Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ideological and personal backgrounds in the process of creation of Nenets shamanistic heritage. It aims at showing that the motives and perspectives of our informants are inherent in the production of research materials and that these can be interpreted from the materials archived.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the ideological and personal backgrounds of one moment in the process of creation of Nenets religious, shamanistic heritage. It aims at showing that the motives, perspectives and viewpoints of our informants are inherent in the production of field work materials and that these can be interpreted from the materials archived.

In summer 1928 a Tundra Nenets, Matvei Ivanovič Yadnye visited Finland for two months. He was invited by Finno-Ugric Society that had been asking the Institute of Northern Peoples in St. Petersburg to send informants for linguistic research since 1927. Initially, the Society asked for a representative of Nenets, Tungus (Even) and a Yenisei Ostyak (Ket), and after some scientific trade, three indigenous Northerners arrived to Helsinki. These men were photographed and "anthropologically metered" and also blood samples were taken, after which linguists worked with them.

Matvei Yadnye was sent to Western Finland to work with Toivo Lehtisalo who had done extensive field work among the speakers of Tundra and Forest Nenets before the October Revolution in Russia. While their work had linguistic ends, Lehtisalo also recorded shamanistic ritual singing that he later also published. In my paper, I shall discuss the nature of the co-operation between Yadnye and Lehtisalo and ask how they conceived it. While Lehtisalo was interested in language and mythology as something that we might today call heritage, Yadnye's motives and aims are not so explicit. What kind of heritage building was he engaging in singing esoteric shamanistic ritual songs?