Khanty and Mansi Religion
KHANTY AND MANSI RELIGION. Together with Hungarian, the Mansi (Vogul) and Khanty (Ostiak) languages form the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric (and, ultimately, the Uralic) language family. During the first millennium BCE, the proto-Ob-Ugrians withdrew along the Ob River northward from the forested steppe region of southwest Siberia, simultaneously assimilating the autochthonous population and losing their own Iron Age culture and equiculture. The Ob-Ugrians (Khanty and Mansi) thus became secondarily primitivized, emerging as a fishing, hunting, and reindeer-breeding sub-Arctic people. Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries the Ob-Ugrians split into quasi-tribal or clan-based "chiefdoms," a system that disintegrated as a consequence of sixteenth-century Russian colonization. The Eastern Orthodox church began conversion of the Ob-Ugrians in the eighteenth century, but the character of this conversion was formal and thus did not essentially influence the original religion.
The Mansi number 7,700, the Khanty, 21,000; of these, respectively 49 and 68 percent speak their ancestral language. The ethnographic macrogroups correspond to dialect groupings. Yet, while the culture and language of the various macrogroups is divergent enough to justify their classification as distinct peoples, the Mansi and Khanty within the same microgroup differ from one another only in language and in their consciousness of identity.
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