Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the RAS, Moscow, Russian Federation, [email protected]
ABSTRACT
Introduction: ​ the structural-typological analysis of the heroic epos of any nation, on the one hand, is important for folklore studies with the discovery of textual patterns, both in a given people and in their neighbors. On the other hand, it is a valuable ethnological source on the peculiarities of the worldview, the mechanism of thinking, the system of values and behavior patterns. Nenets traditional culture is based on a nomadic way of life. In the geographical space occupied by the Nenets, , as a rule, settlements and towns are on the periphery of the Nenets settlement; there are few of them and they belong to the peoples adjacent to the Nenets. Therefore, in the Nenets heroic epic, with rare exceptions space is completely occupied by nomadic reindeer herders, where the awareness of “one-to-other” is differ from sedentary cultures. The task of the research is the identification of functional and descriptive textual universals of the perception of space.
Objective: to make a structural and typological analysis of the Nenets heroic songs, concerning the imagery of human habitats from concrete to abstract in the search for certain patterns and explanation of their semantic content.
Research materials: published texts of Nenets heroic songs in the amount of 50 works.
Results and scientific novelty: for the first time a structural and typological analysis of the Nenets heroic songs was made. It is given in relation to one of the types of descriptive elements which accompany a plot. Certain patterns were found in the texts of the Nenets heroic songs in relation to specific descriptions of habitats in the general structure (beginning – plot – final) and their independence from the character of the heroes (positive or negative); in relation to abstract descriptions we found the worldview notions which are still not described as well as their relation to the heroic epos as a folklore genre.
Key words: the Nenets, hero, heroic epos, song, river, stream, lake, sea, cape, earthen chum, thick willow wood.
Acknowledgments: the author is grateful to the graduate student of the IEA RAS Elizaveta Serokovna Yaptik for checking of the Nenets texts and Russian translations, as well as for valuable comments to separate Nenets words and notions.
For citation: Pluzhnikov N. V. To the question of typology of space in the Nenets heroic epos (habitat) // Vestnik ugrovedenia = Bulletin of Ugric studies. 2018; 8(4): 729–740.