Koryaks
The Koryaks are a people on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east of Russia . Most of them live in the Koryak Autonomous Okrug . Their number is about 8,000.
language
The Koryak language , together with the closely related Chukchi language, belongs to the group of the Chukchi-Kamchadal languages .
Way of life
Before the arrival of the Russians, the Koryaks lived in extended patriarchal families. There were both nomadic reindeer herding groups and sedentary groups who lived from hunting and whaling. In the late 19th century, whaling yields plummeted as American whalers depleted whale stocks, and fishing began to play a role. In Soviet times the nomadic tribes were settled and reindeer herding was introduced on a large scale.
religion
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 Koryaks. 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. A "family shamanism" existed among the Korjaks; every member of the family owned a sacred shaman's drum .
Christianization only took place superficially among many remote peoples of Siberia, so that syncretistic mixed religions are common today. The Korjaks belong to the peoples who still largely follow the tradition of shamanism today.
politics
Politically, the Koryaks belong to the group of small indigenous peoples of the Russian north, Siberia and the Russian Far East , which are organized in the umbrella organization RAIPON .
literature
- Petra Rethmann: Tundra Passages: History and Gender in the Russian Far East. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 2000, ISBN 978-0-271-02058-7 .
- Waldemar Jochelson : The Koryak (= Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition . Volume 6), two volumes, New York 1905, ( digitized ).
Web links
- www.koryaks.net - culture, geography, language, history of the Koryaks. Website of Alexander King, University of Aberdeen
- The Korjaks, the Itelmenen - report of the radio station "Voice of Russia"
Individual evidence
- ↑ Leonid Zapok: church growth in Chukotka . In: Institute G2W. Ecumenical Forum for Faith, Religion and Society in East and West, Zurich, 2012, accessed on March 3, 2015.
- ^ Rolf Wilhelm Brednich (Ed.): Schinden, Schinder - Sublimierung. Volume 12 of the Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales: Concise Dictionary for Historical and Comparative Narrative Research Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2007, ISBN 3110921715 . P. 617.