Keten
The Keten , also Ketó ( Russian кеты , kety ; own designation Sg. Ket ("man") or Pl. Deng ("people", "people", historical name Yenisei-Ostyaks ) are one of the 44 "indigenous peoples of the Russian north " . At the 2010 census , 1,219 people reported being of Ketan nationality.
The Kets live in several areas of the Krasnoyarsk Territory : most of them in Turukhansk district on the left of the Yenisei, others in two separate subgroups in the former Evenk Autonomous Okrug on the right of the Yenisei.
Language, culture and religion
The Ketan language belongs to the group of the Paleo-Siberian languages and is the only language from the Yenisite language family spoken to this day . In 1989, 48% of the ketas said they spoke the ketan as their mother tongue.
Their traditional way of life is based on hunting and fishing and is closely related to the great Siberian rivers.
The so-called classical shamanism is the ethnic religion of the Keten. 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 kets have a hereditary or divinely transmitted shamanism. The apprenticeship and initiation takes a very long time (21 years), after which they have a high social status ("iron antler crown"). Lower bear shamans are responsible for simple things like healing. Reindeer shamans maintain contact with the upper world. Like elsewhere, the drum is a personified animal helper. There are strong influences from Turk-Mongolian shamanism.
Christianization only took place superficially among many remote peoples of Siberia, so that syncretistic mixed religions are common today. However, the kets are one of the few peoples who still largely follow the tradition of shamanism.
As with other peoples in the north of Eurasia, a bear cult is part of the Keten tradition. A bear is considered an ancestor because it contains the soul of a deceased person. When a bear is killed, certain physical characteristics are searched for in order to find out whose soul it was harboring. There is also the notion that the bear has clairvoyant abilities, he can understand human language and even guess thoughts. Therefore, according to the report of a research expedition carried out between 1905 and 1908, the Kets used a form of appeasement when they surrounded a bear while hunting: “'Don't be angry, grandfather! Come to us as a guest. ' Only then do you beat him to death. ”Other rituals had to be observed when cutting the bear meat , for example no blood was allowed to drip onto the earth. A wooden house was built for the skull of a killed bear. The Finnish linguist Kai Donner describes a bear festival in which he took part in 1912, in which a bear figure painted with damp charcoal on birch bark was the focus.
Individual evidence
- ^ The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire - The Kets, Institute of the Estonian Language
- ↑ Klaus E. Müller : Shamanism. Healers, spirits, rituals. 4th edition, CH Beck, Munich 2010 (original edition 1997), ISBN 978-3-406-41872-3 . Pp. 29-33.
- ↑ 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 . Pp. 159-160.
- ↑ Heinrich Werner: The age-old deer or reindeer cult among the Yenisei people in the light of vocabulary . In: Studia Etymologica Cracoviensia , No. 16, 2011. pp. 141-150.
- ↑ The Keten . ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Report on the radio Voice of Russia on October 5, 2010.
- ↑ The small peoples of the far north and far east of Russia. Society for Threatened Peoples - South Tyrol, Bozen 1998.
- ↑ Hans-Joachim Rüdiger Paproth: The Ketó Bear Festival in Northern Siberia associated with the bear ceremonies and bear festivals of other peoples in the northern hemisphere. In: Anthropos, Volume 57, Issue 1/2, 1962, pp. 55-88
Web links
- Edward J. Vajda: The Ket and Other Yeniseian Peoples. Course Material, 2000
- Indigenous Minority Languages of Russia - Ket: General overview. August 3, 2001
- The Keten report of the radio station "Voice of Russia"