Paper Short Abstract:

I plan to discuss the influence of a couple of prominent scholars from the 19th and early 20th centuries on the image of the Finno-Ugric Indigenous peoples inhabiting the region around the northern Ural Mountains in later research tradition. One of the key topics in this scholarly discourse was connected to the presumed religious preferences of these groups.

Paper Abstract:

By the early 20th century, ethnographic mapping of the Indigenous groups around the northern Ural Mountains was complete. Although many scholars, travellers and missionaries contributed to diverse picture of Indigenous world perceptions during the 19th century, the dominant intellectual approach separated the Komi from smaller groups (the Nenets, Khanty and Mansi) regarding subsistence strategies, religious preferences and overall degree of development. By the early 20th century, the Komi became depicted as overwhelmingly Russian Orthodox by religion, who had forgotten all their archaic traditions, knowledge and customs. At the same time, the smaller Indigenous neighbours of the Komi were admired for their ages-old traditional way of life, epic singing, shamanic practices and animistic worldview.

I aim to explore how this contrasting scholarly view of neighbouring Indigenous inhabitants of the North was produced and how it became so dominant. I claim that the international image of the Komi as traitors of old Finno-Ugric ideals was created and vigorously promoted by a few very influential scholars (Matthias Alexander Castrén and Uuno Taavi Sirelius) who had negative field experiences among the Komi but hold enjoyable memories from trips among the other Finno-Ugric peoples in the region. We can find a spiritual contest or imagined harmony between scholars and local peoples at the heart of this cognitive conflict. This pattern, introduced by prototypes of the Finno-Ugric ethnography, has influenced later scholars significantly.