kə́nadeŋ | |
|---|---|
 Kets | |
| Total population | |
| c. 1,100 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Krasnoyarsk Krai (Russia) | |
| Russia | 1,088 (2021)[1] |
| Ukraine | 37 (2001)[2] |
| Languages | |
| Ket,Russian | |
| Religion | |
| Russian Orthodoxy,Animism,Shamanism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Yughs,Paleo-Eskimos,Indigenous peoples of the Americas, especiallyNa-Dene peoples | |
 | |
  Location of Ket people Shown within Russia | |
| Location | Most Ket live on the middleYenisei River and tributaries, including a group in the community ofKellog. |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 62°29′N86°16′E / 62.483°N 86.267°E /62.483; 86.267 |
Kets (Russian:кеты;Ket: кето, кет, денг) are aYeniseian-speaking people in Siberia. During theRussian Empire, they were known asOstyaks, without differentiating them from several other Siberian people. Later, they became known asYenisei Ostyaks because they lived in the middle and lowerbasin of theYenisei River in theKrasnoyarsk Krai district ofRussia.[3] The modern Kets lived along the eastern middle stretch of the river before being assimilated politically into Russia between the 17th and 19th centuries. According to the 2010 census, there were 1,220 Kets in Russia.[1] According to the 2021 census, this number had declined to 1,088.
The Ket people share their origin with otherYeniseian people and are closely related to otherIndigenous people of Siberia andIndigenous peoples of the Americas. They belong mostly to Y-DNAhaplogroup Q-M242.[4]
According to a 2016 study, the Ket and other Yeniseian people originated likely somewhere near the Altai Mountains or near Lake Baikal. It is suggested that parts of the Altaians are predominantly of Yeniseian origin and closely related to the Ket people. The Ket people are also closely related to several Native American groups. According to this study, the Yeniseians are linked to the Paleo-Eskimo groups.[5]
According to one study, the vast majority of Kets belong to Y-DNA haplogroupQ-L330 (94%).[6][7] According to another research, most Kets belong to three unrelated haplogroups, 86.4% of whom to Q, 9.1% tohaplogroup N1a1 and 4.5% tohaplogroup R1a.[8]
A 2016 study found that the global maximum ofANE ancestry occurs in modern-day Kets,Mansi,Native Americans, andSelkups.[9]
Ket people live primarily inTurukhansky district ofKrasnoyarsk Krai.
Kets by selected settlements[10][11] as of 2010:
| Name | Total population | Ket population | Percentage of Ket population |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sulomai | 183 | 147 | 80.33% |
| Kellog | 306 | 216 | 70.59% |
| Turukhansk | 4,662 | 105 | 2.25% |
| Maduika | 79 | 65 | 82.28% |
| Bor | 2,635 | 65 | 2.47% |
| Sym | 140 | 17 | 12.14% |
| Yartsevo | 1700 | 10 | 1.12% |
| Verkhneimbatsk | 614 | 31 | 5.05% |
| Surgutikha | 199 | 53 | 26.63% |
| Vereshchagino | 203 | 32 | 15.76% |
| Baklanikha | 48 | 20 | 41.67% |
| Farkovo | 327 | 19 | 5.81% |
| Goroshikha | 123 | 39 | 31.71% |
The Kets are thought to be the only survivors of an ancientnomadic people believed to have originally inhabited central and southernSiberia. In the 1960s, theYugh people were distinguished as a separate, though similar, group.
Today, Kets are the descendants of fishermen and hunter tribes of the Yeniseitaiga, who adopted some of the cultural ways of those original Ket-speaking tribes of South Siberia. The earlier tribes engaged inhunting, fishing, andreindeerbreeding in the northern areas.[1]
Some of the Ket were part of theSkewbald Horde prior to the arrival of the Russians. The Ket were incorporated into the Russian state in the 17th century. Their efforts to resist were unsuccessful as the Russians deported them to different places in an attempt to break up their resistance. This broke up their strictly organizedpatriarchal social system and their way of life disintegrated. The Ket people ran up debts with the Russians. Some died of famine, others of diseases introduced from Europe. By the 19th century, the Ket could no longer sustain itself without food assistance from the Russian state.[12]
In the 20th century, theSoviets conductedcollectivization among the Ket. They were officially recognized as Kets in the 1930s when the Soviet Union began to implement the self-definition policy for indigenous peoples. However, many Ket traditions continued to be counteracted by the state. Collectivization was completed by the 1950s, and the Ket people were led to adopt the same lifestyle as ethnic Russians; education in Russian contributed to language loss as well.
The population of Kets has been relatively stable since 1923. According to the 2010 census, there were 1,220 Kets in Russia. The Kets live in small villages along riversides and are no longer nomadic.Unemployment andalcoholism are rampant among the Ket, like many other indigenous peoples of Siberia.[13]
TheKet language has been linked to theNa-Dené languages of North America in theDené–Yeniseian language family.[14][15][16] This link has led to some collaboration between the Ket and northernAthabaskan peoples.[17] Although a potential link to theNa-Dené languages has been identified, this link is not accepted by all linguists.[18]
Ket means "man" (pluraldeng "men, people"). The Kets of the Kas, Sym and Dubches rivers usejugun as a self-designation. In 1788,Peter Simon Pallas was the earliest scholar to publish observations about the Ket language in a travel diary.[19] An older ethnonym,kə́nadeŋ, is used by the older generation.[20]
In 1926, there were 1,428 Kets, of whom 1,225 (85.8%) were native speakers of the Ket language. The 1989 census counted 1,113 ethnic Kets with only 537 (48.3%) native speakers left.[citation needed]
As of 2008, there were only about 100 people who still spoke Ket fluently, half of them over 50.[14] It is entirely different from any other language in Siberia.[1]Alexander Kotusov (1955–2019) was a Ket folk singer, composer, and writer of songs in the Ket language.[21]
The Kets have a rich and varied culture, filled with an abundance of Siberian mythology, includingshamanistic practices and oral traditions. Siberia, the area of Russia in which the Kets reside, has long been identified as the originating place of the Shaman or Shamanism. In the 1950s,Mircea Eliade states this in the first sentence of his bookShamanism: "Since the beginning of the 20th century, ethnologists have fallen into the habit of using the terms 'shaman', 'medicine man', 'sorcerer', and 'magician' interchangeably to designate certain individuals possessingmagico-religious powers and found in all 'primitive' societies. If the word 'shaman' is taken to mean any magician, sorcerer, medicine man, or ecstatic found throughout the history of religion and religious ethnology, we arrive at a notion at once extremely complex and extremely vague; it seems, furthermore, to serve no purpose, for we already have the terms 'magician' or 'sorcerer' to express notions as unlike and ill-defined as 'primitive magic' or 'primitive mysticism'."[22]
The shamans of the Ket people have been identified as practitioners of healing as well as other local ritualistic spiritual practices. Supposedly, there were several types of Ket shamans,[23][24] differing in function (sacral rites, curing), power, and associated animals (deer, bear).[24] Also, among Kets, (as with several other Siberian peoples such as theKaragas[25][26][27]) there are examples of the use of skeleton symbolics.[28] Hoppál interprets it as a symbol of shamanic rebirth,[29] although it may also symbolize the bones of theloon (the helper animal of the shaman, joining the air and underwater worlds, just like the story of the shaman who traveled both to the sky and the underworld).[30] The skeleton-like overlay represented shamanic rebirth among some other Siberian cultures as well.[31][28]
Today, the practice of shamanism has largely been abandoned.Monotheism has displaced the ideas of the shaman and shamanistic practices. Of great importance to Kets are spirit images, described as "an animal shoulder bone wrapped in a scrap of cloth simulating clothing."[32] One adult Ket, who had been careless with a cigarette, said, "It's a shame I don't have my doll. My house burnt down together with my dolls."[33] Kets regard their spirit images ashousehold deities, which sleep in the daytime and protect them at night.[34]
Edward J. Vajda, a professor of Modern and Classical languages, spent a year in Siberia studying the Ket people, and found a possible relationship between the Ket language and theNa-Dene languages, of whichNavajo is the most prominent and widely spoken.[35]
Vyacheslav Ivanov andVladimir Toporov compared Ketmythology with those ofspeakers of Uralic languages, assuming in the studies that they are modelingsemiotic systems in the compared mythologies. They have also made typological comparisons.[36][37] Among other comparisons, possibly from Uralic mythological analogies, the mythologies ofOb-Ugric peoples[38] andSamoyedic peoples[39] are mentioned. Other authors have discussed analogies (similar folkloremotifs, purely typological considerations, and certain binary pairs in symbolics) may be related to a dualistic organization of society - somedualistic features can be found in comparisons with these peoples.[40] However, for Kets, neither dualistic organization of society[41] norcosmological dualism[42] have been researched thoroughly. If such features existed at all, they have either weakened or remained largely undiscovered.[41] There are some reports of a division into twoexogamous patrilinear moieties,[43] folklore on conflicts of mythological figures, and cooperation of two beings in the creation of the land,[42] the motif of the earth-diver.[44] This motif is present in several cultures in different variants. In one example, the creator of the world is helped by a waterfowl as the bird dives under the water and fetches earth so that the creator can make land out of it. In some cultures, the creator and the earth-fetching being (sometimes called adevil, or taking the shape of a loon) compete with one another; in other cultures (including the Ket variant), they do not compete at all, but rather collaborate.[45]
However, if dualistic cosmologies are defined in a broad sense, and not restricted to certain concrete motifs, then their existence is more widespread; they exist not only among some Uralic-speaking peoples, but in examples on every inhabited continent.[clarification needed][46]
The Ket traditional culture has been researched extensively. Some people included as reference areMatthias Castrén,Vasiliy Ivanovich Anuchin,Kai Donner,Hans Findeisen, andYevgeniya Alekseyevna Alekseyenko.[47]
1913 photographs by the Norwegian explorerFridtjof Nansen:
![Group of Kets around a campfire. The people in the background wearing fur hats are Russians.[citation needed]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=https%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aKet_campfire_1914_cropped.jpg)
During the Russo-Ukrainian War, a 50-year-old Ket man named Oleksandr, originally from the remote settlement of Kellogg in Krasnoyarsk Krai, was captured by Ukrainian forces on the Pokrovsk front while fighting as a soldier for the Russian military. The captive stated that he joined the army due to personal issues, such as "drinking" and "prison," and admitted that he did not speak the critically endangered Ket language and knew little of his people's culture, noting much of it had already been lost. The report highlighted that the 2021 Russian census recorded only 1,088 Kets.[48]
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Media related toKet people at Wikimedia Commons
