Cheremis Folk Belief

A few months ago I stumbled across a used book store run out this guy's house. I start rummaging around and see that he has an amazing folklore section. I was expecting old paperbacks and stuff, but he had things like Stith Thompson's memoirs. In a small garage bookstore he had a full shelving unit devoted to folklore. How odd, but great.

Going to the other side of the bookstore I discovered a whole wall of archaeology and anthropology titles, including piles of journals and special publications. Paydirt! I opened a few covers and discovered "From the Personal Library of Margaret Mead" inscribed on the inside of a number of titles. What the heck was going on.

I pick up a few titles - if I was of unlimited means I surely would have cleaned the place out. I talk to the guy behind the counter and it turns out he was a bibliographer for an anthropological society. I want that job. Really, i do.

I am working my way through one of those finds, "Studies in Cheremis: The Supernatural. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology Number Twenty-Two" by Thomas A. Sebeok and Frances J. Ingemann. New York 1956. This title makes me excited for so many different reasons. Firstly, I wrote almost a whole chapter of my dissertation on the work of Thomas Sebeok. I wish I had this book when I was dissertating, it would have improved that work exponentially. Sebeok was one of the first (if not the first) anthropologist/folklorist to employ a computer for the scientific study of folklore. The gist of that chapter of my diss was that his use of the computer was influenced by his allegiance to the structuralist school. Sebeok loaded one of those room-sized computers with tales and spells from the Cheremis people and did sophisticated (for the time) word-counts, determining repetitive imagery and the like.

He studied the Mari people of East/Central Russia (also called the Cheremis), who were a finno/ugric native peoples who numbered around half a million. For more on the Mari, check out the wikipedia article. The Mari are stuck somewhere between the Slavic Russians and the Mongol-Turkic Tatars, and demonstrate influences from both sides.

Thomas Sebeok was probably most famous as a biosemiotician. I am not smart enough to enough try to describe what that is. Instead, here is a great article explaining Sebeok's life work by someone with a much better vocabulary than me.

It is easy to forget that Russia is an ethnically diverse country, and I think studies such as Sebeok's are important in preserving the cultural heritage and identity of groups that are in danger of being swallowed up by more dominant (or better, populous) ethnic groups.