The article is devoted to the present situation on the Yamal Penin- sula. At the beginning of the 20th century the majority of Nenets living on Yamal were nomads. Over the last decades, settlement component has become a part of Nenets culture; failure to recognize this component while describing the present state of Nenets culture leads to serious distortions. For a present- day Nenets, life in a settlement is a possible alternative to life in the tundra, whereas the spheres of two ways of life existing in Nenets culture, namely, a tundra life and a settlement life, are spatially separated. It is considered nor- mal when a Nenets belonging to a younger generation possesses both alterna- tives of culture simultaneously, knows the rules determining the choice of the lifestyle, can effectively perform the switch from one lifestyle to another, and can use both. At the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of Nenets living on the Yamal Peninsula were nomads; only a very small portion of population was compelled to lead a sedentary way of life which was seen as a breach of the normal order of things. To cite the words of the Nenets anthropologist Galina Khariuchi, Each professional hunter "sitting on one place" (ngamdioda) and not having the freedom to roam from place to place, tried to "raise on rein- deer herding - that is, to increase deer livestock, to become a reindeer herder and to live nenei ilngana (lit. 'the real life'). (Khariuchi 2001: 12) Although situations when even herd owners who possessed thousands of rein- deer would lose all their animals, for instance as a result of epizootic, were not at all uncommon on Yamal, in the majority of cases these people were able to continue their usual nomadic way of life and had a chance to restore their herds. What made this possible was a special system of "insurance" and "cred- iting" in the Nenets culture (for a detailed description of this system, see Evladov 1992: 168-173). 1