Jukagiren

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Jukagir women
at the end of the 19th century
Shaman, 1902

The Jukagirs are a small Paleo-Siberian people who live in Northeast Asia mainly in the Sakha Republic (popularly known as Yakutia ), which belongs to Russia .

geography

The main settlement areas of the Jukagiren are the landscapes of the northeast Russian rivers Alaseja , Kolyma and Indigirka , which run in the area of ​​the extensive East Siberian lowlands and the Jukagiren plateau , the coldest regions of Siberia.

General information

In 1979 there were 835 Jukagirs, in 2010 1603 people professed their Yukagir identity. Only a smaller part of the Yukagir population speaks the Yukagir language , which is threatened with extinction. Jukagir (Yukagir) is probably a Tungusian foreign name. The names of the different groups are: Odul, Vadul, Dutke, Dutkil.

Distribution area of ​​the Jukagirs in the 17th century (dashed) and in the late 20th century. Light red settlement areas of Jukagiren, which today have adopted other languages, dark red today's Jukagir language area. The southern area in the vicinity of the cold pole of inhabited areas of Oymyakon .

Until the Christianization by the Russian Orthodox Church (beginning in the 17th century, but not worth mentioning until the end of the 19th century), so-called “classical shamanism” was the ethnic religion of the Jukagirs. The ethnologist Klaus E. Müller speaks of "elementary shamanism" and means the most archaic form of this spiritual practice, which was typical of Siberian ethnic groups, in which the hunt played a prominent role in cultural terms. The Jukagirs were a particularly ancient form, because anyone could be a shaman . On the one hand there was the healer who asks for the luck in the hunt and offers sacrifices and on the other hand the so-called “tremor” ( ritual ecstasy ). According to the traditional Yukagir idea, a person has three souls.

Christianization only took place superficially among many remote peoples of Siberia, so that syncretistic mixed religions are common today. The Jukagirs are one of the peoples among whom some people still follow the tradition of shamanism.

history

When Tungus-speaking groups penetrated north and east Siberia in the 13th century, several ethnic groups that were linguistically and culturally related to the ancestors of today's Jukagirs lived there in a very large area. At this point in time, metalworking was not yet widespread, so that one must speak of late Stone Age hunter-gatherer cultures. They lived from hunting, fishing and collecting. The only domestic animals were domestic dogs and reindeer , but only as draft animals, unlike other peoples of Siberia, not as a source of food. They lived in Tschum . After the Russian colonization, which began as early as the 17th century, and the further spread of the Yakut and Eweni language and culture, only smaller groups remained in the 19th and 20th centuries who identified themselves as Jukagirs. Some Yukagir groups took part in the colonial conquest of Northeast Asia as Russian auxiliaries. War losses, linguistic and cultural assimilation and epidemics led to the fact that by 1861 the number of Jukagirs had fallen below 1000. The Jukagirs were already considered Christianized in the 18th century .

present

The centuries-old Russian influence on the Jukagirs and other small peoples of Siberia has led to an extensive culturally Russification . In contrast, the Soviet Union decided in 1989 to take far-reaching measures to stop or reverse this process: mother-tongue school classes were set up to preserve the language. Training programs for hunting and fur farming have been initiated. These laws were adopted by the Russian state in December 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At the 2010 census, 1603 people said they were Jukagiren.

Related ethnic groups

The ethnic groups of the Anaul and Hodyn disbanded during the Russian colonial era. With the Tschuwanen (Tschuwanzen) a mixed population with its own identity emerged, who now live in many parts of Northeast Asia.

See also

Web links

Commons : Jukagiren  - collection of images, videos and audio files

proof

  1. ^ Nikolai Fjodorowitsch Katanow : Christianization of the indigenous peoples of Siberia. Translation of the publication of the Ministry of Education of the Khakassky State University on bildungsstoffen.com, accessed June 30, 2015.
  2. ↑ including Klaus E. Müller: Shamanism. Healers, spirits, rituals. 4th edition, CH Beck, Munich 2010 (original edition 1997), ISBN 978-3-406-41872-3 . Pp. 75, 88.
  3. ↑ Richard B. Lee and Richard Daly (Eds.): The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. 4th edition, Cambridge University Press, New York 2010 (first printed 1999), ISBN 978-0-521-60919-7 . P. 154.
  4. ↑ The small peoples of the far north and far east of Russia. Society for Threatened Peoples - South Tyrol, Bozen 1998.
  5. ↑ [URL https://www.gfbv.de/de/news/indigene-voelker-im-norden-russlands-und-sibiriens-174/ .] In: Information of the Society for Threatened Peoples South Tyrol, from Die kleine Völker des far north and far east of Russia. A current situation report with a historical and ethnographic introduction , Bozen 1998, accessed on September 15, 2019.
  6. ↑ National data from the 2010 census (Jukagiren line 202 )