The Nenets2
Geographical distribution, population, environment
The Nenets (also known as Yurac, Hasava, Samoyed) people live in the far north of the Russian Federation. They occupy a vast Arctic land of over 450,000 square miles stretching from the White Sea in the west to the Yenisei river in the east. The northernmost borders of their land reach the islands of the Arctic Ocean: Novaia Zemlia, Kolguiev, and Vaigach. The southern borders run across the basins of the Taiga rivers: the Polui, Nadym, Pur, and Taz. Some Nenets groups approach the neighbouring areas populated mainly by Russians (the North Dvina river near Archangel, and the Onega river). A small number of the Nenets reached the Kolāsky peninsula, the northern parts of the Komi Autonomous National District, and the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous National District.
The whole of Nenets territory consists of a few tundra areas: Kanin Tundra (the Kanin peninsula), Timan Tundra (from the Pesha river to the Indiga river), Malaia Zemlia (from the Indiga river to the Pechora river), Bolāshaia Zemlia (from the Pechora river to the Kara river), and Yamal Tundra (the Yamal peninsula). The tundras are organized into the administrative units of (1) the Nenets Autonomous National District (Archangel Province), with the capital Narāian Mar, and (2) the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous National District (Tiumenā Province), with the capital Salekhard (formerly Obdorsk).
Linguistically and culturally the Nenets are related to other inhabitants of the circumpolar area of Eurasia, known by the general name Samoyed: Selākup (Ostyak-Samoyed), the Nganasan (Tavgi-Samoyed), and the Enets (Yenisei-Samoyed). According to the census of 1989, there were 39,754 inhabitants of the Samoyed group in the country; 34,665 of this amount were the Nenets, who appeared to be the largest population among the Samoyed and other Northern Minorities of Russia (Vakhtin, 1994: 34).
The majority of the Nenets form a group referred to as the Tundra Nenets. The rest comprises a very small group (about 1200 people, according to the 1962 census) called the Forest Nenets. They live in a far eastern part of the Nenets territory in the taiga of the Pur River basin, which belongs to both Yamal-Nenets and Hanty-Mansi District. In the 19th century, as a result of mixed marriages between the Nenets and the Komi (the Finno-Ugrian people), a further group emerged called the Kolvin Nenets. Although the Kolvins speak the Komi-Izhem language, they consider themselves Nenets.
The Nenets of the European tundra are surrounded by Russians, who came to the Pomorāie region in the middle of the 19th century, and the Komi, who moved to the north in the 16th century. A regular Nenets āsovkhozā (Soviet Farm) usually comprises a mixed population (Nenets, Russian, and Komi). On the Kolāsky peninsula the Nenets are surrounded by the Saami and the Russians, whereas in the east, in the Yamal Tundra, the Nenetsā neighbours include fellow Samoyed peoples (the Enets and Nganasan), Finno-Ugrians (the Hanty and the Mansi), and other northern peoples (Kets, Evenks, and Dolgans). All these peoples share the severe living conditions of the Arctic climate, characterized by permafrost, long-lasting polar days and nights, long and cold winters, and short, cool summers.
Names and language
There are different hypotheses on the etymology of the term Samoyed referring to the Nenets and their linguistic and cultural relatives (Khomich, 1966: 24-7). For example, a partial answer has been suggested by P. Hajdu, who excludes the origin of the word from the Russian language (Hajdu, 1950: 6-18). The name Yurak as applied to the Nenets was thought to originate from the Nganasan, the Nenetsā relatives and neighbours in the east, who used to call the Nenets of the Yenisei region by a similar name, dāuraka. M. Castren applied this name to all tundra Nenets, and scholars of the Finno-Ugrian and other Western traditions continued adhering to this term.
Today the people have chosen to call themselves Nenets. For this reason, they appear in this book under this rather than any other name. The name Nenets has been an official designation of these people since their inclusion in the former Soviet State. It is based on the word nenei meaning āmanā, or āreal manā, and nenei ne meaning a āreal womanā. It has been suggested that the people gave themselves this name when they began separating from other Samoyeds (Khomich, 1966: 24). As an ethnonym, āNenetsā was already in use at the end of the 18th century (Georgi, 1799: 4). In everyday life, however, it is usually substituted by a clan name. Most of the last names of the people have been traced to a few clan names associated with the Siberian tundra area. Later, when the Nenets spread over the European tundra territories, those original clans formed new families acquiring new names (Verbov, 1939; Dolgikh, 1970a).
Besides a clan name individual Nenets have a variety of other names signifying their various identities. An individual may also have a taboo-name, nickname, common name-address, teasing name, official name (a Christian name in tsarist Russia and a passport name in the former Soviet Union and todayās Russia), as well as a name after death (Pushkariova, 1990b: 141).
The Samoyed group of languages consists of the North and South Samoyed branches. The northern branch includes the most closely related languages: Nenets, Enets, and Nganasan. The southern group consists of Selākup and the languages of the Samoyed tribes of the Sayan mountains, which have now been almost completely assimilated by neighbouring Turkic people.
Among all the Finno-Ugrian languages it is the language of the Lapp that is most closely related to Samoyed. The Lapps live today in the Arctic parts of Scandinavia and Finland, but mainly on the Kola peninsula. Both the Samoyed and the Lapps are known to be the most ancient surviving inhabitants of the Arctic. The common roots of the two languages have been discussed in a number of comparative linguistic studies (Bubrikh, 1948; Toivonen, 1950; Collinder, 1954), which have also prompted various theories on the relations the Lapps and the Samoyeds may have with an aboriginal Arctic population (Tereshchenko, 1992: 52).
Linguists have been studying the Samoyed languages extensively since the 18th century (Sorokina, 1990: 66-71). They have detected two major dialects in Nenets: the Tundra and the Forest dialects, with further classification of the Tundra dialect into three groups: the West, the Central (Great) and the East. However, scholars admit that these dialects share a basically homogeneous structure, and that the differences between them have never been an obstacle to communication between the Nenets (Khomich, 1966: 24; Tereshchenko, 1990: 7).
Nenets has a very interesting structure. Among its most fascinating characteristics are a consonant phoneme h called a voiceless āglottal stopā; the predestinative and predicative inflections, occurring between the stem and the equivalent suffix; objective conjugation, indication of the category of number (singular, dual, plural) both in nominal and verbal inflections; and āa fantastic abundance of grammatical formsā (Decsy, 1966: 4). The language is also characterized by a vowel harmony, which is a particular form of limitation of vowel occurrence, and by avoidance of more than one consonant at the beginning of words. Nenets vocabulary incorporates older words borrowed from Turkic, Komi, Ob-Ugric languages, and about 1,500 new words adopted in the twentieth century from Russian (Decsy, 1966: 14, 15, 42).
Modem standard Nenets-Yurak was codified by Georgy Prokofiev and his colleagues in the Institute of Northern Peoples in Leningrad in the early 1930s. It was based on the Great Tundra dialect spoken by the people living mostly in the Yamal-Nenets National (now Autonomous) Okrug. At first, Nenets books were published in roman type characters, then Cyrillic was introduced in 1939. Basic linguistic works which contributed to the establishment of standard Nenets are listed in the Yurak Chrestomathy by Professor Gyula Decsy (Decsy, 1966: 7), who conducts a graduate programme on Samoyed linguistics at the Department of Central Eurasian Studies of Indiana University, Bloomington.
Economy, society, world view
The Nenets people practise seasonal fishing and hunting, but it is reindeer breeding which is the foundation of their economy. The significance of reindeer in the life of the people is hard to overestimate: it provides food, clothing (leather and fur), shelter (skins to cover their movable homes) and transportation indispensable in tundra conditions. Reindeer images proliferate in Nenets folklore and crafts. According to scholars investigating the origin and age of the Nenetsā reindeer economy, it was the Nenets who established and developed the unique material culture based on the reindeer economy, and who taught other people in the Arctic region their skills (Vasilevich and Levin, 1951; Vainshtein, 1986). No wonder the Nenetsā material culture has been called the reindeer type of civilization (Kodolanyi, 1976).
As part of the reindeer economy, the people practised a nomadic way of life. In the past, the seasonal search for proper pastures forced them to move in spring towards the northern seashore, and in autumn towards the southern forests. Migration from one area to another and the choice of pastures were based on the peopleās empirical knowledge about a reasonable and productive utilization of the landās natural resources. Ie. Susoi, a native Nenets scholar, gave a detailed account of the traditional customs which secured the success of the economy and affected not only the lifestyle but also the moral and social values of the Nenets.
Nenets treat their tundra as a huge spacious home which they endeavour to save for future generations. They know every comer of their land and regard themselves as the guardians of the regionās resources. Their hunting rules aim not at exterminating but rather saving animals. For example, they do not fire at certain birds and animals, trying instead to catch them while riding a sledge, so that only the weakest (those that would not survive anyway) become the hunterās victims. There are also restrictions on the quantity of animals which can be caught for fiir, and on the areas where the hunting can take place. When a Nenets family leaves the nomad camp, they are careful to clean the area as they found it, perhaps with only a neat trace of fire (which they never start without any necessity). The Nenets have created many taboos for the purpose of protecting nature. To make the rules psychologically convincing they express them in the form of beliefs and superstitions. For example, the people believe that if these taboos are violated, thunderstorm, flood, rain or snow could start. The reindeer is a subject of many such taboos. Since good pasture is important for the herds, none of the Nenets picks so much as a blade of grass without a reason, although they are highly knowledgeable about the medicinal properties of plants and freely collect those that will be of use to them (Susoi, 1986: 11322).
These unwritten laws and customs make the nomadic tribal life and economy efficient, and environmentally protective. They support the view of this culture as a positive and progressive phenomenon, a view which is often labelled by sceptics as romantic and idealistic.
The need to travel prompted the Nenets to create a mobile type of dwelling, suitable for their nomadic life. The conic tent called choom is constructed of a few poles, covered with reindeer skins in winter and birch bark in summer. The choom is usually a home for a family or sometimes a few related families. A camp of chooms, called nesy, comprises a group of travelling families related to each other and sharing the ownership of the reindeer herds.
The existence among the Samoyed of a social organization based on exogamous relationships was first pointed out in 1770s by Peter Pallas (Pallas, 1771-76). Subsequent studies described the exogamous rules and organization of clans into larger exogamous unities ā phratries (Dolgikh, 1970b: 174). Marriage within one and the same clan and, moreover, the same phratry, was forbidden. Various terms were applied to the basic unit of the Nenets nomadic society: migratory band, clan, or tribe. Khomich accepts the term clan. She characterizes traditional Nenets society by exogamous patrilocal marriage, as well as patrimonial lineage, name, and ownership of pastures, sacrificial sites and cemeteries (Khomich, 1966: 142).
The world view of the Samoyed is based on a complex of animistic and totemistic beliefs, and a worship of spirits residing in the three worlds: the sky (the upper world), on the earth (the middle world), and under the ground (the underworld). The Samoyed express their philosophical outlook through various symbolic forms and behaviours ā myths, song narratives, rites and ceremonies. As Galina Grachiova points out, learning the peopleās world view is similar to putting the many pieces of a puzzle together. It requires paying attention to all manifestations of the culture (Grachiova, 1984).
Although in the Nenetsā mythological stories the image of the main creator of the world, the supernatural being Num, is often present, the religious ideology of the people conforms to the early form of religion, first described by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, and later by Emil Durkheim (Tylor, 1871; Durkheim, 1915). The essence of this religion is the animation of nature and the belief that spirits reside in all aspects of nature. In the past, religious life was organized around a religious leader called a shaman, and his/her ritual activities. As in many other shamanistic traditions, Nenets shamans served as mediators between the people and the outside world. Their goals were to harmonize life within society, and conduct communication with nature and its spirits.
As a basis for analysis and explanation of the peopleās musical expression and behaviour, social and ideological aspects of the Nenetsā traditional culture will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters.
Destruction of the Nenetsā traditional society
In the 1990s, the Nenets, like other northern minorities of Russia, have found themselves in desperate conditions (Vakhtin, 1994: 31). The Russian ethnolinguist Nikolai Vakhtin has called for special attention to be paid to this situation. He points out that the history of the Nenets has been largely misrepresented in Soviet ethnographic studies, and he describes this misrepresentation as a gradual destruction of the traditional culture under the ādark yearsā of the Soviet state. Although colonization of the aboriginal population began during tsarist Russia, it was the Soviet state which actually conquered the northern peoples, undermined their cultures, and left them with little hope for survival.
The expansion of tsarist Russia into North European regions was first recorded by chronicles of the 11th and 12th centuries, the time when the aboriginal people of the north paid taxes to the Novgorod state. Conflicts with the native population, among whom the Nenets were the most resilient and rebellious, accompanied Russian colonization. The process was completed at the beginning of the 17th century, when the territory populated by the Nenets was secured under the power of the Moscow state.
The Russian state was determined to control the indigenous Arctic peoples who often rebelled against the state and, particularly, the taxation (yasak) imposed on them. In a regulation on how to administer northern peoples, issued by the committee of Michael Speransky (the tsarās advisor) in 1822, the Nenets were assigned the status of inorodets (strangers). Although the rights of the people to self-regulation and land ownership are indicated in the document, they were never actually fulfilled.
In addition, an intrusion into the spiritual world of the Nenets was carried out through the missionary activities of the Orthodox Church. M. Castren and other scholars wh...
