Abstract
This article investigates contemporary uses of the Sakha language algys (blessing poems) and reveals the “old” and “new” types of language materiality present in this genre of ritual poetry. Focusing primarily on one example of algys shared online in 2018, I discuss how performing algys has always involved close interconnection between language and the material world and present the changing contexts and forms of algys transmission that highlight both fixity and fluidity in the way speakers conceive of language and materiality. Despite the new mobilities and technologies that build upon the previously established written textual forms of this poetry—and contribute to its continued circulation and transmission—certain elements of traditional algys remains salient for speakers, reinforced by ideologies or ontologies of language that foreground the power of the (spoken) word. This is connected to the production of qualia and the invocation of chronotopes. Thus, while textual forms further enable processes of citationality as they are circulated online; the written words alone do not constitute an algys. Rather, here the importance of embodied, spoken language materiality is at the fore.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to all of my Sakha-speaking friends and research consultants, many of whom have helped me not only with Sakha language study but have also encouraged me to study algys and understand the role that they play in the Sakha culture currently. In particular, I thank Lena Sidorova and Oleg Sidorov for their thoughts and support on this project and for sharing many useful references and introducing me to many algyschyts, who I also thank for their time and willingness to reflect on their creative and spiritual practices. Many thanks to Laura Siragusa for the invitation to speak at the seminar “The Materiality of Indigenous Languages: Co-Creating Landscapes” in Helsinki in June 2018 and for her helpful comments on early drafts; comments and questions from seminar participants also helped to shape the development of this article. I also sincerely thank the anonymous reviewer(s) who provided generous encouragement to push my arguments further and excellent suggestions on further literature to better situate the ideas I present here.
References
Alekseev, Nikolai A., Prokopii E. Efremov & Vasilii V. Ilarionov. 2003. Obriadovaia Poeziia Sakha (Iakutov). Novosibirsk: Nauka.Search in Google Scholar
Andreev, Kari Elizabeth. 2017. Visions of Olonkho: representation of Sakha epic poetry from the 19th century to today. University of Texas at Austin. MA Thesis.Search in Google Scholar
Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella. 2014. The potency of indigenous bibles and biography: Mapuche Shamanic literacy and historical consciousness. American Ethnologist 41(4). 648–663.10.1111/amet.12103Search in Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (trans). Austin and London: University of Texas Press.Search in Google Scholar
Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. 2005. Whose steeple is higher? Religious competition in Siberia. Religion, State and Society 33(1). 57–69.10.1080/0963749042000330839Search in Google Scholar
Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. 2012. Shamans, spirituality, and cultural revitalization: Explorations in Siberia and beyond. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Search in Google Scholar
Bell, Catherine. 1988. Ritualization of texts and textualization of ritual in the codification of Taoist Liturgy. History of Religions 27(4). 366–392.10.1086/463128Search in Google Scholar
Bell, Catherine. 2009. Ritual theory, ritual practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Briggs, Charles & Richard Bauman. 1992. Genre, intertextuality, and social power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2(2). 131–72.10.1525/jlin.1992.2.2.131Search in Google Scholar
Calder, Jeremy. 2019. The fierceness of fronted /s/: Linguistic rhematicization through visual transformation. Language in Society 48(1). 31–64.10.1017/S004740451800115XSearch in Google Scholar
Cavanaugh, Jillian & Shalini Shankar. 2014. Producing authenticity in global capitalism: Language, materiality, and value. American Anthropologist 116(1). 51–64.10.1111/aman.12075Search in Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas. 2003. Sociolinguistic authenticities. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(3). 417–31.10.1111/1467-9481.00233Search in Google Scholar
Course, Magnus. 2012. The birth of the word: Language, force, and Mapuche ritual authority. hau: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1). 1–26.10.14318/hau2.1.002Search in Google Scholar
Crate, Susan. 2006. Ohuokhai: Sakhas’ unique integration of meaning and movement. Journal of American Folklore 119(472). 161–83.10.1353/jaf.2006.0019Search in Google Scholar
Davis, Jenny. 2018. Talking Indian: Identity and language revitalization in the Chickasaw renaissance. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Search in Google Scholar
Dubuisson, Eva-Marie. 2017. Living language in Kazakhstan: The dialogic emergence of an ancestral worldview. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.10.2307/j.ctt1r69xq1Search in Google Scholar
Efimova, Liudmila S. 2013. Iakutskii algys: spetsikifika zhanra, poetika. Dissertation. North Eastern Federal University.Search in Google Scholar
Faudree, Paja. 2013. Singing for the dead: The politics of indigenous revival in Mexico. Durham and London: Duke University Press.10.1515/9780822391890Search in Google Scholar
Faudree, Paja. 2017. Language, music, materiality (and immateriality): Entanglements beyond the “Symbolic.” In Jillian Cavanaugh & Shalini Shankar (eds.), Language and materiality: Ethnographic and theoretical explorations, 255–259. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781316848418.014Search in Google Scholar
Ferguson, Jenanne. 2016. Language has a spirit: Sakha (Yakut) language ideologies and aesthetics of sustenance. Arctic Anthropology 53(1). 95–111.10.3368/aa.53.1.95Search in Google Scholar
Ferguson, Jenanne. 2019. Words like birds: Sakha language discourse and practices in the city. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.10.2307/j.ctvb1hs6gSearch in Google Scholar
Ferguson, Jenanne & Lena Sidorova. 2018. What language advertises: Ethnographic branding in the linguistic landscape of Yakutsk. Language Policy 17(1). 23–54.10.1007/s10993-016-9420-4Search in Google Scholar
Frankfurter, David. 1994. The magic of writing and the writing of magic: The power of the word in Egyptian and Greek traditions. Helios 21. 189–221.Search in Google Scholar
Gal, Susan. 2013. Tastes of talk: Qualia and the moral flavour of signs. Anthropological Theory 13(1–2). 31–48.10.1177/1463499613483396Search in Google Scholar
Grenoble, Lenore A. 2003. Language policy in the former Soviet Union. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press.10.1007/0-306-48083-2Search in Google Scholar
Graber, Kathryn E. 2020. Mixed messages: Mediating native belonging in Asian Russia. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.10.7591/cornell/9781501750502.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Hauck, Jan P. & Guilherme O. Heurich. 2018. Language in the Amerindian imagination: An inquiry into linguistic natures. Language and Communication 63. 1–8.10.1016/j.langcom.2018.03.005Search in Google Scholar
Harkness, Nicholas. 2015. The pragmatics of qualia in practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 44. 573–89.10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030032Search in Google Scholar
Harris, Robyn. 2017. Storytelling in Siberia: The Olonkho epic in a changing world. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.10.5622/illinois/9780252041280.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
İğmen, Ali. 2012. Speaking Soviet with an accent: Culture and power in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.10.2307/j.ctt5vkh78Search in Google Scholar
Keane, Webb. 1997. Religious language. Annual Review of Anthropology 26(1). 47–71.10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.47Search in Google Scholar
Keane, Webb. 2005. Language and religion. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology, 431–448. Wiley-Blackwell.10.1002/9780470996522.ch19Search in Google Scholar
Keane, Webb. 2013. On spirit writing: Materialities of language and the religious work of transduction. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19. 1–17.10.1111/1467-9655.12000Search in Google Scholar
Knowlton, Timothy W. 2015. Inscribing the miraculous place: Writing and ritual communication in the chapel of a Guatemalan popular saint. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 25. 239–255.10.1111/jola.12100Search in Google Scholar
Ksenofontov, Gavriil. 1992 [1937]. Uraangkhai-sakhalar: Ocherky po drevnei istorii iakutov. Yakutsk: Natsional’noe Izdatelstvo Respubliki Sakha-Yakutii.Search in Google Scholar
Levin, Theodore. 2019 [2006]. Where rivers and mountains sing: Sound, music, and nomadism in Tuva and beyond. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.10.2307/j.ctvj7wm07Search in Google Scholar
Nakassis, Constantine. 2013. Citation and citationality. Signs and Society 1(1). 51–78.10.1086/670165Search in Google Scholar
Nakassis, Constantine. 2012. Brand, citationality, performativity. American Anthropologist 114(4). 624–638.10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01511.xSearch in Google Scholar
Peers, Eleanor. 2015. Soviet-era discourse and Siberian shamanic revivalism: How area spirits speak through academia. In K Rountree (ed.), Modern pagan and native faith movements in Europe: Colonial and nationalist impulses, 110–29. New York: Berghahn Books.10.2307/j.ctt9qctm0.10Search in Google Scholar
Perley, Bernard. 2011. Defying maliseet language death. Emergent vitalities of language, culture and identity in eastern Canada. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.10.2307/j.ctt1df4g4tSearch in Google Scholar
Perley, Bernard. 2013. Remembering ancestral voices: emergent vitalities and the future of indigenous languages. In Elena Mihas, et al., (ed.), Responses to language endangerment: In Honor of Mickey Noonan. New directions in language documentation and language revitalization, 243–270. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/slcs.142.13perSearch in Google Scholar
Petrov, Afanasii A. & Marina P. Stepanova. 2016. Algystaan, Archylaan! Olokh bary tügenneriger. Yakutsk: Bichik.Search in Google Scholar
Romanova, Ekaterina N. & Vanda B. Ignat’eva. 2012. The Yakut [Sakha] National Festival Ysyakh in transition. Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia 50(4). 42–55.10.2753/AAE1061-1959500405Search in Google Scholar
Shankar, Shalini & Jillian Cavanaugh. 2012. Language materiality in global capitalism. Annual Review of Anthropology 41. 355–369.10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145811Search in Google Scholar
Shankar, Shalini & Jillian Cavanaugh. 2017. Toward a theory of language materiality: An introduction. In Jillian Cavanaugh & Shalini Shankar (eds.), Language and materiality: Ethnographic and theoretical explorations, 1–28. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781316848418.001Search in Google Scholar
Sidorova, Evgenia & Roberta Rice. 2020. Being indigenous in an unlikely place: Self-determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920–1991). The International Indigenous Policy Journal 11(3). 1–18.10.18584/iipj.2020.11.3.8269Search in Google Scholar
Siragusa, Laura, Clinton N. Westman & Sarah Moritz. 2020. Shared breath: Human and non-human co-presence through ritualized words and beyond. Current Anthropology 61(4). 471–494.10.1086/710139Search in Google Scholar
Tambiah, Stanley. 1968. The magical power of words. Man 3(2). 175–208.10.2307/2798500Search in Google Scholar
UNESCO Institute for Statistics. 2018. Education: Adult literacy rate, population 15+, both sexes (%). Available at: http://data.uis.unesco.org/index.aspx?queryid=166.Search in Google Scholar
Uzendoski, Michael. 2008. Somatic poetry in Amazonian Ecuador. Anthropology and Humanism 33(1/2). 12–29.10.1111/j.1548-1409.2008.00002.xSearch in Google Scholar
Uzendoski, Michael & Edith Felicia Calapucha-Tapuy. 2012. The ecology of the spoken word: Amazonian storytelling and Shamanism among the Napo Runa. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.10.5406/illinois/9780252036569.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Vasil’ev, Georgii M. 1965. Iakutskoe Stikhoslozhenie. Yakutsk: Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo.Search in Google Scholar
Vizenor, Gerald. 2008. Aesthetics of survivance: Literary theory and practice. In Gerald Vizenor (ed.), Survivance: Narratives of native presence, 1–24. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Search in Google Scholar
Watts, Vanessa. 2013. Indigenous place-thought and agency among humans and non-humans (first woman and sky woman go on a European world tour). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 2(1). 20–34.Search in Google Scholar
Wyman, Leisy T. 2012. Youth culture, language endangerment, and linguistic survivance. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.10.21832/9781847697417Search in Google Scholar
Zola, Lia Emilia. 2012. The revival of shamanism, shamans and contemporary art: The case of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Shaman 20(1–2). 157–74.Search in Google Scholar
Zola, Lia Emilia. 2017. Invisibility or marginality? Assessing religious diversification among women shamans in eastern Siberia. In Stefania Palmisano & Nicola Pannofino (eds.),Invention of tradition and syncretism in contemporary religions: Sacred creativity, 51–68. Palgrave MacMillan.10.1007/978-3-319-61097-9_3Search in Google Scholar
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
