The Kets and Their Culture. Research Problems in the 20th-21st Centuries (The Statement of the Problem)

The Kets are an indigenous people of Siberia whose culture is investigated by many Russian and foreign researchers. One can state now that an authentic view on the Kets' origin and ethnogenesis does not exist. In particular, there are assumptions of linguists and anthropologists concerning the contacts and similarities of the Kets and North American Indians, of the Kets and the Chinese, of the Kets and other peoples of Siberia, etc. The aim of the article is to reveal some problems of the Kets' culture research in the 20th and 21st centuries. The basic sources for this article are published articles by many researchers (linguists, anthropologists, ethnographers, etc.), results of the author's field and theoretical work. Since the beginning of the scientific study of the Kets, this people has lost many ethnic features. One of the main problems of the study of the Kets now (and back in the 19th and 20th centuries) is that it is unclear who the Kets were and are; in other words, what the criteria for determining an authentic representative of the Ket ethnos are. These criteria must be scientifically based and must be prepared before working with informants. The second problem is a wrong methodology of work with representatives of the ethnos. Researchers studied the Kets after the beginning of Russian assimilation when the Kets had cultural concepts typical for the Russian population. It is obvious that these cultural phenomena belonged to the modern Kets rather than to the native ones. Besides, researchers interviewed the Ket people from their own point of view, founded on peculiarities of the Russian culture and language, talked with informants in Russian, etc. This caused the obtrusion of new notions and researchers' worldview, which is inadmissible if we aim to describe and study an original ethnic culture. The third problem consists in the erroneous summarizing of the theoretical stage. It is clear that the primordial incorrect field research determines fallacious conclusions, contradictory outcomes, hypotheses, etc. These three problems are not new and typical for the 20th and 21st centuries and for the Kets exclusively, but they remain relevant and ever-present. The author concludes that the existing situation requires an integrated rethinking of research methods. Otherwise, the study of the Kets will be unproductive. In particularly, today, it is necessary to critically analyse the collected data, to correct methods of field work and of interviewing of informants.

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