Notes about Possessing a Heritage in a Komi Village

In this article I try to analyse some aspects of heritage management in the Turya village of the Republic of Komi, Russia. I attempt to demonstrate how the local museum curator, Olga Shlopova, treats her fairy tales, museum exposition and collection of local heritage. My aim is to interpret some dialogue situations between local village people, scholars and officials which indicate how people manage differences in understanding of heritage administration. I presume that local people’s ideas and methods of dealing with cultural phenomena and institutions may obtain their own specific value in the course of culture processes. The question is, how flexible can official cultural specialists be in adapting and reflecting these, sometimes, slightly unconventional approaches. I suppose that an ethical approach helps a researcher to distance him or herself from possible prejudices or, at least, to be more conscious about stereotypes or pre-settled patterns of thinking. Unconditional recognition of an indigenous way of understanding local phenomena also helps a researcher to reach a more culture-specific model of interpretation

Editorial Impressions: Feeling of Hybridity

Editorial impressions

Editorial Impressions: On a Non-War

Editorial to the issue.&nbsp

Finno-Ugric Indigenous Knowledge, Hybridity and Co-Creation in Research: The Komi Case

The aim of this article is to explore the effect of hybridity in the Komi hunters' knowledge system as well as the potential for mutual understanding in dialogue between ethnographers and their Indigenous partners. I discuss how the hunters exploit printed sources, both scholarly works and popular magazines, in their practice. In the empirical part of this study, I present three case studies that demonstrate different ways in which a potential hybridity of knowledge has appeared in a field encounter. The analysis shows that some pieces of the hunters’ knowledge have a background in written sources, while they present scholarly evidence as facts from their own lives. At the same time, some similarities between the hunters' narratives and publications are possibly random. I argue that exploitation of scholarly works and popular publications by hunters brings together Indigenous and scholarly knowledge and supports the potential of collaborative research

Narratives of Indigenous Resistance in North-Western Siberia in the 1930s

The paper discusses official and Indigenous views of the Khanty and Forest Nenets uprising against the Soviets, known as the Kazym War (1931–1934). The rebellion is well documented in archival sources and covered by scholarly research, popular essays, and novels. Almost a century after the uprising, Indigenous narratives about the uprising are still circulating in local communities. Specifically, this paper addresses selected episodes of the Kazym War reflected both in official and Indigenous narratives. I focus on the analysis of diverse modes of narrating hybrid knowledge produced in a contact zone, and the mythic imagination of shamans shaping narratives about the uprising. Here, I argue that perceptions of Indigenous history sometimes adopt and reproduce the dominant discourse about the uprising, but link to the official story predominantly by rejecting it and establishing autonomous discussions. Keywords: Khanty, Forest Nenets, Indigenous, uprising, narratives, shama

Editorial Impressions: Foresight or Hindsight?

Editorial Impressions

Editorial Impressions: Bricolage and the Ethnographic Field

Editoria

Landscape and Gods among the Khanty

The purpose of this article is to examine Khanty spatial ritual behaviour in the context of the simultaneous application of different ideas about sacred landscape. I aim to demonstrate the functional pattern behind handling seemingly ambivalent characteristics of cosmological models in the tangible ritual performance of the Khanty, an indigenous people inhabiting the taiga and forest taiga zone of Western Siberia. I explore three cases in which the concept of sacred topography is applied among the Khanty by exploring two public ceremonies of reindeer sacrifice and one episode of a post-funeral rite. It appeared that the spatial conceptualisation is different in different rituals. During sacrificial ceremonies, the Khanty position the Upper World in the southern direction, while in the case of death rituals, the Upper World is projected towards upstream of a river, even if it remains in the north. Studying different spatial orientations during rituals may provide a methodological key for approaching other concepts of vernacular belief among Siberian indigenous communities.&nbsp

Preface to the Special Issue “Hybrid Beliefs and Identities”

Preface to the Special Issue “Hybrid Beliefs and Identities

Revolt of Grannies: The Bursylysyas Komi Folk Orthodox Movement

We study the role of women in the Bursylysyas Komi folk orthodox movement. Throughout the history of the movement, women have gradually gained more authority in this religious community. The initial stage of communist rule and the final phase of the Soviet Union were periods in which women’s domination in local religious life was most obvious. We argue that men lost their leadership in the movement because their way of execution of religious power was public and thus they became targets for Soviet repression. Komi women continued to keep the Bursylysyas faith alive, although they did so in a more domestic, hidden way. This enabled women to lead local religious practise throughout the Soviet period. In addition, the peculiar ecstatic practices of Bursylysyas, most fully developed during the initial period of Soviet rule, were more suitable for women in the framework of Komi traditional folk religiosity