Technology, performance and the preservation of cultural heritage, or the bear festival and the Yugan khanty digital media center: a Siberian example

During the course of the years 2008-2010, the authors of the report developed and carried out a project of ethnographic research and applied anthropology to create a media center for the Khanty community Yaoun-Yakh. The project was part of UNESCO's program to create an international network of indigenous media centers. The center was supposed to be a portal opening up access for the Khanty to the global network community. At the same time, the media center was to serve as a school for computer literacy and a base for the development of cultural heritage conservation programs initiated and controlled by local Khanty community self-government association. An initiative group of the Yugan Khanty, members of the Yaoun-Yakh community, united around the project, formed an organizing committee to develop the Charter of the media center and plan the main areas of activity. Sensing how much is being lost as generations slip away and native lands are destroyed in front of their eyes. The Bear's House Project has two parts. First, with technical assistance and professional guidance, and skills transfer workshops, the Yugan Khanty community will establish a community media center. This portion of the project was funded by UNESCO's Moscow Office and fundamentally completed by the end of 2009. The culmination episode of the joint research work was the expedition of the seminar participants together with the authors of the project on the Big Yugan River, captured by a seminar student with a digital camera. These materials formed the basis of the DVD film on the community's work to restore the traditions of the Bear Festival. Second, through the newly-established Community Media Center, the Yugan Khanty community will pioneer a master-apprenticeship program for preserving Bear Festival Traditions. The Bear's House Project will serve the Yugan Khanty community as the impetus for identifying their cultural conservation priorities, mobilizing community participation and resources, developing a folk arts program and archive for the documentation and conservation of Yugan Khanty traditions and creating digital media programming for the public dissemination of their indigenous interests Visual and Audio Repatriation._This program would engage representatives of the local Khanty community in traveling to museums whose collections contain historic Khanty artifacts, for the purposes of visual documenting those collections, or, in the case of sound recordings, making digital audio copies, so that these missing elements of cultural heritage may be repatriated in virtual forms. Such virtual repatriation will enable recovery of memory culture.

Keywords

Authors

References