clean sturgeons, pikes, and burbots, and menstruating women do not eat these fishes; they perform cleansing rituals after menstruation and childbirth, do not step over men’s and children’s things, do not go up to the attic, etc.). Apartments and houses of the Nenets living in cities and villages feature ethnic items: nukhuko dolls or toy reindeer, women’s tutsya needlework bags, things made out of birch bark; along with Christian icons, they can keep myad’ pukhutsya , patroness of the family and clan, and amulets. Village and city population partially retain funeral and wake customs and retain the Nenets hospitality custom, a mandatory tea and gift-giving when a person pays the first visit to a home and stays there as a guest.