The keeper who put the Khanty of the Vasyugan on the map

My paper deals with a problem, how people can use and revitalize the, so called traditional culture of the indigenous ethnic minorities in a situation, when the continuity of a culture was broken, and the activists have not got any possibility to use a kind of organic tradition. Furthermore I deal with a problem, how to appreciate, how to accept the public opinion of this (re)invented tradition. In this paper I present this question by demonstrating the curriculum vitae and an artist's oeuvre. The geographic field of my research is Western-Siberia and the Khanty people, especially N.B. Vyalova an artist who considers herself as a Khanty, in the district of Kargasok, Tomsk county, where 90% of the population is Russian and the Khanty do not amount to 1%. In this paper I delineate Vyalova's biography, and analyse how did she discovered her form of self-expression: paper-cutting, and how she based this forms of art on her curriculum vitae. Furthermore I show the way how she became more and more versatile and complex artist, and how she create the aura of authenticity with the help of - for example - using the khanty language, which she never learnt to speak. After the analysis of the question of authenticity, I interpret her work as a naive, auto-didactic art, and her permanently evolving academic life's-work as autodidactic, popular science, since her activity is prominent not only in art but she is present in science, too. The activity of „native anthropologists” rarely articulates itself in a straightforward way. They often oscillate back and forth between different fields: they may become politicians, ecological activists, religious-spiritual leaders or, as is the case of Vyalova, artists. Building Khanty art into a successful brand, she has smuggled back the Khanty into public discourse after several decades of exclusion. Based on long term participating fieldwork and on written sources such as local press products, publications on the interfaces of social media and also the artistic and scientific works of Vyalova herself, I interpret her oeuvre in a social-cultural anthropological perspective using technical terms like „invented tradition”, „native anthropologist”, „folklorization” and „heritage language”. Summarised: I examine specifically how her art fits into present-day Siberian socio-cultural context in which social groups that had lost their traditional ways of life and art but experience a phase of ethnic revival, revive traditional cultural forms that can be learnt back or else, create new ones: they invent new traditions.

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