The Fighting Chukchi

In the lore of Soviet humor, the Chukchi people of Siberia are the butt of innumerable jokes - what the Polish joke is to American humor, the Chukchi are to the Russians.   This is not so for those tribes who are neighbors to the Chukchi, who are - I was surprised to find out - perceived as a ferocious fighting people.

The following excerpts are from the Lamut story "A Tale About the Chukchee Invasion," included in Waldemar Bogoras collection Tales of Yukaghir, Lamut, and Russianized Natives of Eastern Siberia.  

The tale recounts how the Lamut people were driven out of their homeland by the invading Chukchee:

In the morning at dawn there came from the east enemies as numerous as flees [sic].  Even the snowy mountains grew black with the multitude of men.  They were the Chukchee.  They moved on in large herds like reindeer.  They attacked the tents in front, and were killing the people.  At that very time those in the rear gathered a few things and moved off.   They rode along.  The Chukchee saw them and followed afoot, so nimble and light of foot were they.

The Chuckchi followed the Lamut for a while, and the Lamut eventually settled on the place where the Chuckchi stopped following them, at the foot of the Oloi mountain.   

Tale was collected by Borogas from the Lakut storyteller Hirkan in 1896.

This imagery of the savage Chuckchi is in stark contrast to the image of the Chuckchi as a backwoods rube as commonly portrayed in humor.   Some sample Chuckchi jokes:

• A Chukcha comes into a shop and asks, "Do you have color TV's?" -  "Why, yes, we do."  "I'll take a green one."
• A Chukcha applies for membership in the Union of Soviet Writers.  Shocked, they ask him what literature he is familiar with.  "Have you read Pushkin?"  - "No."  - "Dostoevsky?"  - "No." -  "Tolstoi?"  - "No."  - "Well, what have you read?"   - "Chukcha not reader!  Chukcha writer!"

(Yes, I am trying to spell the word Chuckcha every possible way.)

A Question Every Married Man Asks Himself

From "The Tale of Three Storks" in the collection Tales of Yukaghir, Lamut, and Russianized Natives of Eastern Siberia, collected by Waldemar Bogoras.   The story was told by a Yukaghir man named Innokenty Karyakin in 1895.

There lived a man who did not know where he was born.  We think, however that we were born of this man.  He was rich in everything.  One time a She-Monster came to him and wanted to be his wife.  The She-Monster said, "You must take me for your wife.  Otherwise, I shall devour you."   So he married her, and they lived together.  After some time he felt sorrowful and thought to himself,  "Is it fair, that I being a man, so strong and rich, must have for a wife this unclean monster?"

The Semantic Web and Bulgarian Folklore

One of my pet projects is the creation of a universal ontology for folkloristics.  I know, aim high.  While doing some of my due diligence today I stumbled upon an interesting article from a few years back detailing the goals of such a project.   

"Use of Knowledge Technologies for Presentation of Bulgarian Folklore Heritage Semantics" by Detelin Luchev, Desislava Paneva and Konstantin Rangochev.

They mention in the article a proposed Bulgarian folklore database called FolkKnow, but a preliminary search did not unearth much about the project.  I fear it might be dead on the vine, being three years since the appearance of the article.  I would love to be corrected on this note.

They do present a neat flow-chart that I think nicely displays the kind of work I am attempting in the creation of my ontology.   Nice work, I hope they have continued it!

Old Jews Telling Jokes

This and other great jokes can be found at Old Jews Telling Jokes.

Why Muslims Won't Eat Pork

As collected by Feridah Kirby Green and published in the 1908 "Folklore" under the title "The Reason for Abstaining from Wine and Pork" collected in Tangier:

Once when the Prophet was away, the Sohaba had a hunting party and slew many pigs and had a feast and were very merry.  And when Muhammed returned, one of his disciples, a poor man, came unto him and cried, "I have a claim, oh my Lord."  And the Prophet said "Speak on," and the man said, "I was prevented from joining in the hunt of the other Shereefs, and when they returned and the spoil was divided as is our wont, and they sent to each man a portion, my portion they forgot.  And thou knowest, oh my Lord, that I am a poor man, and a piece of meat is not easily procured in my household."  Then said Sidna, "This is not right," and to the other Sohaba he said, "Give the man his portion:" and they said, "It is some days since, and what was not eaten we destroyed and none is left."

Then was Sidna wroth, and he said, "Henceforth, for the sake of this my poor disciple whom ye have scorned, that portion of the pig which should have been his shall be cursed, and no true believer  shall eat of it."  And the Sohaba bowed their heads and said, "It is well."  But when they came to think how they had divided the pig and what pieces had been portioned to each, they found  that no man could remember which piece should have been allotted to the poor man, and so for fear of offence they determined to abstain from the eating of pig; and thus do we also, we, their sons and followers.

February Book Roundup

Interesting folklore titles coming out this month.  As always, I welcome these as gifts or review copies!

• Landscape of Memory: Living Folklore in England - Jerry Bird
• Ag Bun Na Craoiche: Folklore and Folklife from the Foot of the Reek - Caitriona Hastings.  Collection of material gathered by students in the 1930s.
• Indo-European Poetry and Myth - M. L. West.  This has some excellent reviews for the hardcover edition.  This is a paperback reprint.
• Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others - Stephanie Dalley.  New translation based on latest advances in Akkadian language studies.
• Tales from Maliseet Country: The Maliseet Texts of Karl V. Teeter - ed. and trans. by Philip S. Lesourd.  Bilingual collection in the Studies in the Anthropology of North America series.
• Sir Francis Drake: The Construction of a Hero - Bruce Wathen.  
• Clan Traditions and Popular Tales of the Western Highlands - John Gregorson Campbell.  Reprint.
• The Proverbial 'Pied Piper': A Festschrift Volume of Essays in Honor of Wolfgang Mieder on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday - edited by Kevin J. McKenna.   Gotta love you some festschrifts!
• Bandit Territories: British Outlaws and Their Traditions - Helen Philips (ed)
• The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T'ang Literature - Edward H. Schafer.
• All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region [Special Edition] - David Whisnant.  25th Anniversary edition of this classic in Appalachian studies.
• Soul of a People: The WPA Writer's Project Uncovers Depression America - David A. Taylor.  The WPA Writer's Project has proven an oh-so-great wealth of American folklore.  Can't wait for President Obama to re-instate a new WPA Writer's Program to uncover the current Depression America.
• Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox and Reflexivity - Kimberley Christine Patton.  
• Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare's Festive World - Phebe Jensen (ed).  Includes a section on one of my favorite things: Morris Dancing!
• Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Enthnographic Approaches - ed. by Phillip Vannini.  Part of the Series Intersections in Communications and Cultures: Global Approaches and Transdisciplinary Perspectives (that was a mouthful).

That was quite a list.  Starting in March I will attempt to update the list weekly, making it less daunting!

The Jass

From Charles J. Billson's article on  a Swiss tradition"The 'Jass' at Thun" (1908) (Billson also employs one of my favorite words, bugbear):

At Thun, in Switzerland, the annual Shooting Feast takes place in October, when three days are devoted to making holiday.  One of the tallest and strongest boys in the town is previously selected by the schoolmasters for the honour of appearing during the feast in the costume of a "Jass" or Jester, shown in the accompanying photograph.  His mission is to walk about the town and belabour with his baton all the youngsters whom he can catch.  During the rest of the year the "Jass" is held up as a bugbear wherewith mothers and nurses threaten their children, telling them that, if they are not good, the "Jass" will catch them, and give them a beating.   Another name given to the "Jass" is "Fulla Hund," i.e. Fauler Hund, "Lazy Dog."

The Burry-Men

On the second Friday in August the annual fair is held at South Queensferry, a small burgh of great antiquity, just below the Forth Bridge. The fair takes place in a field within a convenient distance (the burgh has now no common land of its own) and consists of the usual shows and merry-go-rounds with the recent addition of pipe- playing and reel-dancing. On the day before the fair, a house-to-house visitation is made by the Burry-man, a character who has existed from time immemorial. The ceremony is now left to the boys of the place, who make their rounds to collect money to be spent at the fair next day.

The quote and the image are from an article by Isabel Dickson about a Scottish tradition.  The Burry-man is usually a young lad covered in burs.  

Burry could also mean "Borough", "hairy" or "fuzzy."   Of course, it could also mean "covered in burs."  It is unclear as to which came first: the name or the burs.   

Dickson seems to think that the ritual arose from some agragrian ritual, and is a most likely reason:

I would therefore suggest that the ceremony of the Burryman is a relic of an early propitiatory harvest rite. The Burryman himself represents an indeterminate being, possibly the wild man of the woods, possibly the angry spirit in the form of wolf, bear or boar, whose original hairy shaggy covering has, by corruption or misunderstanding of the word burrie, degenerated into a covering of burrs. His procession and collection of money from door to door are the modern form of the sacrifice required to ensure a fruitful season.

Disturbing Descriptions of Anthropophagy

Anthropophagy  - a fancy word for cannibalism!

From the article "The Disposal of the Dead in Australia" by Northcote W. Thompson, in the journal "Folklore", 1908.

I might as well start with the most disturbing juxtaposition of sentences in the article:

Infants and very young children were eaten whole by old women alone. Deformed people were pushed into a log.

I am not certain of the veracity of the informants - and this is my first exposure to any writing on aboriginal culture  - so I am going to take most of this at face value, even though I am kind of skeptical of the research methods, etc.  This article does take the form of the 'oooh look at what these people do' - Believe it or Not! - type of writing, but it is ameliorated with the caveat that these practices were noticeably rare:

As a rule, where only one method of dealing with the body is practised, it consists in simple burial beneath the surface of the ground; occasionally the trunk of a hollow tree in selected as the last resting-place of the remains, and still more rarely cremation, anthropophagy or exposure is the recognised method of disposing of the body.

Thompson analyzes the aboriginal burial customs along linguistic and tribal lines - trying to ascertain any sort of pattern.  I admittedly am not conversant in the said culture - except that I am aware that it is extremely diverse - and Thompson, for his part recognizes this diversity.  The first mention of anthropophagy is among the Dieri:

The corpse was first disembowelled—a procedure practised also at Natal Downs, Queensland—and then dried ; the fat was caught in shells, and put on the tip of the tongue, and here the link is with the Dieri tribe, where certain relatives, usually those in the female line, eat the fat of the dead, which is in this case cut off from the body after it has been placed in the grave.

I will admit that most of my writing on this blog is of the 'hey check this out - Yuck!' variety.  But, hey, yuck.

Like the Narrinyeri, the tribes in the west of Victoria had more than one form of disposal of the dead.1 The body of an ordinary person was corded, the knees upon the chest, in an opossum rug. Two sheets of bark served as a coffin, and it was buried head to the east. If, however, there was no time to dig a grave, a funeral pyre was prepared and the body laid on it, head to the east; any bones which remained were pulverised and scattered about. If, however, it were the body of a married woman, her husband put the calcined bones in a little bag and carried them till the bag was worn out or he married again, when it was burned. Persons of either sex who died by violence were eaten by their adult relatives; the bones and intestines, however, were burnt. This custom they declared to be a mark of respect to the dead.

The reason for disposing of the body through eating it - at least in terms of the peoples from Brisbane and Maryborough regions - is explained practically by Thompson thus:

If it was decided to eat the body, all partook without limitation; it was eaten in the case of well-known warriors, magicians, people killed in battle, or women dying suddenly in good condition ; and the purpose of the rite is said to be to prevent the spirit from annoying the living and to dispose of the corpse, so that survivors were not troubled by its decomposition.

Many factors went into determining if a corpse was eaten or not; the primary factor appears to be age:

At Port Darwin children up to two are eaten ; from two to ten they are buried and a decorated post put up; young men or women are rolled in bark and their bodies put in trees; old people are exposed on the ground and then buried. After two months the bones are exhumed and put in a tree, and finally buried in a small hole about two feet deep.

The bodily fluids of the corpse also held certain import to certain aboriginal peoples; it did not appear to engender the squimishness which would be exhibited by most Westerners.  One of the major reasons someone would actually interact with the body - or parts of a body - of a deceased person was because the body seemed to still possess a power of sort:

Cannibalism, as we have seen, is sometimes inspired by fear, and Roth says that he cannot discover that the desire to acquire the qualities of the deceased is anywhere the object of the ceremony. Howitt, however, states in positive terms that the young men of the Kuinmurbura would stand beneath the burial stage of a great warrior, and stand underneath in order to let the products of decomposition fall upon them and transfer to them some of the strength and fighting power of the dead man.

There are countless beliefs in western culture which suggest that such a relationship to a body whose soul has shifted off this mortal coil is not that unusual.  Reliquaries spring to mind.  So does Ted Williams frozen head in an Arizona cryogenics tank.