Khanty online resources
A few links until the next Ob-Ugric posts are ready:
Bear feast songs collected by Wolfgang Steinitz (1905-67), the German Ostyakologist.
A map of the geographic distribution of Uralic languages – please don’t ask me why Slovenian is included in the first place, let alone in a novel location!
Survival International is an international organisation that campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples worldwide. Their site includes a page of information on the Khanty, where and how they live, and threats to their survival from the 1930s until today; and a page of pictures with a short film of Khanty life in winter, in which Russian is spoken, except when the woman filleting fish addresses her daughter, at about 4.45 minutes in.
Khanty children
Khanty children at Numto lake, a picture taken in March 2006 by Ugraland, whose photographs of the Ob region are here.
An article at the Trade Environment Database on the impact of oil industry expansion on the Khanty-Mansisk region and its peoples.
A note on the instruments used, from a manuscript by the late G. F. Cushing, Professor of Hungarian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London:
The instruments used to accompany the songs are interesting in themselves; two stringed instruments, otherwise unknown in Western Siberia. One is a five-stringed, fish-shaped ‘music-making wood’; the other a small harp of nine or thirteen strings, shaped like a swan. Both are believed to come originally from the Near East and to have been passed on to the Ob-Ugrians by Iranian intermediaries.
There are a couple of Khanty songs performed by Liubov Yendyreva on Janno Simm’s website: a song about a fisherman who buys a Moskva-10 outboard motor for his boat and then earns enough to buy his fiancée a gold ring; and a song about a reindeer hunter who goes off to fetch his bride on a sledge led by four reindeer.