Dmitri A. Funk, Doctor of Historical Sciences (in anthropology), is Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnology at Moscow State University, as well as leading researcher at Tomsk State University. His academic interests include social transformations in post-Soviet countries and religions and epics in Northern Asia. Among his recent books are Post-Soviet Transformations (2009, ed. with H. Beach and L. Sillanpää) and The North and the Northern People: Contemporary Situation among the Small Numbered Indigenous Peoples of the North of the Russian Federation (2012, ed. with N. Novikova, in Russian).