Leaders of the Ob Ugrians and the Samody (according to folklore)

The historical accuracy of folklore texts may at best be debatable, however, for an ethnographer they are a valuable source of knowledge about the ethno-cultural values and the rules of behavior. Unlike the written historical sources created by outside observers (the chronicles, the tax and population census records, the parish registers, etc.) the folklore provides an insider’s view. However, the folklore is not devoid of its own historicism as well, particularly when describing important events, and, in that sense, it plays the role of a folklore history (or “ethno-history”). In other words, the folklore offers a characterization of events and phenomena in projections and interpretations of the people themselves. The Ugrian (the Khanty and the Mansi) and the Samody (the Nenets) folklore offer rich material in terms of the study of elites and, first of all, for the study of power and leadership phenomena. Comparison of the folklore representations of the Ob Ugrians and the Samody leaders revealed both the similarities and the differences. The similarities involved the mention of the military and the religious functions of the leaders as the main ones, their perception as the personification of the people (in the folklore there is no mention of any “interests of the people”). There are certain differences in the style of leadership - the stability in the Ugrian groups and the contextuality in the Nenets societies. In the Ugrian model the urt concentrated all power functions in one person; in the Nenets one they were distributed among the leaders called erv, teta, serm”'bertya. In both models the most important leadership function were the war and the defense of their settlements (the Urgians) and migration territories (the Nenets); at the same time the most frequent motivation for conflicts and military campaigns was a “bride quest” (in the Nenets model this was complemented by the seizure of the strangers’ herds and protection of their own). In terms of the leadership traditions the Ugrians tended more towards the elitism, while the Nenets - towards the egalitarianism; the Ugrians - towards stability, and the Nenets - towards mobility, which did not however preclude a quick advancement of the leaders-warriors in case of a military conflict - in this way the nomads’ mobility included also an authority mobilization mechanism. It were the leaders, as well as the military-political and the religious functions performed by them, who consolidated the aboriginal societies, formed the centers and the boundaries of principalities, the clan and the ethnic communities. The kinship and the in-laws networks of the elites formed the basis for the consolidation of societies and the inter-community links - in that sense the military campaigns of the leaders and their teams apart from provoking enmity also maintained communications across the vast territories. The religious and the mythological substantiation of these links were the legends about the leaders-ancestors, the dispersal of the sons and daughters of the supreme deities across the land, the customs of pilgrimage to the religious centers and organization of mass-scale ritual ceremonies. The positions and the actions of the leaders formed the basis to various inter-ethnic communications scenarios.

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