Bogatyrs and spirits of the Rubezh enclave: some results of the field trip to the Chulym region in 2019

Abstract

The article presents the results of the authors’ field season of 2019, that were collected in three villages on the Chulym River: Tegul’det, Belyj Yar and Kuyanovskaya Gar’. Among the results are some narratives concerning shamanic practices; some rare fragments of nearly extinct tribal legends about the bogatyrs, ancestors of Chulym Turkic families; a plentiful array of stories about the tayga kizhi / tayga kizi (“taiga men”, “taiga people” - the legendary, supernatural forest folk of the Chulym Turkic folklore texts); some particularly interesting rituals; and, last but not least, some rather surprising texts about the historical memory of Soviet times. Beside that, the authors sketch the outlines of a potentially possible ethnogeographic classification of present-time settlements of the Chulym Turki; and make some assumptions concerning the existence of shamanic traditions in Middle Chulym area during the Soviet era. The authors also introduce some field data from the collections of Eleonora L. Lvova to academia for the first time - and discover some parallels to said data in the contemporary field materials.