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Thursday, July 26th, 2007
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3:07p - [BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Russia's Finno-Ugric peoples
Russia Profile's Nadezhda Sorokina recently reported news of the very recent Finno-Ugric summit held in Saransk, capital of the Russian autonomous republic of Mordovia.
This year’s festival of national cultures of the Finnish-Ugric peoples promises to be one of the largest in the event’s history. For the first time in the history of this annual event organized by the Finno-Ugric world the Russian President Vladimir Putin will be taking part. At previous events he sent representatives who read words of greeting from the head of the Russian state.
Now, however, Putin intends not only to hold a three-way Russian-Hungarian-Finnish meeting with the participation of Finnish president Tarja Halonen and the Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany. He also intends to attend one of the cultural exhibitions being held in Saransk as part of the event.
Putin’s interest in the festival in Mordovia is no coincidence. Over half the Finno-Ugric peoples live in Russia, with a total world population of this ethnic group of around 20 million. The group includes Hungarians, Veps, Votes, Izhorians, Karelians, Kvens, Komi, Komi-Permyaks, Livonians, Mansi, Mari, Moksha, Nenets, Sammi, Selkups, Udmurts, Finns, Finno-Ingermanlands, Khanty, Erzyas and Estonians.
In Russia, the Finno-Ugrics are the third major component of the Russian people, along with ethnic Russians and Tartars. According to some estimates, half of the Russians are related to Finno-Ugrics. Members of this ethnic group reside in 12 regions in Russia and are the native inhabitants of the Volga and the Urals, Karelia and the Kola Peninsula.
The Finno-Ugric languages that have served as the basis for this reunion are associated with a group of a couple dozen peoples dispersed across northeastern Europe, from the Danubian plain and the Baltic Sea to the Urals and beyond.
The Hungarians of the Danubian basin and the distantly related Khanty and Mansi of northwestern Siberia, speakers of Ugric languages all, are associated with a branch of the Finno-Ugric language family separate from the geographically and culturally more diverse community of Finnic language-speakers. The relationship of the Ugric languages with the Finnic languages might be more distant still, as The Economist's 2006 article, "The dying fish swims in water" suggests. (The article itself takes its name from what an Estonian linguist thought was the only sentence intelligible in both Finnish and Hungarian, but turns out to be actually unintelligible after all.) Over the 20th century, Finland and Estonia have turned out to be the countries most involved with the Finno-Ugric movement, using it to connect with the vast and diverse assortment of distant ethnic kin described by the Estonia-based Information Centre of Finno-Ugric Peoples.
Regarding the type of culture, Estonians, Finns and Hungarians are typical Europeans, while the culture of Volga-Finnic, Permian and minor Balto-Finnic peoples is agrarian, since due to several historic, political and cultural reasons they have had no opportunity to create their own urban culture. Throughout the centuries the culture of the Khants, Mansis and Samoyeds, which has based on hunting, fishing and reindeer raising, has adapted itself to the life under extreme Siberian conditions, nevertheless, it is most vulnerable to the European industrial culture.
As to their religion, Estonians, Finns and Western Lapps are Lutheran, whereas Hungarians are mostly Catholic (Calvinists and Lutherans can also be found). Finno-Ugrians living in the European part of Russia are mostly Orthodox, but the Udmurt and Mari people have preserved the ancient nature religion (i.e. animism). The Finno-Ugrians in Siberia as well as the Samoyeds are shamanists.
The Uralic peoples differ in their political fate and status. Hungarians have a thousand-year-long independent state. Finland with its own Parliament and currency was autonomous in the czarist Russia already. Estonians gained their independence only in 1918. After World War II, Estonians and Hungarians were part of the so-called socialist sphere, whereas Finland succeeded in maintaining its market economy and democracy.
The Finnic minority peoples in what is now Russia seemed on the verge of independence after the collapse of the First World War, when Ingrians constituted their own state in the hinterlands of St. Petersburg, Karelians associated themselves with Finland, and the Mari, Udmurts, and Mordovians in the middle Volga area federated with Turkic populations like the Tatars under the banner of Idel-Ural regionalism. The reunification of Russia under the Soviet Union abruptly ended this period, the subsequent seventy-odd years seeing the constitution of autonomous republics with their own state institutions for many of these nationalities, policies of Sovietization through industrialization-driven immigration and Russian-medium immigration which tended to Russify local populations as in the Komi Republic, and Stalinist state terror that targeted the cultural leaderships of many populations as potentially disloyal. The Finno-Ugric movement took off again after the Cold War, following Hungary's transition to democracy, Estonia's return to independence, and the emergence of federalism in the Russian Federation, but the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia lack the strong identities--and, it should be noted, the supportive state apparatuses, most visibly in Mari-El--that have driven the successful nationalism of Tatarstan. By and large, the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia are assimilating into the general population of the Russian Federation, through intermarriage, language shift, and the depopulation of the rural areas of Russia where so many of these peoples are concentrated.
The Finno-Ugric movement isn't going to disappear. Putin supports the idea of a relatively harmless gathering of distant ethnic kin, even attending the summit in Saransk, promoting it as a way to attract investment and encourage trade in Russia. Sorokina claims that for Finland, "a country with a population that is growing old at a brisk pace and is also enduring the twin onslaughts of European integration and American culture, the related peoples of the Volga and Urals have a romantic connotation and represent an opportunity to rejuvenate its population." Estonia may come to the same perspective in time, for the moment seeing these smaller populations as ethnic kin who (unlike the Estonians) are still being repressed by a Russian empire, as the existence of the Estonia-hosted The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire hints. Perhaps these two countries might even try to promote immigration from these populations, under somewhat the same principle that promoted Ingrian immigration to Finland after the end of the Soviet Union--half of the students recruited from these populations to Estonia under a scholarship program in 1999, The Economist reported, ended up staying in Estonia. Anything more substantive--say, the redefinition of these small peoples, as Udmurt Konstantin Zamyatin suggested in 2004, as "Eastern Finns" so as to ensure foreign support--is exceedingly unlikely in the face of Finnish disinterest, Russian hostility, and the separate histories of these peoples. Given another century, I wonder whether any of these populations will survive as culturally separate populations, as anything more than annotations and other obscure references in geography textbooks and people scattered over the Eurasian landmass who say (when prompted) things like "My grandmother was ...".
current music: Ultravox!, "The Wild, The Beautiful And The Damned" (3 comments |comment on this)
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7:42p - [BRIEF NOTE] "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Alan Weisman's impressive new book did The World Without Us, as Salon said it would, restore my sense of awe at the sheer durability of the natural world. Beginning from the intruiging starting point of the sudden disappearance of the world's human population, Weisman systematically examines the different artifacts of human civilization and concludes that while certain remnants of technological civilization would survive--certain industrial chemicals and plastics aren't likely to decompose for hundreds of thousands of years, well-suited introduced species will adapt to their new environment, garbage dumps will contain large numbers of durable artifacts for some time, and, of course the ongoing human-caused mass extinction will continue a bit longer as radioisotopes decay, urban/industrial areas burn, and climates change--material civilization would start disappearing quickly. Curiously enough, intact bronze sculptures may outlast everything else, enduring for tens of millions of year owing to the protection provided by their oxidated patina.
Crooked Timber's Kieran Healy wondered whether products of genetic engineering might last, perhaps to be discovered by Intelligent Design advocates in humanity's successor species. The odds seem to be against that. Organisms produced by modern genetic engineering are just as vulnerable to the winnowing pressures of natural selection as organisms produced by traditional breeding, since the traits selected for by humans are traits which don't appear in nature for a reason--organisms genetically engineered to spend valuable energy to produce insulin or silk are going to be at a disadvantage in the wild compared to organisms which don't produce human-used goods. Even human-created gene sequences, as a comment left by one Ben M. suggests, won't be very visible.
IDers claim to see protein structures that simply look funny. They look at the flagellum and say, "whoa, there are, like, twenty pieces"; they look at the centrosome and say, "whoa, it looks sort of like a jet engine". Humans may be designing our own organisms, but we are absolutely not designing custom proteins with irreducible mechanical arrangements. GMO proteins look and behave just like natural proteins -- they’re the same blobby enzyme-y things with pokey active sites and inscrutable folds. For the most part, they’re developed, not by a Designer sitting around fitting parts together, but by mutation and selection--artificial, forced, or targeted mutation (sometimes!) and selection in a petri dish (usually!). I’m willing to bet that the "Round-Up Ready" gene produces some surface protein whose structure and modus operandi were not known until after it was found to cause Round-Up resistance. A future scientist looking at the structure of this protein would conclude, at best, "This gene evolved in a species which was exposed to thus-and-such a toxin; it evolved very rapidly, so must have been under intense selection." He will not be able to say, "This thing has a totally different design principle than any other protein."
The only artificial, engineering-like step is where the scientists decide to move the genes from one organism to another. If that’s detectable or not, I dunno--"This enzyme seems to be a trivial modification of an Icelandic hot-spring bacterium’s gene, including all of the translation-invariant choices. What the hell is it doing in wild North American cabbage?". If there is any evidence of Behe seeing, or even looking for, such a thing, I’d love to hear about it.
Horizontal gene transfer might be invoked to explain one or two such oddities. If I were a a future crustacean version of Michael Behe, I might notice a systematic pattern of: lots of "apparent" horizontal-transfer events; all apparently under rapid selection, with sources (apparently) randomly scattered over the world but with targets concentrated in plains and pasture species; all occurring at about the same time ("Just before the late Holocene mass extinction") as the peak of an ill-understood material culture. Weird.
All said, I find nature's ease in recycling humanity's relics a bit depressing. Yes, it's very nice to know that complex life will handily outlast us, at least for another 1.1 billion years, after which point a heating sun is 10% brighter than it is today will make the Earth's oceans start to evaporate into water vapour. Still, the idea that millions of years hence nothing identifiable will be left of my species but piles of civilization's waste and fossil records of a sadly depleted biosphere is depressing. Is a net positive legacy really too much to hope for?
current mood: a bit depressed (11 comments |comment on this)
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