Structural organization of Kazym Khanty ritual bear songs

The Kazym Khanty ritual of the bear festival is currently experiencing its second birth. Interest in folk creativity appeared; a new generation of performers is growing up. Thus, the question of the poetics of sacred texts becomes very urgent. Ritual songs of the bear festival are characterized by multi-level text structure. The minimal stable, repeatable unit a formula. The next level of the text, which is characteristic of typicality, is the plot. The paper is devoted to the description of the principles of plot construction of the ritual songs of the Kazym Khanty bear festival. The author studies the songs of the kajoen ar genre (the songs that praise the bear). The comparison of eleven songs of this genre made it possible to identify the constant elements in the narrative structure that are close to the typical epic places of Siberian people. Despite the heterogeneity of the genre, the analysis revealed the following typical places: a description of the bear’s life in the forest; appearance of a man; bear hunting; ritual activities after the bear hunting; skinning; delivery to the camp; shouting the name of the area along the road; meeting of hunters in the camp; holding a bear festival. The bear festival ritual is described by the following typical moments: the gathering of guests, prayer, sacrifice, fun, singing, dancing, playing musical instruments, the coming of deities, the final of the rite (sending the souls of a bear). Thus, ritual songs reproduce all the key stages of the rite itself. The songs of the genre kajoen ar represent a very diverse material of varying degrees of typification. The bear delivery songs are the most formalized, describing the life of a bear in the forest. The song-myths are the least formalized, describing some unique event of sacred history.

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