Style and Genre Aspects of Kazym Khanty Bear Festival Songs

Abstract

The bear festival of the Kazym Khanty represents a multicomponent cultural and religious phenomenon, featuring key ritual and mythic symbols of the Khanty world, closely correlated to the richest level of Ob’-Ugrian musical depth. Relevant literature encompasses significant works by ethnographers, musicologists, and culturologists from the eighteenth through nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, the style and genre aspects of analyzing ritual bear-honoring songs of the Kazym Khanty has been insufficiently studied. The article explores the genre and musical component of the bear festival as a unified traditional culture conceptual text. Classification of the ritual songs requires studying the rite’s dramaturgy, integrated structurally. The ritual bear complex and its actions can be structurally analyzed according to genre and by ethnic group. Theoretical interpretation and musical style typology can be derived using a hierarchy of Kazym Khanty bear songs. Aleatoric principles [from Latin, aleatorius or playful] pertain to songs within a genre group in a specific order, as in the preliminary moments of a shamanic séance, thus indicating the musical structure of the bear festival in each concrete situation.

Homogeneity characterizes melodies that are sacral and profane. The entire rite forms a stylistic series: sequential (a horizontal axis, within phrases, genre groups and songs), and diachronic (a multi-temporal vertical axis). Intonation enables a unified environment that integrates song arrangement. The bear festival is therefore envisioned as a style and genre system.

Notes

1. The author’s ethnographic and musical expeditions (MEE: year, region, composition) are indicated under “Sources” below.

a. The original ms. used the controversial, somewhat old-fashioned word “cult.” However, the author’s provided abstract in English substituted “religious” – itself a controversial but more encompassing term. A technical term, syntagma, is used here to buttress the author’s argument for seeing a coherent yet playful and flexible song system within the bear festival. It comes originally from the Greek for “arrangement.” On the widespread circumpolar significance of the bear ceremony, see especially the classic A. Irving Hallowell “Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere,” American Anthropologist 1926, 28(1), pp. 1–175.

b. For background on the Khanty, Ob-Ugrian history, and the bear ceremony, see Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Andrew Wiget and Olga Balalaeva, Khanty: People of the Taiga, Surviving the 20^th Century (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2011).

c. See Wolfgang Steinitz, Ostjakologische work. Contributions to linguistics and ethnography. Gert Sauer and Renate Steinitz, eds. Volume I - IV, (Budapest and Berlin: Akademiai Kiado and Oxford University Press, 1980).

d. The late Éva Schmidt, a brilliant Hungarian researcher and friend of mine, moved to the Khanty region and created a wonderful archive of Khanty ethnography and ritual arts. She published little, in part due to concerns about copyright and revealing spiritual secrets, but the author references two of her legacy works.

e. Maria Vagatova (also Voldina) is a well-known and beloved Khanty poet-elder, daughter of a shaman.

f. Based on my fieldwork in the Northern Khanty region in 1976 and 1991, the bear ceremony incorporates significant concepts of gender relations and restrictions; it also features crucial “moiety” kin group relations congruent with the dualistic patterns discussed here. In sometimes bawdy satirical skits embedded in the festival, transvestite men often take women’s roles. See Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, “Sacred Genders in Siberia: Shamans, Bear Festivals and androgyny,” Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, S. P. Ramet, ed. (London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 164–182).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ol’ha V. Vasylenko

Olha Valentynivna Vasylenko (Mazur), candidate of arts, is a lecturer and associate professor at the department of the history of music, faculty of musical art, R. Glier [Glière] Kyiv Institute of Music. [email protected].