Nenets Erotic

The Nenets are the people who carried large-scale nomadic reindeer herding into the twenty-first century, on a scale no one else in the Arctic matches. Their country is the tundra rimming the Barents and Kara seas, from the Kanin Peninsula in European Russia across the Yamal Peninsula to the Yenisei mouth and the western edge of Taymyr. Most of the roughly fifty thousand Nenets live in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, with smaller populations in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug around Naryan-Mar and in the Taymyr district. Herding families still move with the seasons, north to the coast in summer and back to the forest edge in winter, and some Yamal routes run more than a thousand kilometers a year. The whole household travels on reindeer-drawn sleds, and the conical hide tent, the chum, goes up at every stop. Women own that work: they raise the tent, drive their own sleds and sew the fur clothing that makes the migration survivable. Men handle the herd, the lasso and the dogs, and the small white herding laika of the tundra is the ancestor of the Samoyed breed known abroad.

The name Nenets simply means a person. Outsiders long called them Samoyeds or Yuraks, and the older label stuck to the language family. Samoyedic is the branch of Uralic that diverged first, so the Nenets are distant cousins of Finns and Hungarians and near kin only to the small Enets, Nganasan and Selkup groups of the Siberian north. Two Nenets languages exist: Tundra Nenets, spoken by most of the people, and Forest Nenets, a language of the Pur and Agan river taiga with about a thousand speakers and limited mutual intelligibility with its northern relative. Along the Ob they border the Khanty, another Uralic people, and to the west the Komi, whose Izhma herders learned large-scale reindeer keeping from them.

Traditional religion is animist, with a sky god called Num, an underworld figure named Nga and a set of household spirits carried on a sacred sled that travels with the family. The space behind the hearth in the chum remains a zone women do not enter. Vaygach Island was the great sanctuary until Orthodox missionaries in the 1820s, and Soviet officials a century later, destroyed its idols. Shamans were persecuted through the 1930s, the same decade Yamal Nenets rose in the mandalada revolts against collectivization and the seizure of their herds. Orthodox baptism reached many families early, evangelical missions have arrived since the 1990s, and in practice the layers coexist. The pressure now comes from gas: Bovanenkovo, Sabetta and the railway across Yamal all cut through migration routes, and a growing share of Nenets live settled lives in villages and okrug towns.