Issue 4 (65)
| NEITHER A SHAMAN, NOR AN ETHNOGRAPHER (Ethnic identity in Museum Collections) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Year | 2019 | Number | 4(65) |
| Pages | 108-115 | Type | scientific article |
| UDC | 39:069.4 | BBK | 63.521(=667)+79.100 |
| Authors | Perevalova Elena V. |
Topic | MUSEUM AND ETHNICITY |
| Summary | An assemblage of the Nenets ritual objects No. 6725/1-28, added to the funds of the MAE RAS in January 1974, does not stand out as something special among the numerous masterpieces of the museum’s funds, however, the composition and the “biography” of these ethnographic relics, the history of their existence and the appearance in the museum reveal the factors and the motives contributing to the transformation of ethnic identity. Neither the struggle against the pagan cults during the forced conversion to the Russian Orthodoxy (the 18th — the early 20th centuries), nor the “red terror” campaign against the shamans (late 1920s–1940s) could eradicate the religious and ritual traditions of the indigenous peoples of the North. However, the boarding school system, which from the very beginning of the Soviet period actively fought against the “backward” tradition, resulted in a massive change in the ethnic identity perception. The Soviet younger generation educated by the boarding schools became a conductor of the cultural (ideological) revolution. These processes found their reflection in a museum system, including the principles and the approaches to making up the collections. The religious items, which came to the museums in the 1930s and the 1950s via the NKVD or other Soviet official bodies with the accompanying notes of the type “given over to a museum at the request of the Komsomol members upon closing of a shaman’s labaz”, were gradually replaced with the ethnographic collections donated to the funds by the representatives of the indigenous peoples themselves. For the young people, such as the Nenets Anatoly Serotetto, the motivation for the donation of the family religious relics to a museum was associated with a choice between becoming a shaman like his father and his grandfather, or an ethnographer. And, even though his plans were never fulfilled, the shaman’s songs performed by him, and the religious items of the Serotetto family donated to the museum, live even today as a memory-presentation of the Nenets religious and ritual tradition. The trajectory of the movement of the Serotetto “shaman’s box” from the ethnic environment (the Yamal tundra) to the MAE RAS collections reflected the specifics of the changes in the ethnic identity of one person, a family, and the whole people. | ||
| Keywords | ethnic identity, Nenets, museum collections, ritual objects, shaman | ||
| References |
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