Images-concepts in the perception of the Nanay fisherman's water space

The paper is purposed to reveal semantics of water space among the Lower Amur fishing people. The article considers a fisherman’s figurative range through his perception of natural environment. In the article, a wide range of information sources were drawn upon, including Nanay lexical (fishery and nature, names of places), folklore and physical (sacred objects related to water sphere) materials. Use of different forms of Nanay people cultural heritage allows to derive information, cultural codes of their social and cultural space. They have appeared as a result of the fisherman’s object-sensory perception of his habitat, and through economic and cultural borrowing from neighbors. The cornerstone of the fisherman’s primary experience was his associative series based on comprehension of the earthly realities, for the most part presented by the local reservoirs, that was reflected in his vocabulary and names of places. The idea of "water", "fishing" has laid in a whole group of terms, and becomes central to the development of conceptual-figurative series of view of the world, combining a series of the visual images with mnemonic function. They have been fixed in the oral folk art and ritual complex. Some of the images-concepts contain an autochthonous cultural core. They are associated with mythical characters in the form of an old man, an old woman, a multifaceted nature Temu, acting as patrons of fish wealth, assistants in navigation and creators of the world. Over time, the composition of the aqueous patrons was supplemented by images of the water bear (Mue-Duenteni), entities of marine life, snake (Simun), dragon (Puimur). They were imported from Siberia, Okhotsk sea coast, South-East Asia. The complexity of ritual-ceremonial complex among the Amur fishermen demonstrates that their values have changed and social and cultural space have extended from the river to the sea basin. In the water pantheon of images-concepts, placing the river ichthyofauna and salmon fish at the bottom of the hierarchy, and the open sea inhabitants at the top shows that the Okhotsk sea and the Pacific became a legendary outskirts, which is typical for communities of peripheral natural and cultural zones.

Keywords

Authors

References