Animism in Rainforest and Tundra, 8 & 10


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8.

Objects in the Nenets Tundra Home

Vera Skvirskaja

146-61


p. 148 geographical location of the Nenets/Samoyed

"The Asiatic Nenets (also known as Samoyed) are a Finno-Ugrian speaking reindeer-herding people who moved to the territory of what is today the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in the late seventeenth century."


p. 149 terms in Russian for social groupings

term

meaning

rod

clan

plemia

tribe

vataga

band


pp. 150-1 analogue to tipi

p. 150

"The chroom, a teepee-like structure built over wooden poles and covered with reindeer hides ... is the only type of tundra dwelling used by herder families ... . ...

p. 151

The space behind the fireplace and opposite the entrance is a sacred zone marked by two sacred poles (N. siamzy) ... used to accommodate carved wooden images of spirits (N. siadai). My tundra hosts ... acknowledged invisible spirits residing there ... . ... During their reproductive years women do not cross the sacred zone, neither inside nor outside the chroom, nor dry the clothes that cover the lower part of their body above the fire ... . Inside the chroom, there are female sectors that are situated on both sides of the entrance and used to store women's belongings. Male sectors, located next to the sacred poles, ... serve as designated areas for respected visitors and guests. The bed of the household head and his wife is located in the intermediate space between the male and female sectors."


p. 152 hospitality

"chroom hospitality is taken for granted and offered to all. ... There are two areas where guests and visitors are accommodated : in the 'male' sector ... and on the matrimonial bed ... . At meal times or when hosts entertain their guests ..., the matrimonial bed is transformed into a seating area, near which a low table is set up."


pp. 152-3 seating-arrangement for guests

p. 152

"Visitors are accommodated as follows : ... men senior to the wife's husband ... from his group of clans (or phratry) are not welcome to sit on the couple's bed. Similar restrictions apply to women : they are free to sit on the beds of any men from their own phratry but would not accommodate themselves on the beds of any men from the other phratry who are senior to their husbands. ...

p. 153

To sit on someone's bed is to compell the person's attention; the sight of the 'wrong' person (a non-agnate) on one's bed transforms him or her into a potential sexual rival or partner."


pp. 154-5 sacred objects

p. 154

"Sacred objects (N. khekhe) and the sacred sledge (N. khekhe-khan) comprise the chroom's spiritual wealth that is transmitted between generations ... . ...

p. 155

Classic accounts of the Nenets sacred sledge emphasize different sacred objects as forms of representation -- for example,

representations of the spirit of the locality,

parts of some 'main' spirits (taken from sacred places in the tundra),

ancestral images (N. ngitarma),

domestic spirits, chroom guardians ... ."


pp. 155-6 spirits in sacred objects

p. 155

"a man-made ancestral image (N. ngitarma) has a spirit or soul of its own, ... spirits in sacred things (N. khekhe)".

p. 156

"A common theme ... is that an object becomes sacred due to unusual circumstances or by 'showing' itself to a particular individual."

[p. 159, n. 5 "The idea of objects choosing the persons with whom they want to form relationships is a common one across indigenous Siberia (see, e.g., Vitebsky 2002)."]


"Some khekhe are given names -- 'the watchman', 'the grandma', 'the doctor', and so on. ... Although these khekhe are not ... ancestral spirits, they resemble the ongon (an ancestral spirit vessel) found in Siberian and Inner Asia shamanic groups in that they are seen as protectors and helpers (see, e.g., ... Petersen [2005]:150-56). ... Nenets khekhe were explicitly understood as containers of spirits, i.e. a spirit could leave or enter a (sacred) object ..., and the sacred sledge itself was fashioned after a reindeer and perceived as a 'body' animated by spirit (... Dio`szegi 1978)."

Vitebsky 2002 = Piers Vitebsky : "Social and Spiritual Crisis in the Indigenous Russian Arctic". In :- Christopher Michael Hann (ed.) : Postsocialism : Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London : Routledge. pp. 180-95.

Petersen 2005 = Morten Axel Petersen : "Talismans of Thought : Shamanist Ontologies and Extended Cognition in Northern Mongolia". In :- Amiria J. M. Henare; Martin Holbraad; Sari Wastell (edd.) : Thinking Through Things : Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London : Univ College. reprinted 2006 Milton Park : Abingdon (Oxon); reprinted 2007 London : Routledge. pp. 141-66.

Dio`szegi 1978 = Vilmos Dio`szegi : "Pre-Islamic Shamanism of the Baraba Turks ...". In :- Vilmos Diószegi; Mihály Hoppál (edd.) : Shamanism in Siberia. Budapest : Akade`miai Kiado`. pp. 83-168.


p. 158 indexing social relations

"the Nenets' mode of indexing relations in things ... is a strategy aimed at maintaining social relations and relatedlness. In her study of objects that can be found in every Mongolian household -- photographic displays, things kept inside the family chest, like pieces of offerings from oboos (ritual sites), people's hair -- Rebecca Empson (2007:134) suggests precisely that. ... When people are dispersed across the landscape, things act as sites for containing aspects of people's relations in the absence of people and maintain relations in time".

Empson 2007 = Rebecca Empson : "Separating and Containing People and Things in Mongolia". In :- Amiria J. M. Henare; Martin Holbraad; Sari Wastell (edd.) : Thinking Through Things Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London : Univ College. reprinted 2006 Milton Park : Abingdon (Oxon); reprinted 2007 London : Routledge. pp. 113-40.


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10.

Extractive Relations in Inner Asia

Katherine Swancutt

175-94


pp. 176-7 persons who seek to become vampires in Mongolia

p. 176

"the Aga Buryat Mongols hold that when unvirtuous {insubmissive?} people die,


they become vampiric imps (cho:tgo:r) because they

{"the vampiric imps are skeletal (aragyas shig), with long nails and dishevelled hair that stands straight up on end. Their eyes are either missing, as with the skulls of decayed bodies, or glow like red lights." ("UG", p. 846)}

p. 177

refuse to meet


the spirit bureaucracy (an explicit hierarchy)

{"as generational distance grows, spirits are increasingly drawn into the administrative bureaucracy of the shamanic afterlife world" ("UG", p. 852)}


which regulates the cycle of laypersons' rebirths and the afterlife {never to be reborn?} for shamans (Swancutt 2008:847). These vampiric imps remain on earth, preying on their consanguineal relatives' livestock, foodstores and eventually their bodies {cf. "UG", p. 855}. At the same time, the imps encourage their kin to commit suicide ..., so that they too can contravene the authority of the spirit bureaucracy and become imps (ibid.:846)."

Swancutt 2008 = "UG" = Katherine Swancutt : "The Undead Genealogy : Omnipresence, Spirit Perspectives, and a Case of Mongolian Vampirism". J OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE 14.4:843-64. http://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/anthropos-and-the-material/Intranet/ritual-practices/Reading%20group/swancutt-the-undead-genealogy.pdf

{vampiric imps as poltergeists : ["UG", p. 846] "Typically, vampiric imps hide in household sheds, closets, cupboards, milking pails, and hats. At night, they run along the roads at the outskirts of a district and congregate at crossroads. ... Vampiric imps can be heard raiding the pantries at night, accidentally bumping into the furniture, opening cupboards, and chewing food." [These are evidently identical with the type of entity known in modern western Europe as "poltergeist".]}


myths concerning Avgaldai (a possessing-spirit employed in mediumship) and Abagaldai -- the twain gods [perhaps distinct], in "UG", pp. 853-4

"UG", p. 853

"People in Bayandun pronounce the spirit's name as 'Avgaldai', which in Mongolian can mean a pupa, larva, or caterpillar".

{cf. Maui-tikitiki's "turning himself into a moko huruhuru (caterpillar)." ("SMM&L")} {/Moko/ is 'tattoo' : the tattoo "dye for the body ... was from a caterpillar, infected with a certain type of fungus." (OCh"MM"; cf. TIAM, p. 422)}

"UG", p. 854

"Avgaldai practised as a great shaman ..., but was always terrified that the spirits of his wife and daughter would ... find him and take his own head."

{The divine name /Maui- tikitiki/ is (as mentioned in OEBC) in Micronesia pronounced /Mo-c^ikc^ik/ : cf. how in Cubeo myth "Mavi`chikori’s head was crushed" (CHRTh, p. 239) by wearing a feather-bonnet -- cf., e.g., the trailing feather-bonnet worn by skull-headed god in CBM, p. 39, upper left.}

"UG", p. 854

"Abagaldai goes off for a smoke while his wife is away holding a shamanic se'ance,

{Hera-klees was burned to death on account of contact with the blood (of a centaur) given to him by Deianeira (DCM, s.v. "Heracles", p. 207a).}


during which time his abandoned son drowns

{Hera-klees "slew all his children" (DCM, s.v. "Heracles", p. 195b).}


in a river."

{Deianeira had obtained the blood at the

river Eu-enos (DCM, s.v. "Nessus").}

"SMM&L" = "Some Maori Myths and Legends". http://www.hinau.co.nz/Maori%20Myth.html

OCh"MM" = Oleg Cherne : "Moko Maori". http://www.olegcherne.ru/articles/46-moko-maori/

TIAM = Richard Taylor : Te Ika A Maui. London : Wertheim & MacIntosh, MDCCCLV. http://archive.org/stream/teikaamauiornew01taylgoog/teikaamauiornew01taylgoog_djvu.txt

OEBC = David H. Kelley : Our Elder Brother Coyote. PhD diss, Harvard Univ.

CHRTh = Irving Goldman (ed. by Peter J. Wilson) : Cubeo Hehe`newa Religious Thought. Columbia Univ Pr, NY, 2004. http://myth.00.gs/Cubeo_Hehenewa_Religious_Thought,_7-10.htm

CBM = Codex Borgianus Mexicanus. http://www.famsi.org/research/graz/borgia/img_page39.html


p. 177 the human soul, according to the Nuoso tribe in Yun-nan province

"[Ancestors] of present-day villagers had migrated one hundred fifty years earlier from the Greater Cool Mountains (Da Liangshan) of neighboring Sichuan Province."

"the human soul is in fact a predatory 'soul-spider' (yyr) residing on the outer surface of the human body."


p. 179 obtaining Heavenly blessings by seeking the attention of deities

"among Deed Mongols in the district of Zu:u:n Sum (Chinese : Zongjia), Qinghai Province ... a young man told me ... that ... a ... person could even make ritual sacrifices, with the explicit purpose of attracting disproportionately more blessings from the spirits ... . This man gave the following rationale ... : ... more modest people fail to attract the attention of the gods, and by extension their blessings.

... kin and friends involved in the conversation ... confessed that the man had spoken truthfully after all".

{Surely they must have taught these facts to him; he was thus most likely only repeating their words.}

{This would be more or less feasible; except that deities do not care to have their attention occupied with minor personal requaests on behalf of a group of merely a few persons (and still less, a single person) -- especially if fulfiling the particular requaest could not solve the problem into and through the distant future --, and would, by far, praefer that any and all requaests be for a global (planetwide) application. (Requaests of purely personal application are likely to be not only summarily dismissed, but with poinalty imposed for frivolous communication with one's supernatural superiors.) Acceptable types of prayer-requaests for transmission-and-praesentation to major committees of divine entities would be, in all probability, for assistance in plans to overthrow false (materialistic, etc.) philosophies and vicious (capitalistic, etc.) oikonomic systems.}


p. 179 indulgences

"Curiously, the Mongol strategy of attracting a disproportionate number of blessings resonates with

the medieval Catholic practice of selling indulgences, or documents from the Church declaring ... the purchasers ... absolved ... of their sins. Notoriously attractive, these documents were avidly sought by wealthy people {ie., by bloatedly superopulent confirmed hypocrites, who barely at all tolerated the Church with its traditional advocacy of voluntary poverty}, who hoped to buy up all the indulgences {thereby freeing themselves of any religious duties to the Church} on offer from travelling churchmen."

{The "indulgences" were intended to obliterate the effects of not only any past, but also of any future sins, so that the buyers of these would be (by being exempted from any future spiritual punishment for any future contravention of ecclesiastic conventions) automatically exempted from ever again having to say confession to a priest (because forgiveness from a priest would no longer be necessary). In consequence, the Church lost track of the secret conspiratorial doings among political factions of the ruling-class, with the result that the Church would no longer be informed about incipient conspiracies among the political ruling-class against the Church itself. The eventual result, of course, was praevalence among the ruling-class of a conspiracy for the ovethrow of the Church itself, which culminated in the Protestant Reformation -- whose national Churches (Lutheran, etc.) thereupon hastily abolished "indulgences" lest further conspiracies against themselves also be furthermore encouraged!}

{The "indulgences" had been intended as a notice to the ruling-class of such trust in nobility and in ploutokrats that they need no further confess any of their own participation in, or knowledge of other persons' particiption in, conspiracies against the Church itself. But such trust was excessively overconfident, and grossly misplaced. Thitherto political factions in the ruling-class had been obviated (by the sacrament of the confessional) from deliberate plotting against the Church itself; so that by eliminating such a restraint, the Church doomed itself (in northern Europe, at least).}


p. 181 further details about the Nuoso soul-spider

"Every Nuoso person's soul-spider ... resides on the outside surface of the body and crawls along its contours. Resembling the smallest and whitest of spiders, or a newly hatched spider, the soul-spider can be seen with the naked eye and is visible to both laypersons and shamans. Typically, the Nuoso see their own soul-spiders crossing their household thresholds during a soul-calling ceremony. ... On rare occasions, the soul-spider may even be seen to spin a thread ... when using its filament to lower itself from a person's fingertip, before climbing back up that thread and crawling again along the person's body."

"the Nuoso prohibit killing actual spiders, which although never confused with soul-spiders bear too close a resemblance to them."


p. 182 Nuoso social classes

Nuoso term

definition

nuo

"elites"

qunuo

"commoners"

mgajie

"semi-independent farmers"


p. 184 AmerIndian conviviality in Surinam

"Holding ... festivals which attract residential affines into a single communal house, ... Trio partake in ... games and

circle dances around a central pole,

{cf. European maypole; the Aztec xocotl uetzi (DLA, p. 247) for Xiuh-tecuhtli Ueue-teotl : "they raised ... this pole, and ... all danced around it" (Motolinia 1903 [1536–1541]:Capítulo 19:61 -- transl in "APR", p. 303b).}

with the aim of renewing society through their ... 'liminal' emphasis on centripetal relationality ([Grotti 2007]:63-65, see also 71-77, 104-6; 2009:80-89)."

DLA = Jacques Soustelle (transl by Patrick O'Brian) : Daily Life of the Aztecs, on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest. George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1961. https://books.google.com/books?id=Xm67kMSlXpAC&pg=PA247&lpg=PA247&dq=

Motolinia 1903 = Toribio de Motolinia [1536–1541] : Memoriales. En Casa del Editor, Mexico (DF).

"APR" = Christopher S. Beekman : "Agricultural Pole Rituals ... in ... Central Jalisco". ANCIENT MESOAMERICA 14(2003):299–318. https://www.academia.edu/400449/Agricultural_Pole_Rituals_and_Rulership_In_Late_Formative_Central_Jalisco

Grotti 2007 = Vanessa Elisa Grotti : Nurturing the Other : Wellbeing, Social Body and Trasformability in Northeastern Amazonia. PhD thesis, Univ of Cambridge.

Grotti 2009= Vanessa Elisa Grotti : "Parente', "diffusion de l'influence" et transformations corporelles dans les fe^tes de bie`re trio, Amazonie du nord-est". J DE LA SOCIE'TE' DES AME'RICANISTES 95.1:73-96.


pp. 184-5 inviting return, of its own accord, of a strayed soul-spider

p. 184

"Cajoled into the home with promises ..., the soul-spider is encourage to climb a white thread laid across the household threshold, which is meant to resemble a real spider's thread. Usually the owner of a lost soul-spider, or a close relative, handles this thread and a small basket ... -- or a lacquer compote box -- which contains ... a swatch of cloth, to which the thead is tied. Everyone attending ...

p. 185

watches for the moment when the soul-spider starts climbing the thread, whispering to each other when they have seen it, and monitor its travel. When the soul-spider has reached the basket, the person handing the thread winds it up, ... wrapping the soul-spider within the thread, and then places it in the basket, shutting the lid ... . The basket is then opened on the next good astrological day that arises, to release the captured soul-spider within the home, whereupon it willingly crawls onto the surface of its owner's body.

Recovering the soul-spider strengthens the person's health ... and the fullness of life."


pp. 185-6 homecoming : post-mortem travel by soul

p. 185

"Nuoso post-mortuary rites (nimu cobi) ... invite the deceased ancestor home one or more years after the funeral. ... Carving a 'spirit vessel' (madu), which takes the form of a cylindrical container made of hawthorn wood, ... the vessel would be placed on a bamboo mat, 'representing a bed for the soul' (Ma 2000:55).


Ideally, the bamboo mat is suspended from the ceiling of the deceased's home ... .

{evidently, so as to simulate the flight of a flying-carpet of the jnun}


... the rite ensures the deceased returns {that the defunct return} to the original Nuoso lineage location ... [in] 'the land of the ancestors ... [called] Zyzypuyvy, near the present-day Zhaotong, in northeastern Yunnan' (ibid.:55). ... when the deceased reached this ancestral land, they

{cf., e.g. : "Because they are lands of origin, ... from which the ancestors came in the beginning, the wairua ['souls'] return to them after death." (MM&L, p. 113b)}

p. 186

were also {each} stably transformed into a guardian spirit (jjyp lup) ... ."

Ma 2000 = Ma Erzi (transl. by Stevan Harrell) : "The Bimo, Their Books and Religious Implements". In :- Stevan Harrell et al. (edd.) : Mountain Patterns : the Survival of Nuoso Culture in China. Seattle : Univ of WA Pr. pp. 51-7.


p. 188 philanthropic attitude advocated, among mortals, by deities

"The shamanic spirits and ... gods like seeing people help others, without expecting anything in return, and treating each other as equals."

[Instance of a communal worship-structure built as philanthropic effort :] "an old man in Bayandun who who had a reputation locally of being very knowledgeable ... recently

had built many stone cairns (ovoo) ... in the shape of a turtle".

{Because in Taoist cosmography one of the mythic paradisaical isles inhabited by deities is described as a gigantic turtle (much as the mortal-inhabited ocean-surrounted earthly continent, as known to them, is called a "turtle" by many AmerIndians), therefore to build a stone cairn in the shape of a turtle would be to invite the advent locally of paradise-deities.}


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Marc Brightman; Vanessa Elisa Grotti; & Olga Ulturgasheva (edd.) : Animism in Rainforest and Tundra : Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia. Berghahn Bks, Oxford, 2012.