Product Code Database
Kets (; Ket language: кето, кет, денг) are a Yeniseian-speaking people in Siberia. During the Russian Empire, they were known as Ostyaks, without differentiating them from several other Siberian people. Later, they became known as Yenisei Ostyaks because they lived in the middle and lower Drainage basin of the Yenisei River in the Krasnoyarsk Krai district of Russia. The modern Kets lived along the eastern middle stretch of the river before being assimilated politically into Russia between the 17th and 19th centuries. According to the 2010 census, there were 1,220 Kets in Russia. According to the 2021 census, this number had declined to 1,088.
According to a 2016 study, the Ket and other Yeniseian people originated likely somewhere near the Altai Mountains or near Lake Baikal. It is suggested that parts of the Altaians are predominantly of Yeniseian origin and closely related to the Ket people. The Ket people are also closely related to several Native American groups. According to this study, the Yeniseians are linked to the Paleo-Eskimo groups.
Kets by selected settlements as of 2010:
| + !Name !Total population !Ket population !Percentage of Ket population | |||
| Sulomai | 183 | 147 | 80.33% |
| Kellog | 306 | 216 | 70.59% |
| Turukhansk | 4,662 | 105 | 2.25% |
| Maduika | 79 | 65 | 82.28% |
| Bor | 2,635 | 65 | 2.47% |
| Sym Russia | 140 | 17 | 12.14% |
| Yartsevo | 1700 | 10 | 1.12% |
| Verkhneimbatsk | 614 | 31 | 5.05% |
| Surgutikha | 199 | 53 | 26.63% |
| Vereshchagino | 203 | 32 | 15.76% |
| Baklanikha | 48 | 20 | 41.67% |
| Farkovo | 327 | 19 | 5.81% |
| Goroshikha | 123 | 39 | 31.71% |
Today, Kets are the descendants of fishermen and hunter tribes of the Yenisei taiga, who adopted some of the cultural ways of those original Ket-speaking tribes of South Siberia. The earlier tribes engaged in hunting, fishing, and reindeer Animal husbandry in the northern areas.
The Ket was incorporated into the Russian state in the 17th century. Their efforts to resist were unsuccessful as the Russians deported them to different places in an attempt to break up their resistance. This broke up their strictly organized Patriarchy social system and their way of life disintegrated. The Ket people ran up debts with the Russians. Some died of famine, others of diseases introduced from Europe. By the 19th century, the Ket could no longer sustain itself without food assistance from the Russian state.
In the 20th century, the Soviet Union conducted collectivization among the Ket. They were officially recognized as Kets in the 1930s when the Soviet Union began to implement the self-definition policy for indigenous peoples. However, many Ket traditions continued to be counteracted by the state. Collectivization was completed by the 1950s, and the Ket people were led to adopt the same lifestyle as ethnic Russians; education in Russian contributed to language loss as well.
The population of Kets has been relatively stable since 1923. According to the 2010 census, there were 1,220 Kets in Russia. The Kets live in small villages along riversides and are no longer nomadic. Unemployment and alcoholism are rampant among the Ket, like many other indigenous peoples of Siberia.
Ket means "man" (plural deng "men, people"). The Kets of the Kas, Sym and Dubches rivers use jugun as a self-designation. In 1788, Peter Simon Pallas was the earliest scholar to publish observations about the Ket language in a travel diary. An older ethnonym, , is used by the older generation.
In 1926, there were 1,428 Kets, of whom 1,225 (85.8%) were native speakers of the Ket language. The 1989 census counted 1,113 ethnic Kets with only 537 (48.3%) native speakers left.
As of 2008, there were only about 100 people who still spoke Ket fluently, half of them over 50. It is entirely different from any other language in Siberia. Alexander Kotusov (1955–2019) was a Ket folk singer, composer, and writer of songs in the Ket language. Siberian Lang – Alexander Maksimovich Kotusov
The shamans of the Ket people have been identified as practitioners of healing as well as other local ritualistic spiritual practices. Supposedly, there were several types of Ket shamans,Alekseyenko 1978Hoppál 2005: 171 differing in function (sacral rites, curing), power, and associated animals (deer, bear). Also, among Kets, (as with several other Siberian peoples such as the Karaga peopleDiószegi 1960: 128, 188, 243Diószegi 1960: 130Hoppál 1994: 75) there are examples of the use of skeleton symbolics. Hoppál interprets it as a symbol of shamanic rebirth,Hoppál 1994: 65 although it may also symbolize the bones of the loon (the helper animal of the shaman, joining the air and underwater worlds, just like the story of the shaman who traveled both to the sky and the underworld).Hoppál 2005: 198 The skeleton-like overlay represented shamanic rebirth among some other Siberian cultures as well.Hoppál 2005: 199Hoppál 2005: 172
Today, the practice of shamanism has largely been abandoned. Monotheism has displaced the ideas of the shaman and shamanistic practices. Of great importance to Kets are spirit images, described as "an animal shoulder bone wrapped in a scrap of cloth simulating clothing."A. A. Malygna, Dolls of the Peoples of Siberia 1988, p. 132, cited in Edward J. Vajda, Yeniseian Peoples and Languages: A History of Yeniseian Studies with an annotated bibliography and a source guide, Curzon Press, 2001. One adult Ket, who had been careless with a cigarette, said, "It's a shame I don't have my doll. My house burnt down together with my dolls."Werner Herzog, (documentary film) 2010. Kets regard their spirit images as Household deity, which sleep in the daytime and protect them at night.Herzog
Edward J. Vajda, a professor of Modern and Classical languages, spent a year in Siberia studying the Ket people, and found a possible relationship between the Ket language and the Na-Dene languages, of which Navajo language is the most prominent and widely spoken.
Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov compared Ket mythology with those of Uralic peoples, assuming in the studies that they are modeling Semiotics systems in the compared mythologies. They have also made typological comparisons.Ivanov & Toporov 1973Ivanov 1984:390, in editorial afterword by Hoppál Among other comparisons, possibly from Uralic mythological analogies, the mythologies of Ob-Ugric peoplesIvanov 1984: 225, 227, 229 and Samoyedic peoplesIvanov 1984: 229, 230 are mentioned. Other authors have discussed analogies (similar folklore motifs, purely typological considerations, and certain binary pairs in symbolics) may be related to a dualistic organization of society - some dualistic features can be found in comparisons with these peoples.Ivanov 1984: 229–231 However, for Kets, neither dualistic organization of societyZolotaryov 1980: 39 nor cosmological dualismZolotaryov 1980: 48 have been researched thoroughly. If such features existed at all, they have either weakened or remained largely undiscovered. There are some reports of a division into two exogamous patrilinear moieties,Zolotaryov 1980: 37 folklore on conflicts of mythological figures, and cooperation of two beings in the creation of the land, the motif of the earth-diver.Ivanov 1984: 229 This motif is present in several cultures in different variants. In one example, the creator of the world is helped by a waterfowl as the bird dives under the water and fetches earth so that the creator can make land out of it. In some cultures, the creator and the earth-fetching being (sometimes called a devil, or taking the shape of a loon) compete with one another; in other cultures (including the Ket variant), they do not compete at all, but rather collaborate.Paulson 1975 :295
However, if dualistic cosmologies are defined in a broad sense, and not restricted to certain concrete motifs, then their existence is more widespread; they exist not only among some Uralic-speaking peoples, but in examples on every inhabited continent. Zolotarjov 1980: 56
The Ket traditional culture has been researched extensively. Some people included as reference are Matthias Castrén, Vasiliy Ivanovich Anuchin, Kai Donner, Hans Findeisen, and Yevgeniya Alekseyevna Alekseyenko.Hoppál 2005: 170–171
1913 photographs by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen:
|
|
