WAYS OF DESCRIBING NENETS AND KHANTY “CHARACTER ” IN 19th CENTURY RUSSIAN ETHNOGRAPHIC LITERATURE

• Main Author: Art Leete
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: khanty; nenets; samoyed*; Siberia
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.546.7153; http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol12/pdf/charactr.pdf

The current article deals with general assertions about the natives of West-Siberia as bearers of their world view conception in the Russian ethnographic literature of the last century. The aim of the article is to explain the general or background attitudes towards the Khanty and Nenets people in the 19th century (as well as to-wards their world view) in ethnographic literature during the pe-riod under discussion. A certain attitude towards the natives of the northern part of West-Siberia – the Khantys and the Nenets – was established by the 19th century authors and, at a certain level this attitude can be observed even in contemporary ethnographic texts. Golovnev for example argues that for a long time the principal researcher of the Samoyed people was Castrén, the most important contributor to the study of Ob-Ugric people was Munkácsi. Their renditions and assessments formed the basis of comparison for all the future gen-