Nganasan people

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Nganasan
ӈәнә"са (нә"), ня"
Nganasans, 1927
Total population
c. 978 (2002) Decrease[1]
Regions with significant populations
 Russia: ∟  
Nenets, other Uralic peoples

The Nganasans (

Indigenous peoples of the Russian North. They reside primarily in the settlements of Ust-Avam, Volochanka, and Novaya in the Taymyrsky Dolgano-Nenetsky District of Krasnoyarsk Krai, with smaller populations residing in the towns of Dudinka and Norilsk as well.[2]

The Nganasans are thought to be the direct descendants of proto-Uralic peoples.

Czarist Russia
. They lived relatively independently, until the 1970s, when they were settled in the villages they live in today, which are at the southern edges of the Nganasans' historical nomadic routes.

There is no certainty as to the exact number of Nganasans living in Russia today. The

seriously endangered and it is estimated that at most 500 Nganasan can speak the Nganasan language, with very limited proficiency among those eighteen and younger.[9]

Etymology

Nganasan traditional performers. Folklore group 'Dentedie' (Northern Lights) in Finland, 2018

The Nganasans first referred to themselves in

Nenets language. Following the Russian Revolution, the Nganasans adopted their current appellation.[10][11]

Geography

Nganasan traditional sunglasses, from the Volochanka settlement. They protect the eyes from the bright light during the Arctic summer

The Nganasans are the northernmost ethnic group of the

Dudypta River in the south.[12] The hunting areas of the Nganasan often coincided with those of the Dolgans and Enets to their east and west respectively. In the winter, they resided in the south of the peninsula at the edge of the Arctic tree line, and during the summer they followed wild reindeer up to 400 miles to the north, sometimes even reaching as far as the Byrranga Mountains.[13]

History

Origins

The homeland of the Proto-Uralic peoples, including the Samoyeds, is suggested to be somewhere near the

Central Siberia or near Lake Baikal.[14]

The Nganasan are considered by most ethnographers who study them to have arisen as an ethnic group when

Anabar rivers and came into contact with the aforementioned Samoyedic peoples, absorbing their language and creating their own Tavg Samoyedic dialect.[15] It is known that the ancestors of the Nganasan previously inhabited territory further south from a book in the city Mangazeya that lists yasak (fur tribute) payments by the Nganasan which were made in sable, an animal that does not inhabit the tundra where the Nganasan now live.[10]

By the middle of the 17th century, Tungusic peoples began to push the Samoyedic peoples northward towards the tundra Taymyr Peninsula, where they merged into one tribe called "Avam Nganasans". As the Tavgs were the largest Samoyedic group at the time of this merger, their dialect formed the basis of the present-day Nganasan language. In the late 19th century, a Tungusic group called the Vanyadyrs also moved to the Eastern Taymyr peninsula, where they were absorbed by the Avam Nganasans, resulting in the tribe that is now called Vadeyev Nganasans. In the 19th century, a member of the Dolgans, a Turkic people who lived east of the Nganasans, was also absorbed by the Nganasans, and his descendants formed an eponymous clan, which today, though linguistically fully Samoyedic, is still acknowledged as being Dolgan in origin.[16]

Contact with Russians

The Nganasans first came into contact with

Czar in the form of sable fur under the yasak system in 1618.[17] Tribute collectors established themselves at the “Avam Winter Quarters,” at the confluence of the Avam River and Dudypta River rivers, which is the site of the modern-day settlement Ust-Avam. The Nganasans often tried to avoid paying yasak by changing the names that they provided to the Russians.[18] Relations between the Russians and Nganasans were not always peaceful. In 1666, the Nganasans ambushed and killed yasak collectors, soldiers, tradesmen, and their interpreters on three occasions, stealing the sable furs and property belonging to them. Over the course of the year, 35 men were killed in total.[19]

The Nganasan had little direct contact with merchants and, unlike most indigenous Siberians, they were never baptized[10] or contacted by missionaries.[20] Some Nganasans traded directly with the Russians, while others did so via the Dolgans.[13] They usually exchanged sable furs for alcohol, tobacco, tea, and various tools, products which quickly integrated themselves into Nganasan culture.[21] In the 1830s,[22] and again from 1907 to 1908, Russian contact caused major smallpox outbreaks among the Ngansans.[23]

Soviet Union

See also: Siberian minorities in the Soviet era

The Nganasans first came into contact with the Soviets around in the 1930s, when the government instituted a program of

ethnographers
began to study their customs.

Despite collectivization and the institution of the kolkhoz, the Nganasans were able to maintain a semi-nomadic lifestyle following domesticated reindeer herds up until the early 1970s, when the state settled the Nganasans along with the Dolgans and Enets in three different villages it constructed: Ust-Avam,

consumer goods, and education, allowing the Nganasan to achieve a relatively high standard of living by the end of the 1980s.[28]

Religion

The traditional religion of the Nganasans is

seances were recorded on film by anthropologists in the 1970s.[29]

Language

The Nganasan language (formerly called тавгийский, tavgiysky, or тавгийско-самоедский, tavgiysko-samoyedsky in Russian; from the ethnonym тавги, tavgi) is a moribund Samoyedic language spoken by the Nganasan people. It is now considered highly endangered, as most Nganasan people now speak Russian, rather than their native language. In 2010 it was estimated that only 125 Nganasan people can speak it in the southwestern and central parts of the Taymyr Peninsula.

Genetics

Estimated ancestry components among selected Eurasian populations. The yellow component represents Neo-Siberian ancestry (represented by Nganasans).[30]

The characteristic

Saami, Finns
, and Siberians, is related to the migration of people speaking Uralic languages.

Nganasans are linked to "Neo-Siberian" ancestry, which is estimated to have expanded from the Northern East Asian region into Siberia about ~11,000 years ago BCe.[33]

In 2019, a study based on genetics, archaeology and linguistics found that Uralic speakers arrived in the Baltic region from the East, specifically from Siberia, at the beginning of the Iron Age some 2,500 years ago, together with a Nganasan-related component, possibly linked to the spread of Uralic languages.[34]

In another genetic study in 2019, published in the European Journal for Human Genetics Nature, it was found that the Nganasans represent a possible source population for the Proto-Uralic people the best. Nganasan-like ancestry is found in every group of modern Uralic-speakers in varying degrees.[3]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ John Ziker, who lived with the Nganasans for extended periods, always cites the Nganasan population to be approximately 1000 persons in his works.[5][6][7]

References

  1. ^ a b State statistics committee of Ukraine - National composition of population, 2001 census (Ukrainian)
  2. ^ Ziker
  3. ^
    PMID 30479341
    .
  4. ^ "Центральная База Статистических Данных". Archived from the original on 2008-04-12.
  5. ^ Ziker (1998)
  6. ^ Ziker (2002)
  7. ^ Ziker (2010)
  8. ^ Stern (2005)
  9. ^ Janhunen, Juha. http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/nasia_report.html#Nganasan
  10. ^ a b c d Popov (1966), p. 11
  11. ^ Dolgikh (1962), p. 226
  12. ^ Dolgikh (1962), p. 230
  13. ^ a b Stern (2005), p. 290
  14. ISSN 0355-0230
    .
  15. ^ Dolgikh (1962), pp. 290–292
  16. ^ Dolgikh (1962), pp. 291–292
  17. ^ Dolgikh (1962), p. 244
  18. ^ Dolgikh (1962), p. 245
  19. ^ Dolgikh (1962), p. 247
  20. ^ Stern (2005), p. 293
  21. ^ "The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire". Archived from the original on 2011-09-26. Retrieved 2012-01-19.
  22. ^ Forsyth (1994), pp. 177–178
  23. ^ Dolgikh (1962), p. 248
  24. ^ Chard (1963), p. 113
  25. ^ Ziker (2002), p. 208
  26. ^ Johnson & Earle (2000), pp. 118–119
  27. ^ a b Ziker (2002), p. 209
  28. ^ Ziker (1998), p. 195
  29. ^
    OCLC 3220067.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
    )
  30. PMID 31036896
    .
  31. PMID 15024688
    .
  32. PMID 23840409
    .
  33. S2CID 174809069
    . ...the Neosiberian turnover from the south, which largely replaced Ancient Paleosiberian ancestry, ... Therefore, this phase of the Neosiberian population turnover must initially have transmitted other languages or language families into Siberia, including possibly Uralic and Yukaghir.
  34. PMID 31080083
    .

Bibliography

External links

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