SETTLEMENT NENETS ON THE YAMAL PENINSULA: WHO ARE THEY?
Abstract: 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 descr...
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| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.546.7769 http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol41/liarskaya.pdf |
| Summary: | Abstract: 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. Key words: Nenets of Yamal, tundra and settlement lives in the Nenets cul-ture. 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 |
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