Altai Erotic

The Altai are the Turkic people of the mountains that carry their name, where Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China fold into one another in southern Siberia. Most live in the Altai Republic, a Russian federal subject in which they are the titular nationality but not the majority, with smaller communities in Altai Krai and Kemerovo Oblast and scattered kin in western Mongolia and Xinjiang whom those states count as Oirat Mongols. Altai is a modern umbrella. Under it sit the Altai-kizhi of the high steppe valleys, the Telengit near the Mongolian frontier, the Teleut, and the forest peoples of the north, the Tubalar, Chelkan and Kumandin, who hunted, fished and gathered pine nuts rather than herding horses and sheep. Southern Altai speech is close to Kyrgyz; the northern dialects lean toward Shor and Khakas on the Siberian side. Russian is the language of school and town, and the northern varieties are now spoken mainly by the old.

Religion here is layered rather than chosen. Shamanic practice never left: a traveler still ties a pale ribbon to a birch at a mountain pass and leaves the spirit of the Altai something to eat. The Dzungar Khanate added Buddhist influence before its collapse in 1756 pushed Altai clans under Russian protection, Orthodox missionaries followed in the nineteenth century, and in 1904 the visions of a shepherd named Chet Chelpan launched Ak Jang, the White Faith, which rejected blood sacrifice and Russian priests alike and waited for a messianic Oirot Khan. Tsarist police broke up its first gathering, Soviet policy buried it, and it has been practiced in the open again since the 1990s. Clan identity, the seok, still decides whom one may marry, and asking someone's seok remains an ordinary way to place them. Kai, the guttural throat-sung epic performed to a two-stringed topshur, can run for hours and passes down a lineage of named singers. The 1993 excavation of a tattooed Pazyryk-era woman from the Ukok plateau, and the long campaign to bring her back from Novosibirsk, showed how tightly Altaians bind land, ancestors and their own standing as its people. Every second summer the El-Oiyn games fill a valley with wrestling, horse racing and archery, and with the pointed hats and long belted robes that spend the rest of the year folded in a chest.