Going Native on the Buriatic Steppe

 Ethnolysis  4 Responses »
Sep 302010
 

From p. 55 of Jonas Stadling’s Through Siberia (1901):

… the Russian settlers here [in Buryatia] have to a great extent been “Buriatised”, as the Russians in Yakutsk have been “Yakutised”. This is to be seen not only in physical changes of the Russian type — the dark colour of hair, eyes, and skin, and the Mongolian or Tatarian facial traits characterising the old Russian population in Siberia — but also in their habits and ideas. Thus, both here and in Yakutsk, the old Russian settlers and their descendants have forgotten their mother-tongue, and speak only the Buriat and Yakut languages, or some kind of mixed tongue. Their Russian orthodoxy has also become very much weakened, many of them cherishing stronger faith in the powers of the Shaman than in the ceremonies of the Russian priest.

All of these aspects of metamorphosis through admixture and prolonged proximity are also to be seen amongst the blancos and brancos of Latin America, but rarely to so dramatic an extent. Why is this so?

Stadling echoes Yadrintseff’s harsh judgment on the roughness and low civilizational quality of the conquerers of Siberia — the trappers and the Kossacks — and those that followed in their footsteps (pp. 285), deeming them criminals, slaves, and rapacious adventurers. The fairness of that characterization aside, he does point out what would seem to be a serious Russian disadvantage in culture-transmission: Not only the common people among the Russian colonists, but also the priests were illiterate. I have elsewhere pointed out the fact that even to-day illiteracy — e.g. among the Buriats — is much less than among the peasantry in European Russia. It is therefore no wonder that the Russian colonists easily forget their native tongue and adapt the language, manners, and superstitions of the natives… (p. 287).

But it seems obvious that a purely numeric factor is also at play here: Buryats and Yakuts, at least, did not suffer any irrecoverable demographic collapse upon the introduction of Russian disease; in fact, their ranks burgeoned considerably during Russian rule. (Resilience in the face of zoonotic epidemic disease probably owes much to these groups’ history of stock-breeding and ought not be construed as typical for the natives of Siberia or the Russian Far East — look, for one instance among many, to the experience of the Yukaghirs.)

Works Cited:

Stadling, J. (1901). Through Siberia. (F. Guillemard, Ed.). Westminster: A. Constable & Co.

Henri Béraud on Marseille, 1936

 Vibrancy  1 Response »
Sep 302010
 

A delightfully vitriolic passage penned by Henri Béraud for Gringoire, August 07, 1936:

Sommes-nous le dépotoir du monde? Par toutes nos routes d’accès, transformées en grands collecteurs, coule sur nos terres une tourbe de plus en plus grouillante, de plus en plus fétide. C’est l’immense flot de la crasse napolitaine, de la guenille levantine, des tristes puanteurs slaves, de l’affreuse misère andalouse, de la semence d’Abraham et du bitume de Judée. Doctrinaires crépus, conspirateurs furtifs, régicides au teint verdâtre, pollaks mités, gratin de ghettos, contrebandiers d’armes, pistoleros en détresse, espions, usuriers, gangsters, marchands de femmes et de cocaïne, ils accourent précédés de leur odeur, escortés de leurs punaises.

A translation, apparently by one Patrick Parodi, which was included by Claire Berlinski in this article for Azure magazine (“Ideas for the Jewish Nation”):

[Inroads to the city] have been transformed into giant sewers, a growing, crawling, fetid bog running over our land. It is this immense flood of Neapolitan filth, of Levantine rags, of sad, stinking Slavs, of dreadful, miserable Andalusians, the seed of Abraham and the asphalt of Judaea… doctrinaire ragheads, moth-eaten Polacks, bastards of the ghettos, smugglers of weapons, desultory pistoleros, spies, usurers, gangsters, merchants of women and cocaine, they arrive preceded by their odor and escorted by their germs.

The Yakuts: An Appetizer

 Unlikely Peregrines  2 Responses »
Sep 292010
 

I treasure edges. My eyes narrow continually to take in peripheries, to pare down the shaggy outlines of fringe-dwellers and frontiersmen (recall here the giant single cell that is Gromia sphaerica and the lonely European vigil of the Gibraltar macaque). So, too, is it with my favorite stories in human distribution — the most boreal, the most austral, east in west and west in east.

It should come as no surprise to see my imagination so strongly drawn to the Yakuts or Sakhalar, the northernmost of all Turkic speakers. There’s much to say about this fascinating people — their mass reversion to shamanism some three centuries after the Russian imposition of Orthodox Christianity, their astonishing physiological tolerances, the insight shed onto their relations with the Evenks by genetic studies, their Red Army sniper Fyodor Okhlopkov … but, for now, I’ll let this evocative segment of In Siberia (2000: pp. 250-251), a travelogue by Colin Thubron, speak on my behalf:

The Yakut people who inhabit this republic almost equal the Russian populace, and are multiplying. You hear their clipped tongue everywhere in the streets, see their trim physiques and neat, Turkic features which turn the Russians’ gross. A millennium ago some catastrophe pushed them northward from Lake Baikal into the barren middle Lena, and their language is still shadowed by the region and life they lost. It retains words for ‘write’ and ‘read’ from a time of interrupted literacy, perhaps, and remembers beasts and landscapes which the people themselves have forgotten. Its epics are roamed by tigers and eagles, and sing of a lush land where the white cranes never fly away.

As the Yakuts migrated north they lost their sheep and camels, but their cattle and shaggy ponies adapted to the cold, and gave them the advantage over the scattered peoples round them. In time, like all others, these ‘horse people’ fell under the Cossack whip, but instead of being decimated by smallpox and syphilis, their enterprise and resourcefulness grew. Alone among Siberians they understood the making of pottery, and knew how to smelt iron. They intermarried with the Russians, sometimes absorbed them. Their leaders had aspirations to enter the czarist nobility.

In nineteenth-century Yakutsk, Russian buildings in wood and stone intermingled with Yakut cow-dung cottages windowed in mica, ice or translucent cattle bladder. Their women rode oxen in the streets. Typically, in 1922, they were the first Siberian people to declare their region a republic, and for a heady moment they even raised the green-and-white banner of Siberian autonomy. In 1990 they declared their independence within Russia, announcing the sovereignty of their own laws over federal ones.

The Yakuts are the iron men of Russia’s north. In the past, their old people might ask to be killed beside their graves. They could survive on slabs of frozen milk and on the underbark of larch trees boiled with curd. They supplied the hardiest shock-troops of the Second World War, and lost nearly a quarter of their soldiers, and many women. In Yakutsk they inhabit a bitterly salinated earth, yet in the brief, nightless summer they grow vegetables. They live in a land of diamonds and gold – Sakha is the second greatest diamond producer in the world, with reserves vaster than South Africa’s – but they see almost none of it.

Works Cited:

Thubron, C. (1999). In Siberia (1st ed.). New York: HarperCollins.

On a Gold-Rush Camp in Chinese Manchuria

 Vibrancy  1 Response »
Sep 252010
 

In an 1897 edition of The Atlantic monthly, George Kennan brings us to the valley of the Zhelta, a tributary of the Amur on Qing territory, c. 1884. Here’s a précis (p. 495) of the longer version beneath the fold:

There were wandering Tongus from the mountains of the Trans-Baikal; runaway Russian laborers from the east-Siberian mines of Butin Brothers, Niemann, and the Zea Company; Buriats and Mongols from the province of Irkutsk; discharged government clerks and retired ispravniks from Nerchinsk, Stretinsk, Verkhni Udinsk, and Chita; exiled Polish Jews from the Russian Pale of settlement; Chinese laborers and teamsters from Kiakhta and Maimachin; a few nondescript Koreans, Tatars, and Manchus from the lower Amur; and finally, more than one thousand escaped convicts — thieves, burglars, highwaymen, and murderers — from the silver-mines of Nerchinsk and the gold-mines of Kara.

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Nazism in New Guinea

 Unlikely Peregrines  3 Responses »
Sep 192010
 

I’ve always been fascinated by the improbable wanderings of animals, men, and phoretic children of the mind: the stray stingray last month sighted over 1000 km up the Mississippi; the Kabyles deported from Algeria to New Caledonia; the colony of eastern gray kangaroos inhabiting the forest of Rambouillet, west of Paris; the Phoenician alphabet’s long journey to the vertical script of Mongolia. Treating population movement and cultural dispersion as questions of invasion biology and biogeography lends an underappreciated clarity to human history, but this post will bow out of a grapple with the big picture and stroll instead to the curiosity cabinet.

In the 2001 work Fascism Outside Europe, John Perkins writes of a foreign introduction no less astonishing than those French kangaroos — Nazism, promulgated by German missionaries and settlers, amongst the racially mixed heirs to Deutsch-Neuguinea. Excerpt headings and emphasis mine:

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Foreign Judgments of Ainu Intelligence and Character

 Psychometrics  3 Responses »
Sep 062010
 

This is a brief sampler of European and Wajin Japanese statements on the mental and temperamental characteristics of the Ainu (for the most part, 19th- and early 20th-century Hokkaido Ainu). I’m not in any position to vouch for the accuracy or generalizability of any of the informal accounts, nor for the methodological soundness of the psychometric tests described in the last excerpt, but hopefully this post conveys both the extremes of opinion and a few points of consensus. All emphasis mine.

William Elliot Griffis, writing in The Japanese nation in evolution (1907):

… In the working of their minds, in apprehension of our ways and thoughts and needs of daily life (though not in abstract science), as American and British travellers in our day and generation tell us, they are decidedly Aryan, more so than the smarter Japanese. Mr. Archibald Gowan Campbell, in 1898, besides remarking on their fine physique, says of the Ainu, “they have a distinct bias for veracity and will frequently tell the truth to their own disadvantage,” and that both sexes are devoid of the insatiable curiosity of the Japanese; that many Ainu are distinctly handsome, and the children are singularly European in their ways, that the Ainu intelligence is limited, but it seems to be of the same kind as our own and not of the Asiatic order; that an Ainu readily understands European signs, while a Japanese invariably gets them upside down; that it is easier to make a novel request to an Ainu than to a Japanese, owing to the simplicity of the one and the conventionality of the other.

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