The Living Has Sound; The Dead Is Silent

Abstract

The article examines musical sound as a worldview category connected with rituals, traditional beliefs, concepts, and life styles of the indigenous, numerically small peoples of Arctic Eurasia. The discussion is based primarily on materials from the author’s field research, begun on the Taimyr Peninsula in the 1980s. This study of the sound culture of Samodeic [Samoyedic] peoples incorporates works of ethnographers and art historians, as well as northern studies researchers from other disciplines.

Notes

^a. Linguists and anthropologists by the late 20^th century have used the linguistic term Samodeic, rather than Samoyedic, given the literal derogatory meaning of Samoyed in Russian as “self-eater.” The linguistic category of “Paleoasiatic” as a cohesive group has been questioned by many linguists, including one of the theory’s originators, Roman Jakobsen, who was attempting to reconstruct structural correlations rather than suggest that proto-Samodeic, early Yukagir, and the Chukotan languages were a cohesive whole. Yukagir was once a large, separate linguistic family, with its own dialects, according to Yukagir linguist Gavril Kurilov.

^b. The original quote from Nadezhda Kostёrkina is somewhat ambiguous concerning whether it was sitting the hero on a sleigh or sitting the epic singer on a sleigh that was important. In any case, singing while traveling is an honored tradition for many Northern groups, unless the weather is so severe that use of one’s voice is kept to strict minimum.

^c. A delightful comparison is the significance of personal, owned songs among the Tlingit of Northwest Coast Alaska. My mentor, anthropologist Frederica de Laguna collected many such songs early in her career, and later was able to return them to specific, appropriate family members, since certain kinds of songs are inherited within kin groups.

^d. On the issue of other sensory signals being communicated and felt during shamanic séances, comparative research throughout the Circumpolar North indicates that a breeze, the light touch of a feather, a pungent scent, a knock, and much more could indicate the presence of a spirit. This does not take away from the argument here that aural signs are dominant in Samodeic séances.

^e. The author does not cite Dmitri Zamiatin, but see http://www.riku.ru/confs/vrem_cul/ZamyatTxt.htm on geographic modeling.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oksana E. Dobzhanskaya

Oksana Eduardovna Dobzhanskaya is Senior Researcher, ISTINA [Intellektual’naia Sistema Tematicheskogo Issledovaniia Naukometricheskikh Dannykh], Moscow State University. E-mail: [email protected].