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Sakha Sacred Knowledge and the Scars of Modernity

Surviving the Invisibility Monster

Sakha Sacred Knowledge and the Scars of Modernity cover

Sakha Sacred Knowledge and the Scars of Modernity

Surviving the Invisibility Monster

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Pre-order. Available 10 Dec 2026
£72.00 RRP £80.00 Website price saving £8.00 (10%)

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Description

This book investigates the survival strategies of Sakha girls and women in the face of postcolonial neglect, historical invisibility, and embodied trauma in the Russian North.
Drawing on oral epic traditions such as Olonkho, personal and ethnographic testimonies, and analysis of Russian literature, Natalya Khokholova uncovers how Indigenous knowledge systems preserve life amid violence, abandonment, and medical erasure. Centering figures such as feral children, spectral girls, and forgotten mothers, the book explores the philosophical and cosmological concept of turuk-a Sakha sense of bodily intuition and ancestral guidance-as a method of both survival and resistance. Khokholova brings together literary analysis, autoethnography, and decolonial feminist theory to illuminate how “the invisibility monster” of modernity continues to threaten Indigenous life. By blending storytelling, theory, and critique, Sakha Sacred Knowledge and the Scars of Modernity offers an urgent intervention into global conversations about trauma, resilience, and the politics of recognition.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 Invisible Children of Invisible People: Postcolonial Autoethnography and Sakha Sacred Knowledge
Chapter 2 Abandonment, Feral Children, and the Oral Tradition: Turuk and the Epic Heroines
Chapter 3 Cinema of Haunting: Trauma, Landscape, and Female Spectrality in Yakut Horror
Chapter 4 The Corruptive Power of Money in Russian Literature: From Odoevsky to Dostoevsky
Chapter 5 Narratives of Illness and Survival: Embodied Memory in Sakha and Evenki Women's Stories
Chapter 6 Death and Modernity: Tolstoy, Sontag, and Sakha Cosmology
Chapter 7 Folklore, Fairy Tales, and the Scars of Modern Childhood
Chapter 8 Turuk as Survival: Indigenous Knowledge and the Future of Memory
Conclusion: Toward an Anti-Colonial Pedagogy of Survival

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 10 Dec 2026
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Pages 176
ISBN 9781666922738
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 10 b/w photos
Dimensions 229 x 152 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Natalya Khokholova

Natalya Khokholova is Associate Professor in Gener…

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