Khanty Erotic

The Khanty are the fishing and reindeer people of the middle and lower Ob, the river that drains Western Siberia into the Arctic. Their country is the taiga, bog and floodplain of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, a region still known as Yugra, plus the forest edge of the Yamalo-Nenets district. Their name for themselves means simply "people." Russians called them Ostyaks for four centuries. They number a little over thirty thousand, and in the district that carries their name they are a minority of about one percent, because the oil under their fishing grounds drew in millions of newcomers after the 1960s.

Khanty belongs to the Ob-Ugric branch of the Uralic family, alongside Mansi and, more distantly, Hungarian. The dialects sit so far apart that a Kazym speaker from the north and a Vakh speaker from the east cannot hold a conversation, and linguists often count them as separate languages. The southern Irtysh dialect died out in the twentieth century. Fewer than half of Khanty speak any variety today. Russian took over through Soviet boarding schools that pulled children from the fishing camps for most of the year.

On paper the Khanty have been Orthodox since forced baptisms in the 1710s. In practice the old religion never left. The sky god Torum presides, the river has its spirit master, and sacred groves and household spirit figures still receive offerings of cloth and coins. The bear is central. Khanty hold that the bear is Torum's son, lowered to earth, so a killed bear is not butchered but hosted. Its head is brought inside, set in the place of honor, and entertained over four or five nights of songs, masked comic skits and dances before it is sent back to the sky. The bear feast outlasted the missionaries and the Soviet state and is still held. Society divides into two intermarrying halves, Por and Mos, each with its own animal ancestry, shared with the neighboring Mansi.

Two moments of resistance frame their modern history. In the 1580s and 1590s some Khanty princedoms fought the Cossack advance while others made terms, and all ended up paying fur tribute. Between 1931 and 1934 the Kazym Khanty rose against collectivization, a state fishery on a sacred lake and the removal of their children to boarding schools. The uprising was crushed and its leaders shot. Since the 1990s the struggle has been over "family lands," recognized hunting and fishing territories that oil companies negotiate for, drill across and sometimes buy out. Northern Khanty still herd reindeer, a livelihood borrowed from the Nenets, and fish is the staple everywhere on the Ob.