Summary of the research project
This project’s aim is to gather an international scholarly team, with researchers from different disciplines of the social sciences, in order to study the Eastern Udmurt, a community almost totally ignored by international research. After their migration, the Eastern Udmurt lived in a tolerant Turkic and Muslim environment that allowed them to keep their traditions and their beliefs. Their culture and their language are not only archaic, but also very lively, and their ethnic religion, which is fundamentally tolerant, is more and present in their everyday life. We intend to study the Udmurt ethnic religion from different points of view in order to produce outputs – both film and writing – that would be useful to the academic community and answer the needs of the communities. Our work relies on pilot work accomplished with a small team since 2013.
Documentation
Documentation is a necessity, because it is totally missing. The scientific community must have sound material on which academic work can be rooted. Filming them allows us to document not only the general features, but also the local, often contradictory, traditions. Documenting is not only important for scholarly work, but also for the local population, which has in recent years welcomed our participation and recording. It emphasises village and community identities.
Therefore, we : 1. should edit the gathered material, 2. while continuing the documentation work for other ceremonies. The latter is essential also ethically: recordings of some ceremonies may, in the long term, lead to a dominant position of the village traditions that have been recorded in possible standardisation. Therefore, it is important that all villages have their own recordings. Documentation through film should widen to other fields: commemorations of the dead, weddings, departures for the army, family ceremonies, etc. I wish to emphasise that we follow strict ethics rules in documenting: we do not ask our informants to stage anything and do not interfere with their living tradition.
Investigation
The existence of recorded material should be a powerful incentive to scientific research. We have identified several themes we particularly wish to explore further:
- Is the Udmurt religion a form of animism? (Eva Toulouze, Laur Vallikivi, Zoltán Nagy)
At the end of our project, we should have an extensive overview of the Udmurt religion, and we would like to link it to general contemporary reflexions on animism (cf. Bird-David 1999, Harvey 2005, Ingold 2011, Willerslev 2013, and others). Are we entitled to classify it under the label animism? At the beginning of this project, we used animism as a generic term, mainly in order to avoid the generally used, but controversial, notion of paganism. At the end of it we must justify it thoroughly, or chose another label.
- Animism, Ethnic religions, Neopaganism and New Age at the beginning of the 21st century (Eva Toulouze, Laur Vallikivi, Zoltán Nagy, and other specialists outside the project)
This theme is meant to insert our research object within a wider field, and to reflect on different manifestations of religions unconnected to the big world religions. We shall mostly concentrate on the Eurasian region, trying to reflect on similarities and differences between the needs these expressions of spirituality answer to and the different forms they take.
- Animism in the 21st century: inputs in world culture and values (Laur Vallikivi, Eva Toulouze, Zoltán Nagy)
Bio- and cultural diversity are in great danger in the contemporary world and wide research is engaged to reverse the trend of massive extinctions of species and forms of culture. Along with disappearance of the diversity of the ways of being human, standardization and institutionalization, as well as exclusivism are one of the ways to respond to the threats of extinction. In this context, animism represents an island, or a very diverse archipelago, of human freedom and self-determination. While many different forms of living human spirituality try to reinforce their positions by taking over the toolkit of the forms that smother them, Udmurt animism represents a very original contribution to human diversity, where no trend towards standardization or institutionalization is to be reckoned with. We shall focus on a comparison with the situation among the Mari people, who have made the reverse choice – to create a Church and to challenge the Russian Orthodox Church on their own ground. We argue that the existence of the form of spirituality enacted by the Bashkortostan Udmurt is not to be underestimated as a valuable input in world culture.
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- Collective ceremonies: a typology (Eva Toulouze, Ranus Sadikov, Laur Vallikivi, Nikolay Anisimov, Zoltán Nagy)
We will investigate other ceremonies in order to have precise data on what is being performed and what has disappeared. From this point of view, a comparative approach with diachronic data will be useful. We shall focus on today’s practice, and we hope at the end of the project to have a precise inventory that will allow reflection on which are the ceremonies that make sense for modern 21st century people and which have lost their meaning.
- The Bashkortostan Udmurt sacred places: a typology (Eva Toulouze, Ranus Sadikov, Nikolay Anisimov)
All the ceremonies take place in sacred places. Our study must be extended and deepened, as well as widened with the inclusion of more intimate sacred places. We shall, in cooperation and with the agreement of the local sacrificial priests, set up an Internet homepage with an inventory and photos of the present sacred places, as none of them is – as far as we know - held secret. This theme will hopefully lead to a separate book during the post-project period.
- The sacrificial priest, a central character (Eva Toulouze, Ranus Sadikov, Laur Vallikivi, Nikolay Anisimov, Zoltán Nagy)
The sacrificial priest, the vös’as’, must be a fully active and respected member of the village community. Today, there is no lack of sacrificial priests. How can we explain this phenomenon? How was, and is, the transmission achieved? Who are these new priests? How have they been chosen? What are their motivations? At the end of this project we shall have met most of the acting Udmurt priests in Bashkortostan, and we shall be in a better position to give this question a comprehensive answer.
- The role of the community in the Udmurt religion (Eva Toulouze, Ranus Sadikov, Laur Vallikivi, Nikolay Anisimov, Zoltán Nagy)
Udmurt ceremonies seem to be community reinforcing practices (Toulouze, Niglas 2015a). We are also interested in the role of religion in the reproduction of the community, in the transmission and integration of younger people and children and in the community-building role of the religious ceremonies in enhancing masculine socialisation and socialisation in general. We would like to explore different kinds of community involvement and possibly disruptive elements mainly in connection with migration (or other causes we have not yet identified).
- The prayers yesterday and today: text and performance (Ranus Sadikov, Eva Toulouze, Tatyana Minniakhmetova)
An Udmurt ceremony also has a verbal dimension. Here, we concentrate on the textual aspect. How did the priests ‘get’ their prayer? How many have received it by listening to it repeatedly and thus learning it by heart? How much do the priests allow themselves to change the traditional text? How do they tackle today’s concerns in these prayers? Finally, prayer is a universal phenomenon and we attempt to place Udmurt ‘pagan’ prayers in a more general context.
- Celebrations on a smaller scale: the Bydzhynnal and others (Eva Toulouze, Ranus Sadikov, Laur Vallikivi, Nikolay Anisimov, Zoltán Nagy)
We must identify everyday prayer practice, as well as particular private ritual moments and spaces and smaller scale rituals. Some of them are well known, such as the Great Day (Bydzynnal) which coincides with Orthodox Easter. But there are certainly others. We will penetrate this more intimate sphere and document it as much as will be allowed, without intruding on the intimate character of the ritual.
- Cemeteries and commemoration of the dead (Nikolay Anisimov, Ranus Sadikov, Tatyana Minniyakhmetova)
Much of the well-being of the communities depends on the benevolence of the dead towards the living: therefore, ancestor worship and commemoration occupies a very relevant place. We will explore this dimension, which will be put in comparison with the practice of the Udmurt, especially of the Southern Udmurt, by whom it is quite developed.
- Weddings: the kidnapping of the bride (Eva Toulouze, Laur Vallikivi, Tatyana Minniyakhmetova)
Even today, most of marriages are performed through the kidnapping of the bride. Through life stories of couples, focusing on both men and women, we will attempt to understand the way girls and boys live this particular way of starting a family. We shall focus on the practice today, try to assess the general rules of the contemporary marriage procedure and try to document this custom as much as will be allowed.
- Witchcraft in the village community (Eva Toulouze, Nikolay Anisimov, Laur Vallikivi)
This is a very delicate theme. It is a feature of village life that deserves to be studied. We shall certainly need all the 5 years of the project to delve in depth into this theme. We will try to investigate the people identified as witches in the village. We shall probably be able to introduce elements of comparison with the same issue in Udmurtia, based on fieldwork by our team’s members.
- Religion as an Udmurt identity factor (Maria Vyatchina, Eva Toulouze, Zoltán Nagy)
We shall devote one aspect of our research to a wider observation of community political trends. We shall reflect on how religious practice, which provides a space that is solely Udmurt-speaking, may or may not provide this missing ideological framework, and will follow the local Udmurt authorities in order to understand their strategy from this point of view.
- The ritual songs of the Eastern Udmurt (Irina Pchelovodova, Nikolay Anisimov, Valej Kelmakov, Tatyana Minniyakhmetova)
Our goal is to collect and publish the ritual songs of the Eastern Udmurt (see below). We will analyse the music collected and evaluate the knowledge of the ritual songs, the profiles of the singers and the performance. All these questions deserve to be investigated in the framework of our project.
The project should lead to different sorts of production.
Edited films
The process of filming must be completed by editing the existing material. The project should intensify this activity, in order to 1. Have all the material at least roughly edited; 2. Wherever possible, add subtitles to the edited versions; 3. This requires a huge translation work, first from the local dialect of Udmurt, and then into the other languages of the project. We will finish by having a whole series of edited films with a set of subtitles (Russian, English, French), although this will be an on-going work and will certainly continue after the end of the project.
Documentation Internet homepages
We wished to create at least two homepages: 1. One dedicated to photographs – old and new – of religious activities within a wider homepage of preservation of older albums, that are being massively neglected and even destroyed by younger generations. But they contain ritual events of family life and therefore are of interest for our documentation; 2. Another dedicated to sacred places.
At the moment, we are working on one homepage, which gathers all our materials and outputs.
Workshops
Three workshops – in 2018, 2020 and 2021 – should gather the members of the team in different places in order to 1. Assess the progress of the project; 2. Make presentations informing participants of the results of the fieldwork; 3. Fix the tasks for the following period. 4. The last workshop should be a preparation for the conclusive volume. The working language of the team will be Russian, for all members are fluent in Russian, while some of them do not know English.
We have not managed to keep with the schedule. The financing has not been sufficient to organise the workshops, considered that financing fieldwork has been a priority. However, the team has met several times both during fieldwork, every year at the beginning of June, and at different scientific forums all members have attended and will go on meeting at these occasions, for example at the congress of the Anthropologists and Ethnographers of Russia, in Tomsk in1221.
Scientific articles and international scientific activity
Throughout the project, the participants will produce articles and presentations on the above-mentioned themes in different languages: Udmurt, Russian, English, French, Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian. We expect a minimum of five articles and presentations every year, some of them cooperative. The members of the team will participate in important forums, such as the Finno-Ugric congress (2020), the European Association for the Study of Religion, the Russian Congress of Ethnographers, Ethnologists and Anthropologists (2017, 2019, and 2021), and the Russians conferences of researchers on religion, CIEF.
Books
We plan three books, all in open access and with texts in different languages. 1. A comprehensive book about the Bashkortostan Udmurt’s worldview and religious practice. This collective book will sum up, at the end of the project, the state of the art, and collect the scientific results of the team’s work. The book will be published in at least two versions, English (eds. Eva Toulouze, Laur Vallikivi) and Russian (eds. Eva Toulouze and Nikolay Anisimov). If possible and needed, a French edition should be envisaged. 2. A collection of prayers of the Eastern Udmurt. This book will have both a historical and a synchronic dimension. It would gather all prayers recorded by different scholars, both published and unpublished as well as the prayers recorded by us during our fieldwork. These prayers must be transcribed, translated, and commented upon. This book is very important for us, both for its scientific value and because it is needed in situ, especially by the sacrificial priests. The prayers should be published in Udmurt (local dialect, literary Udmurt Cyrillic and transcription), Russian, English, and French. The book should be accompanied by a CD (or, for electronic versions, links) with the videos of the prayers we have recorded ourselves; 3. A collection of ritual songs. Within this project this would be the first step in a two-volume collection on the songs of the Eastern Udmurt. Their song tradition is ignored and often dismissed as non-existent. We want to popularise it..
Introduction: Why the Eastern Udmurt?
The revival of the so-called “paganism” in Europe is a contemporary phenomenon (Koskello 2009: 295). More attention has thus been turned lately towards these alternative religions that often “reinvent” ethnic traditions that were lost for centuries (see on their place in ethnic revival Chervonnaya 1998, Leete & Shabaev 2010, Västrik 2015). However, there are examples in Eastern Europe of ethnic animist religions that have been practiced in continuity. When talking about such an archaic worldview as the animist one in Europe, it is customary to mention a Finno-Ugric community in Russia, the Mari, “the last European pagans”. And indeed the Mari, throughout history showed their determination to pray according to their ancestral customs (Lallukka, Popov 2009). The disruption of the Soviet regime at the beginning of the 1990s finally allowed the Mari religion to acquire an official status, besides Orthodoxy. It has been and is still thoroughly studied (Toydybekova 1997, Sharov 2004, 2005, 2007, Luehrmann 2011, Alybina 2014). Although by establishing a church they have gone much further in the institutionalisation of their religion (Alybina 2014: 98), the Mari are still not the only animists in today’s Russia. We are interested in studying another kind of community that pursues its religious practice in continuity without any centralised and institutionalised, and even without any strong ideological, framework. We focus on the Udmurt, whom we have investigated in a previous pilot fieldwork study.
The Eastern Udmurt live in north-western Bashkortostan and in the south of territory of Perm. Its formation coincides with the evangelisation attempts that followed the Udmurt core territory occupation by Muscovy after 1552 and most efficiently after 1740 (Sadikov 2008: 7). Reluctant villages, confronted with forced baptism, sometimes chose to flee eastwards, towards lands sparely inhabited by Turkic Muslims, where they settled, paid taxes and eventually bought land. Evangelisation did not reach those communities, and they were allowed to have their own religious practice. The Soviet period was certainly disruptive, but less than in areas where the Udmurt coexisted mainly with Russians. At the end of the Soviet era some places had ensured total continuity. In others, traditional ceremonies were abandoned in the 1970s-1980s, but were still remembered by the elder. In the last years, both insistence from below and the systematic activity of local leaders have led to revitalisation in practically all the villages that had interrupted their practice.
So why the Eastern Udmurt?
- Theirs is an experience of non-institutionalised religious practice, which is very much rooted in local tradition and which has not undergone standardisation; neither is there at the moment any attempt to move in this direction. This is an interesting and almost unique experience.
- Moreover, this practice has a message to transmit in the 21st century, as it is a model of religious tolerance. In a period in which religious intolerance seems to be taking over throughout the world, this seems an interesting experience that deserves to be better known, understood, and shown to the world.
- As we will state hereafter, this group has been studied very little and has received scant attention, in spite of the significant interest in its culture.
The state of the art
The Eastern Udmurt have not attracted wide scholarly attention. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, some Russian (Tezyakov 1882; Komov 1889, Aptiev 1891, Makarov 1915), Finnish (Wichmann 1901, Holmberg 2014) and Hungarian (Munkácsi 1887) scholars carried out fieldwork in these areas and left precious descriptions. Nevertheless no one has developed their research to analyse their material in a systematic way and draw generalised conclusions about the Udmurt religion at that time. The older (Vereshchagin 1995, 1996, 1998a, 1998b) as well as the contemporary (Vladykin 1994, Shutova 2001, 2004) Udmurt scholars concentrated on their own core territory, the Udmurt republic, one of the Russian Federation’s subjects, and although some fieldwork was occasionally performed, the aim was to generalise information. The main data we can rely upon are studies by local scholars Tatyana Minniyakhmetova and Ranus Sadikov studying their own culture. Minniyakhmetova studied ethnography in Ufa, Izhevsk and Tartu (Estonia), and works at the moment at Innsbruck University[1]; Ranus Sadikov studied in Ufa and works at the Bashkortostan Institute of the Academy of Sciences. Both have published dozens, if not hundreds, of articles and books about the traditions of the Bashkortostan Udmurt. But their work is based on the principles of Soviet ethnography: the object of their studies is the highest point of traditional cultures at the beginning of the 20th century. They are thus focused on the past and not on the present situation.
We are interested in what is happening today and how this original religious practice makes sense to the people, who are ordinary people, living ordinary lives, have computers and use the Internet, and are not separated from modernity. While not denying the importance and the interest of historical research, we do not focus on archive sources but on fieldwork, and we use written sources not per se, but for comparative analysis, as the research this project aims for will thus be mainly synchronic.
Previous work
I have been carrying out fieldwork in this region since 2013, investigating and recording animistic ceremonies. I have permanently associated different researchers who already form the team’s nucleus (Ranus Sadikov, Liivo Niglas, Laur Vallikivi, Nikolay Anisimov).
We have been documenting animistic ceremonies in the Tatyshly district’s 19 Udmurt villages. They have ceremonies cycles in two periods of the year, before both the summer and the winter solstices. We have been documenting (photographing, filming, describing) the three kinds of ceremony – 1. village ceremonies (only held in summer, 4 recorded), 2. the intermediate ceremony (Bagysh vös’, both in summer and winter), 3. and the 9 and 10 village ceremonies (see Toulouze, Niglas 2014, 2015). One fully edited film has already been shown in a conference and will circulate in other forums. We have produced academic material in English as well as Russian. Previous experience allows us to set up a comprehensive project that would allow this research to reach more ambitious scientific and practical levels.
[1] Her contract finishes in October 2016, she does not know yet about her future affiliation.
The team
This project is to be an international cooperative project. It gathers all the existent expertise and new research resources on the Bashkortostan Udmurt. The members of the team come from the following institutions:
- INALCO (Paris, France)
- Prof. Eva Toulouze (PhD, Hab) – anthropologist, professor and principal investigator
- University of Tartu (Tartu, Estonia)
- Dr. Liivo Niglas – researcher at the department of ethnology, filmmaker
- Dr. Laur Vallikivi – researcher in the anthropology of religion at the department of ethnology
- Mariya Vyatchina – doctoral student in ethnology at the department of ethnology
- Estonian Literary Museum
- Dr. Nikolai Anisimov – folklorist, researcher at the Estonian Literary Museum and at the Udmurt research institute of the Academy of Science of Russia (Izhevsk)
- the Udmurt research institute of the Academy of Science of Russia (Izhevsk)
- Dr. Irina Pchelovodova, ethnomusicologist, head of the ethnomusicology department
- Dr. Prof. Tatyana Vladykina, folklorist.
- Ufa, Institute of the Academy of Sciences (Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia)
- Dr. Ranus Sadikov, ethnographer, head of the department of minority peoples
- University of Pécs (Pécs, Hungary)
- Dr. Zoltán Nagy, anthropologist, professor, head of the folklore and anthropology department
- Independent researchers
- Anna Baydullina – linguist, doctoral student at the department of Finno-Ugric studies, at the moment a journalist
- Dr. Tatyana Minniyakhmetova, folklorist & ethnologist, Innsbruck
- Evgeni Badretdinov, History and ethnology student, participation in fieldwork
The team has several assets:
It is interdisciplinary
The fields represented are anthropology/ethnology, ethnography, religious studies, visual anthropology, folklore studies, ethnomusicology, sociology and linguistics. The cooperation of these disciplines has proven fruitful: although they are close to one another, they have different goals and use different methods.
Ethnography: We shall rely on both local ethnographers Ranus Sadikov’s and Tatiana Minniyakhmetova’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the field because of their previous work.
Anthropology/ Ethnology/Religious studies: Most of the participants (Toulouze, Niglas, Vallikivi, Nagy) are connected with ethnology/anthropology, some specialising in the anthropology of religion (Vallikivi, Nagy). All the anthropologists have worked previously in Russia. They all are acquainted with the region, and have made fieldwork in it before; we rely heavily on the religious anthropology specialists’ theoretical background to open our field to wider considerations.
Visual anthropology: Visual anthropology is a vital field for the implementation of the documentation dimension of our programme. Liivo Niglas is a skilled visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. He films in a non-intrusive manner and is already known and appreciated in the region. He will lead the team in filmmaking.
Folklore studies: Folklore studies have very much focused on fieldwork, mythology, worldview, and customary practice, developing a fruitful dialogue with anthropologists. Nikolay Anisimov, while finishing his thesis, is already an experienced folklorist, having made extensive fieldwork trips to Udmurtia and to the Bashkortostan Udmurt. He has both worked on the ancestors’ cult and communication with the dead, as well as on folk songs collection and publication (Anisimov, Pchelovodova 2015).
Ethnomusicology: Ethnomusicology has its own methods, depending on the specificities of its object. Irina Pchelovodova is an experienced ethno-musicologist, skilled in editing folk songs. We have included within the goals of the project only the publication of “The Ritual Songs of the Eastern Udmurt”, although we will gather other songs as well, which will be included in a second volume.
Sociology: Maria Vyatchina has defended a MA thesis in sociology. She will follow questions of the community and identity-strengthening aspect of religious practice and will focus on this more political dimension of religious activity.
Linguistics: While our focus is certainly not on language, we rely on language for several outputs of our work: both songs and prayers have a textual dimension that will appear in the publications. We will rely on Udmurt dialectologists to ensure the scientific relevance of this aspect.
This interdisciplinary team should be able to cover all the main points of our programme.
The team is multi-ethnic and multi-lingual
Our team is multi-ethnic, which ensures the multiplicity of points of view in dialogue between themselves. We have Udmurts belonging to the investigated ethnic group, who are total insiders (Ranus Sadikov, Tatyana Minniyakhmetova). There are in the team Udmurts from Udmurtia or Tatarstan, so still Udmurts, but from a different ethnic group, so partly insiders and partly not. Nevertheless, they are able to make fieldwork in the native language of the informants. And the foreigners are total outsiders; the permanent dialogue of these point of view enriches the scientific performance of the team.
Multilingualism in research is, for us, an obligation not only in order to spread efficiently the results of our work, but also in order to diversify and enrich the contents of our investigation. Too often we tend to forget how language sensitive our disciplinary fields are: the efficiency of the result depends on the way one writes. We argue that we have three obligations:
- We have to write in our mother tongues, because this guarantees the best results and the best quality, and, if needed, develops the range of use of the given tongue;
- We have to write in English, because it guarantees access to wider scholarly audiences and allows academic dialogue; we shall take care that the texts are well edited by a skilled native speaker;
- We have to write in languages that our informants understand, which means, in our case, Udmurt and Russian. Actually many of our informants are probably not able to read scholarly Udmurt, so the priority in this case will be to write in Russian, although we hope our team will be an active contributor to the local Udmurt paper Oshmes.
The team we have brought together ensures that these goals will be achieved.
They are already a team
We may say that most of the team has already been tested as a team. All members have already worked and/or written either with one or other of the team members. This previous readiness to work as a team ensures the quality of fieldwork and makes achieving the outputs of the project easier.
The role of the principle investigator
Eva Toulouze’s role as responsible for the project will be manifold:
- To bring together the team and ensure its functioning as a team;
- To stimulate the writing of cooperative articles;
- To carry out fieldwork and elaborate the data according to the needs of the project;
- To edit two books;
- To ensure the multilingual approach of the project outputs;
- To distribute the funding in compliance with the project aims
