This research project operates in the fields of cultural and media studies being especially ethnomusicological in nature. The project aims at producing a first encompassing corpus of Selkup verse-form, sung poetic texts, with their occurrence as patterned sound phenomena in the time of the performance documented and analyzed. This project has been designed as a preliminary phase of a larger joint project, to be completed later with the Russian linguist Olga Kazakevich (Moscow State University).
Goal
Selkup Samoyedic oral culture remains one of the least known domains of indigenous cultures in Western Siberia. The scarce publicity of forms of local culture of the different Selkup groups seems to reflect the remoteness of their territories and the great number of Selkup spoken dialects. So far, the key progress in the study of the Selkup local cultures has been made mostly by linguists and ethnographers. The first fieldwork-based written recordings of oral culture were made by the Finnish linguist M. A. Castrén in the 1840s, and the first phonograms by Kai Donner in the 1910s. Later, in the 1980s, a Belorussian journalist Viktor Rudolf began to work with the Selkup culture, also producing a collection of audio recordings, especially with the performers (such as Konstantin Chekurmin) from the river Tolka. This rare collection of Selkup sung performances may be one of the turning points in understanding at least some local forms of Selkup sung oral culture. A methodological pursuit in this project is to explore the possibilities of the (structural) analysis of this kind of historical data, which contains only minimal clues for the cultural context and knowledge.
Funding source
Kone Foundation, Finland
Contact persons
Jarkko Niemi
University lecturer / researcher
jarkko.niemi [at] tuni.fi
+358 50 317 6168