The Evenk is the largest group of Tungus-Manchuspeaking
peoples in Siberia. Their bear festival is the so called
"mountain-bear festival", a series of rites based on a bear
hunted in its den. This paper examines a social aspect of this
festival in order to attempt to solve problems concerning their
hunting-breeding organization which have not been dealt with
by S. M. Shirokogoroff in his studies.
The bear festival of the Evenks is usually held in autumn.
It consists of a series of rites of bear hunting, skinning, meatcooking,
feasting, and burial of the bear's bones. There is no
qualification for participation, and anyone in a camp or a village,
sometimes even forigners, can take part in the feast. Participants
can be categorized as a discoverer of the bear den, nimak
(he is often a wife's brother of the discoverer), hunters, elders,
and others. But some rules must be observed by each participant,
according to his role in the festival. They often represent rules
or principles of hunting-breeding organization among the Evenks.
By examining the rules of each category of participant, the
following conclusions were reached :
1) Camps or villages of the Evenks are not formed on
clan membership, but on a local or economic basis;
2) Therefore, hunting customs or rules, which regulate
hunters-breeders' activities regardless of clan affiliation, are more
important than clan rules in camps or villages;
3) The structural superiority of the wife-giver group over
the wife-taker group sometimes appears as a hunting custom in
daily and ritual activities;
4) The leadership in a camp or a village is in hands of
elders; and
5) Reflecting these social phenomena, the bear festival of
the Evenks is a camp or village festival, and is supposedly
connected with locality.
Based on that it is necessary to collect and organize huntingbreeding
customs or rules in order to advance Shirokogoroff's
studies and to make a more complete model of Evenk society.
クマ祭に集まる人々 : 狩猟儀礼に表出するエヴェンキ族の社会構成原理について
KH_010_2_006.pdf
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