Yeniseian Peoples and Languages

A History of Yeniseian Studies with an Annotated Bibliography and a Source Guide

Edward J. Vajda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780700712908
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136837401
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Kets of Central Siberia are perhaps the most enigmatic of Siberia's aboriginal tribes. Today numbering barely 1,100 souls living in several small villages on the middle reaches of the Yenisei, the Kets have retained much of their ancient culture, as well as their unique language.

Genetic studies of the Ket hint at an ancient affinity with Tibetans, Burmese, and other peoples of peoples of South East Asia not shared by any other Siberian people. The Ket language, which is unrelated to any other living Siberian tongue, also appears to be a relic of a bygone linguistic landscape of Inner Asia.

Because language isolates such as Ket are of special value to scholars of the original peopling of the continents, linguists have recently attempted to link Ket with North Caucasian, Sino- Tibetan, Burushaski, Basque and Na Dene. None of these links have been proved to the satisfaction of all linguists, and the research continues both in Russia and abroad.

PART I

THE HISTORY OF YENISEIAN STUDIES

No one knows how long Yeniseian-speaking peoples occupied Inner Asia and South Siberia before these areas were incorporated into the Russian state during the seventeenth century. Some of the Chinese references to “barbarian tribes” in this region from Tang times onward may reflect their historic presence (Radlov 1884). The first unambiguous documentation of Yeniseian peoples and languages comes only after Russian expansion into western Siberia following Yermak’s campaign of 1582. The Cossacks, fur trappers, and government officials who flooded into the taiga in search of personal enrichment left behind valuable bits of information on Yeniseian lifeways in the form of official reports, fur payment records, and other historical documents (Miller 1937–41; Dolgikh 1960). After Native Siberians began to be baptized as nominal Christians in the mid seventeenth century, church records furnish additional information on demographics, social organization, and clan distribution (Dolgikh 1960). Diaries and written accounts left by diplomats and other persons traveling through the Yenisei area also contain unique descriptions of the Kets and their extinct cousins, the Yughs, Kotts, Assans, Arins, and Pumpokols. The earliest such traveler was the Englishman Richard Finch, who passed through Yeniseian territory in 1611–14 (Alekseev 1932). Some time after 1657, the Polish prisoner of war Adam Kamiẹński Dłużyk traveled through Siberia and left brief diary notes about the Kets (Kamieẹński Dłuzyk 1874). Next came the diplomat Nikolai Milescu, who observed Pumpokol encampments on the Tishpan River on his journey to China in 1675–8 (Kosven 1955; Spafariĭ 1960). Izbrant Ides and Adam Brand, emissaries on a similar mission to China, passed through Pumpokol and Arin territory in 1692–5 (Ides and Brand 1967). Another traveler to China, Lorenz Lang, left notes about the Kotts (Kan Tatars) made on a trip during 1715–18 (Zinner 1968).

The true beginning of Yeniseian studies came in the mid 1720s when Peter the Great, while lying on his deathbed, issued orders commissioning scholars to describe his mysterious eastern realm. Peter’s interests encompassed not only Siberia’s flora, fauna, and other natural resources, but also the languages and customs of its native peoples. As a result, the German naturalist and historian Daniel G. Messerschmidt visited Ket territory in the mid 1720s. Assisted by a prisoner of war captured after the battle of Poltava in 1709, the talented Swede Phillip Johann von Strahlenberg (Tabbert), he compiled the first scholarly account of the Yeniseian peoples (Messerschmidt 1964), which included lists of numerals and other basic words. Messerschmidt was the first scholar to distinguish the Kets from other West Siberian “Ostyaks” on the basis of their unique language. Strahlenberg was the first to suggest that the Kets might be related linguistically and anthropologically to the American Indian (Strahlenberg 1730), citing Adriaan Reeland’s book Dissertatio de linguis Americanis (published in 1708), which proposed an Asian origin for the Native Americans. These first linguistic and ethnographic studies of the Yeniseians were highly subjective and incomplete. In the 1730s the scholar V.N. Tatishchev conducted a more systematic collection of material using questionnaires to elicit information from local government officials on the peoples of Siberia. Tatishchev’s unpublished findings were transferred to members of the Academy of Science’s Second Kamchatka Expedition (1733–42). The vast staff of this expedition included Gerhard F. Müller, destined to become famous as the father of Siberian history, and the naturalist Johann G. Gmelin. These men left behind valuable, if brief, first-hand accounts of the various Yeniseian peoples still existing at that time (Miller 1750, 1937–41; Gmelin 1751–2). In the late 1730s, Müller was able to find only two or three speakers of Assan and one old man who could speak Arin. Using such fortuitous informants, he compiled vocabulary lists of various Yeniseian languages, records that survive today mostly in the form of unpublished manuscripts housed in various archives. (Later publications drawn from these earliest Yeniseian lexical materials include Klaproth 1823, Dul’zon 1961c, and Khelimskiĭ 1986.) Some of the expedition’s linguistic findings also found their way into Peter Simon Pallas’s famous Comparative Dictionary of the World’s Languages, commissioned by Catherine the Great (Pallas 1786) and augmented by the author’s own data gathered during the Academy Expedition of 1768–74. Another scholar on this expedition, Johann Georgi, combined Gmelin’s data with his own observations of the Kets, Yughs, Kotts, and their dwindling relatives. Editions of his work appeared in German, French, and Russian (Georgi 1776–80), and helped inform Europeans about the existence of the Yeniseian peoples at a time when some groups were already disappearing. Müller and Gmelin’s vocabulary lists also enabled the historian Johann Fischer to recognize that Arin, Pumpokol, Assan, and Kott were closely related to Yenisei Ostyak (Ket and Yugh), and together formed a group completely different from neighboring peoples. Fischer was also the first to hypothesize that the Yeniseian peoples were recent immigrants to the taiga, pushed northward in pre-Russian times by Turkic and Samoyedic speaking tribes (Fischer 1774). The work of these eighteenth century scholars thus bequeathed to future Yeniseian studies a generally correct understanding of the true linguistic and ethnic interrelationships of Siberia’s aboriginal peoples. More importantly, Tatishchev, Müller, Gmelin, and their colleagues were the only scholars who succeeded in recording any significant quantity of Arin, Pumpokol, and Assan vocabulary. Without this priceless legacy, little comparative work in Yeniseian linguistics would be possible today.

The next serious study of Yeniseian languages was conducted by the indefatigable and prolific Finnish linguist Matthias A. Castrén (1813–52), who worked among the Kets, Yughs, and Kotts in 1846–8. Castrén’s Yeniseian studies were actually ancillary to his primary interest in the Samoyedic languages. Nevertheless, his description of Yenisei Ostyak (mostly Yugh) and Kott, published posthumously in 1858 under the editorship of Anton Shiefner, marks an important milestone in Yeniseian linguistics (Castrén 1858). Although Arin, Pumpokol, and Assan had vanished before the end of the previous century, Castrén was able to work with five of the last native speakers of Kott. Enduring years of gruelling physical hardship with only the most rudimentary creature comforts – working long hours in smoke-filled tents and visiting the most remote encampments – Castrén managed to record with painstaking accuracy an amazing quantity of linguistic data. Unfortunately, his ceaseless travels in an inhospitable environment contributed to his early death on the eve of his fortieth birthday. The detailed descriptions of Kott phonology and grammar left by this remarkable scholar, which included extensive dictionary materials far exceeding the brief word lists compiled in the eighteenth century, represent a unique achievement, and all subsequent comparative studies involving Kott have relied mainly on this data. Likewise, Castrén’s meticulous and pioneering descriptions of Ket and Yugh established a solid foundation for the modern study of these languages, to which nothing significant was added for nearly a century, until the work of N.K. Karger in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Finally, in presenting Castrén’s findings, the editor Anton Schiefner was the first to propose that Yeniseian might be related to Sino-Tibetan, an idea championed by many other linguists over the ensuing century (Byrne 1892; Ramstedt 1907; Trombetti 1902; Donner 1916–20; Lewy 1933; Bouda 1936a; Findeisen 1937, 1940; Joki 1946; Holmer 1953). Since the 1950s, the task of determining the external genetic relations of the Yeniseian language family has attracted even broader international participation (see below).

Athough the nineteenth century did not produce any comparable study of Ket culture, the Yenisei Ostyaks continued to attract attention, especially on the part of amateur ethnographers and local historians. A number of books containing first-hand accounts of contemporary native life in the Turukhansk area appeared (Pestov 1833; Stepanov 1835; Kornilov 1854; Kostrov 1857; Mordvinov 1860; Krivoshapkin 1865; Tret’ĭakov 1869). These occasionally included descriptions of elements of Ket folklore or material culture that would otherwise have gone completely unrecorded, such as the legend of the Kets’ first encounter with the Russians, related by Krivoshapkin and not documented again by subsequent scholars. During this same period the noted Turologist Wilhelm Radloff published evidence attesting to a Yeniseian substrate (both ethnographic and linguistic) in many of the Turkic peoples of South Siberia (Radlov 1887). Radloff also took the first steps in using toponymical data to determine the probable prehistoric distribution of Yeniseian-speaking peoples (Radloff 1884). These studies foreshadowed the significant accomplishments in this area made during the mid-twentieth century by such scholars as A.P. Dul’zon, who proved the presence of a Yeniseian substrate among the Chulym Tatars (Dul’zon 1952) and worked out the geographic distribution of Yeniseian substrate toponyms (Dul’zon 1950, 1959e). Radloff’s work also forsha-dowed studies by L.P. Potapov describing a Yeniseian substrate among the Koibals (Potapov 1956b), Khakas (Potapov 1952, 1957) and Northern Altai Turks (Potapov 1953, 1969); as well as S.I. Vaĭnshteĭn’s explorations of Yeniseian elements in Tuvan culture (Vaĭnshteĭn 1957, 1961, 1969). Radloff’s late nineteenth century publications also contain the first hypotheses regarding the possible Yeniseian affiliation of the ancient Dingling and Huns, a topic later taken up in the writings of G.E. Grumm-Grzhimaĭlo (1909, 1926), V.G. Bogoraz (1927b), Lev N. Gumilev (1959, 1960), Roman V. Nikolaev (1960a, 1963) Edwin Pulleyblank (1962) and A. Vovin (2000). Attempts have also been made to link Yeniseian speakers with the prehistoric Karasuk culture (Chlenova 1969, 1975), along with various other South Siberian culture complexes (Maloletko 1989). All of these issues remain unresolved and the role played by Yeniseian peoples in Inner Asian prehistory continues to capture the interest of scholars. One final important event of this period was the popularization by L.I. Shrenk of the notion that the Yenisei Ostyak, along with the remaining non Uralic-Altaic peoples of North Asia – the Chukchi, Koryak, Itelmen, Yukagir, and Nivkh – comprised an ethnographically more archaic group which Shrenk christened the “Paleoasiatic” peoples (Shrenk 1883). This idea was revisited in the writings of V. Bogoraz (1926, 1928a), in particular, and extended to include reference to the languages of the peoples in question. For most of the twentieth century, Ket was conventionally included in a “Paleoasiatic” language group, although most linguists clearly realized that it shared nothing in common with the other “Paleoasiatic” languages (for further discussion of this issue see Meshchaninov 1948 and Vdovin 1954).

Aside from Shrenk’s Paleoasiatic theory, Radloff’s ethnographic findings and Castrén’s pioneering linguistic work, most of the remaining material on the Yeniseians published during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the growing dissatisfaction on the part of local Siberian intellectuals against the government’s shabby treatment of the Kets and other native peoples. Publications of this type include the book Down the Yenisei (Peredol’skiĭ 1908), and a number of articles in local Siberian newspapers and popular science journals (Ĭadrintsev 1883; V. Anuchin 1909a, 1909c; Okulich 1909a,b; Bartol’d 1910), portraying the Yenisei Ostyaks as a people doomed to cultural and physical extinction by the callous disregard of government officials and the predations of local merchants. The tenor of these reports was perpetuated to some degree in the post-war publications of the German folklorist and ethnographer Hans Findeisen (Findeisen 1928b). However, fears of the Kets’ impending disappearance as an ethnic group proved unfounded, since most of these writers’ experience with Ket culture was limited to observing the poorest and most destitute Kets living in or near Russian towns along the Yenisei – individuals who had lost their native culture and had been left in total dependence upon outsiders. In truth, a majority of Kets at that time continued to maintain most elements of their age-old self-sufficient hunter-fisher economy and led a semi-nomadic life in relative isolation from the surrounding Russian society. The persistence of traditional Ket culture became clear only years later with research conducted by early Soviet ethnographers (Bogoraz 1929; Dolgikh 1934).

The first fundamental publication on Ket ethnography came in the second decade of the twentieth century, thanks to extensive field work carried out by V.I. Anuchin, who lived and worked among the Kets from 1905–8. His masterpiece, An Essay on Shamanism Among the Yenisei Ostyak (V. Anuchin 1914), represents a unique source on Ket spiritual culture, since subsequent studies were conducted only after the suppression of Ket shamans under Soviet rule in the 1930s. Anuchin’s book also contains extensive information about Ket prehistory and material culture, and thus established the foundation for the modern study of Ket ethnography in all its aspects. Unfortunately, Anuchin’s research was disrupted by the war and resultant revolution in Russian political and social life, and his scholarship on the Ket language was never published. During 1911–13 the Finnish scholar Kai Donner also traveled through Ket territory. After the war Donner continued studying the Kets, in part with the assistance of a native informant, Ilya Dibikov, brought from Turukhansk to Finland for three months in 1928. Donner’s research eventually led to the appearance of the first lengthy English-language description of the Kets (Donner 1933a) and the first significant dictionary materials since Castrén (Donner 1955).

The chaos of the early Soviet years soon yielded, with the creation of the Committee of the North in 1925, to a vigorous resurgence of interest in Native Siberian linguistic and ethnographic research. The Committee gathered together a group of energetic scholars dedicated to the study of the “small peoples of the North,” including the Kets, and to the establishment of literacy in the native northern languages. This was a radical departure from tsarist policy (Slezkine 1994). As part of the Committee’s work, some of the most talented scholars in the history of Yeniseian studies began the dual tasks of documenting native Ket culture and studying the Ket language with the goal of promoting native literacy. During the late 1920s Nestor K. Karger devised the first Ket alphabet, a Latin-based system oriented to the phonology of the Central Ket dialect. In 1934 a primer appeared (Karger 1934a). Ket had finally become a written language. Karger also produced an important study of Ket reindeer husbandry (Karger 1930), and a substantial description of Ket phonology and grammar (Karger 1934b), contributing the first new insights into the language since Castrén. During the late 1930s the scholar G.M. Korsakov conducted intensive studies of the Mountain Tunguska Kets, the culturally most conservative group. Unfortunately, catastrophic political events soon altered these propitious beginnings. Karger was arrested during the purges and shot (probably in 1937). His alphabet and projects for Ket literacy were abandoned, and his field notes and other materials have never been recovered. Korsakov perished during the Siege of Leningrad before having the chance to publish anything substantial, and his archive seems to have been destroyed with him. As a result, Yeniseian studies virtually ground to a halt. In the intervening decades, Soviet collectivization efforts radically altered the Kets’ traditional economy, and a vicious anti-religious campaign destroyed shamanism and with it much of traditional Ket spiritual culture. During this period, too, a majority of the Kets were settled in villages alongside Russians and other ethnic groups. This led gradually to Ket–Russian bilingualism, initiating a process of language attrition that continues to this day. A priceless opportunity to document Ket ethnography and strengthen the native language through a program of universal literacy was lost irrevocably.

Ironically, the dual tragedies of the war and Stalin’s repressions contributed in several accidental ways to a resurgence of Yeniseian studies during the 1950s and 1960s. In September 1941, Andreĭ P. Dul’zon (Andreas Dulson), a celebrated expert in German dialectology, was exiled with his family from the Volga German Republic to the city of Tomsk in South Siberia. There his scholarly interests turned almost out of necessity toward the study of Native Siberian peoples and languages. In the early 1950s Dul’zon’s research on the Chulym Tatars demonstrated a Yeniseian substrate in that group (Dul’zon 1952), together with an unexpectedly wide distribution of substrate river names (Dul’zon 1959a, 1959b) derived from Yeniseian languages. For many years, official restrictions forbade Dul’zon to travel beyond Tomsk Province, but in 1955 he traveled to Turukhansk District to study the language and culture of the northernmost group of Kets on the Kureika River. For the next two and a half decades, until his death in 1973, he led almost yearly expeditions of his students and colleagues from Tomsk State Pedagogical Institute (renamed Tomsk State Pedagogical University in 1995). Dul’zon’s expeditions visited each of the Ket speaking groups, spread out at that time along the Yenisei and its tributaries over an area greater than the countries of France and Germany combined, and gathered vast quantities of folklore and other linguistic materials. This data, preserved today in over 80 volumes at the TSPU Siberian Languages Laboratory, provided the basis for the first major publication of Ket folkloric texts (Dul’zon 1966c). In addition to his studies of Ket substrate toponyms, Dul’zon produced dozens of publications, including important comparative studies of Yeniseian dialects (Dul’zon 1961c, 1964e, 1970d), and two major monographs on Ket phonology and grammar (Dul’zon 1964e, 1968b). His second book, The Ket Language, earned him a State Prize in 1971. Perhaps most important, though abruptly compelled in middle age to begin a new scholarly life as a persecuted exile, Dul’zon succeeded against all odds in founding a vibrant school of Ket studies whose members have produced hundreds of publications over the past four decades (see below).

Another outstanding Ketologist to emerge from the tragedies of the Stalin years was Yerukhim A. Kreĭnovich, a Committee of the North member who initially dedicated his life to the study of the Nivkh (Gilyak) in the Soviet Far East. In 1937 Kreĭnovich was arrested and exiled to Kolyma. There, while working as a medical assistant, he took up the study of the Yukagir, a local aboriginal group. This led him, after his release from the camps, to an interest in the Yeniseian language group, which shares certain parallels with Yukagir (Kreĭnovich 1957, 1958). His research on Ket, conducted separately from the emerging Dul’zon School in Tomsk during several expeditions to the Yenisei, and in Leningrad with the help of excellent native informants, produced a number of important publications, including a fundamental description of Ket verb morphology (Kreĭnovich 1968a) which still remains a key reference work on this topic. Kreĭnovich also published a number of valuable Ket texts, notable for their meticulous phonetic accuracy. And his prior experience with Nivkh ethnography led him to new conclusions on the original significance of many aspects of the Ket Bear Festival (Kreĭnovich 1969c). Unlike Dul’zon, Kreĭnovich generally worked alone and did not found any school of Ket studies in Leningrad.

The historian Boris O. Dolgikh was able to pursue his work on Ket historical ethnography and demographics despite the purges and the war, eventually producing a landmark study, The Clan and Tribal Composition of Siberian Peoples in the Seventeenth Century (Dolgikh 1960). This volume contains meticulous data on the distribution of Yeniseian peoples during the first centuries after the Russian conquest, and remains the definitive publication on Yeniseian historical demographics and social organization. In the 1950s the Moscow-based specialist on Tuvan culture and history, S.I. Vaĭnshteĭn, produced several articles on Ket culture and origins (Vaĭnshteĭn 1950, 1951, 1954) and continues to publish occasionally on the Kets (see, for example, Vaĭnshteĭn 1994, which describes the Kets’ economic situation during perestroika and after the collapse of communism).

The most prolific accomplishments in the field of Ket ethnography during the post war years belong to the remarkable Evgeniĭa A. Alekseenko of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in St. Petersburg. From 1955 to 1993, E.A. Alekseenko participated in over 30 expeditions to the Kets and gathered vast quantities of new data on all aspects of Ket culture, particularly the Bear Cult (Alekseenko 1960a, 1985d), shamanism (Alekseenko 1971c, 1978a, 1981c,d, 1984a,b,c, 1992d), folk belief (Alekseenko 1963b, 1971a, 1974a, 1977a, 1988d), world view (Alekseenko 1976d, 1993e), and ethnogenesis (Alekseenko 1973a,b, 1976c, 1980b, 1982d). Her numerous donations to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography have helped build the largest collection of Ket artifacts and photographs in the world (Alekseenko 1980c). Her publishing record is likewise extraordinary. In addition to more than 100 substantive articles on virtually every aspect of Ket material and spiritual culture, her book, The Kets: Historical and Ethnographic Essays (Alekseenko 1967a), remains by far the most complete and accurate reference on traditional Ket ethnography. Her publications describe many aspects of the Kets’ unique worldview that would otherwise have vanished without any documentation at all. Her field work also corrected several inaccuracies in V. Anuchin’s generally superb account of Ket spiritual culture (V. Anuchin 1914). For example, Anuchin had incorrectly concluded that Ket shamans could pass on their calling only to members of the opposite sex, while recent field work has documented instances of women transferring their shaman’s gift directly to other women (Alekseenko 1992d). E.A. Alekseenko’s life-long work as ethnographer of the Kets had a most unlikely beginning (personal communication by E. Alekseenko). While traveling as a young student one summer through South Siberia, she witnessed an unusually violent thunderstorm as her train was crossing the Yenisei. The experience left a vivid impression on her. Years later she overheard a teacher mention that Siberia’s least studied ethnic group, the Kets, lived along that very same river. These two events conspired fortuitously to initiate a truly outstanding scholarly career.

Another significant place in the history of Yeniseian studies belongs to the archeologist Roman V. Nikolaev, now reti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• Part I The History of Yeniseian Studies
• Part II Annotated Bibliography of Publications
• Part III Guide to Unpublished Sources
• Part IV Classified Index