Ket People - Culture

Culture

The Ket traditional culture was researched by Matthias Castrén, Vasiliy Ivanovich Anuchin, Kai Donner, Hans Findeisen, and Yevgeniya Alekseyevna Alekseyenko. Shamanism was a living practice into the 1930s, but by the 1960s almost no authentic shamans could be found. Shamanism is not a homogeneous phenomenon, nor is shamanism in Siberia. As for shamanism among Kets, it shared characteristics with those of Turkic and Mongolic peoples. Additionally, there were several types of Ket shamans, differing in function (sacral rites, curing), power and associated animals (deer, bear). Also, among Kets (as with several other Siberian peoples such as the Karagas,) there are examples of the use of skeleton symbolics. Hoppál interprets this as a symbol of shamanic rebirth, although it may symbolize also the bones of the loon (the helper animal of the shaman, joining air and underwater world, just like the shaman who travelled both to the sky and the underworld as well). The skeleton-like overlay represented shamanic rebirth also among some other Siberian cultures.

Some authors hypothesize that the Kets may descend from the ancient Dingling of the Tashtyk culture. According to Leonid Kyzlasov, the Kets were described by Chinese imperial historians as blue-eyed and fair-haired people of Siberia, but Kyzlasov does not mention to which particular Chinese source he was referring. Western Washington University historical linguist Edward Vajda cites that some DNA studies have shown genetic affinities with that of Tibetan, Burmese, and others . Edward Vajda spent a year in Siberia studying the Ket people, and finds a relationship of Ket language to that of Native American languages, and also suggests the tonal system of the Ket language is closer that that of Vietnamese than any of the native Siberian languages.

Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov compared the mythology of Kets with that of Uralic peoples, assuming in the studies that they are modelling semiotic systems in the compared mythologies. They have made also typological comparisons. Among other comparisons, possibly from Uralic mythological analogies, the mythologies of Ob-Ugric peoples and Samoyedic peoples are mentioned. Other authors have discussed analogies (similar folklore motifs, purely typological considerations, and certain binary pairs in symbolics) may be related to a dualistic organization of society—some dualistic features can be found in comparisons with these peoples. However, for Kets, neither dualistic organization of society nor cosmological dualism has been researched thoroughly. If such features existed at all, they have either weakened or remained largely undiscovered. There are some reports on a division into two exogamous patrilinear moieties, folklore on conflicts of mythological figures, and also on cooperation of two beings in the creation of the land, the motif of earth-diver. This motif is present in several cultures in different variants. In one example, the creator of the world is helped by a water fowl as the bird dives under the water and fetches earth so that the creator can make land out of it. In some cultures, the creator and the earth-fetching being (sometimes named as devil, or taking shape of a loon) compete with one another; in other cultures (including the Ket variant), they do not compete at all but rather collaborate.

However, if dualistic cosmologies are defined in broad sense, and not restricted to certain concrete motifs, then their existence is more widespread; they exist not only among some Uralic peoples, but there are examples in each inhabited continent.