Le prochain séminaire des études sibériennes / Siberian Studies Seminar, organisé par Dmitriy Oparin (UMR Passages) et Virginie Vaté (GSRL), avec le soutien du GDR AREES et du programme UXIL, aura lieu en format hybride le mercredi 11 juin de 14h à 17h, au bâtiment de recherche nord du Campus Condorcet, EXCEPTIONNELLEMENT en salle 5.001 (voir informations ci-dessous, aussi lien zoom).

Il sera consacré à une session double sur le thème :

Nanai people in European publications in the late 19th and early 20th century

Aurons lieu deux présentations :

1) Joanna Dolińska, de l'Université de Varsovie (University of Warsaw), 

Deities, Spirits and Beliefs of the Nanai community in Stanisław Poniatowski's Materials to the Vocabulary of the Amur river Gold. (in English)

Nanai language belongs to the southern branch of the Tungusic family of languages, together with Kilen, Udihe, Ulcha, Orok and Oroch. It is an endangered, low-resource language spoken fluently today by no more than 300 individuals. The multifaceted world of Nanai indigenous beliefs from the era before the WWI was recorded in Nanai language by several historians, linguists and anthropologists, such as Wilhelm Grube, Petr P. Shimkevich or Leopold von Schrenck. However, the lexicon which I will discuss in this lecture differs from Nanai standard dictionaries. It represents mainly the world of Nanai beliefs recorded in 1914 in a non-standard way by a Polish anthropologist Stanisław Poniatowski. Firstly, this dictionary includes mainly the names of deities and objects from the semantic field of beliefs, excluding such information as model of subsistence or ordinary, universal concepts which we would find today in the Swadesh list or Leipzig-Jakarta list. Secondly, the key to understand and conceptualize the image, power and areas of influence of the deities and spirits preserved in this work lies in another work, the drawings published in Poniatowski’s diary and original objects collected by Poniatowski in 1914, which are housed today in the National Museum of Natural History in the Smithsonian Institution. With the help of historical linguistics analysis, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, I will try to answer the question, how this lexicon was created and curated, what perspective on the Nanai indigenous beliefs it creates and whether it could potentially serve for the Nanai community for the contemporary documentation and revitalization purposes.

2) Anne Dalles Maréchal, Université Saint Etienne-Jean Monnet / GSRL (Paris, France),

Depicting the Minorities in the UK: The Perception of Tungus People in the Publications of the British Explorer T. W. Atkinson and the British civil servant H. E. M. James. (in English)

Until the second half of the 19th century, the regions of Northeast of China and the Far East of Russia, also known as the Amur region, were relatively unknown in the West. In the wake of the political events after the First Opium War (1839-1842), Europeans began to spread information about the region in Western publications. Scientific and military explorations grew exponentially at the same time as the techniques for disseminating knowledge.  This led to the development of an imaginary Manchurian Far East which circulated in Europe and the United States and aroused the curiosity of explorers. In this presentation, I will look at the publications of two British travellers who visited the Amur region in the late nineteenth century: the 1860 book by T. W. Atkinson, an English explorer who travelled on the River Amur between 1847 and 1853 and the 1888 book by H. E. M. James, a British civil servant in India, who travelled to Manchuria in 1886-1887. The aim of this presentation is to study the way in which these two explorers described the hunting practices of the Tunguso-Manchu populations of the Amur region and used them to give meaning to this new territory. Their descriptions fit longstanding processes of othering of Tunguso-Manchu groups which unfold into the 20^thcentury, and the aim of this presentation is also to understand the impact of these contacts on one of the Tungus groups, the Nanai.  

Nous espérons vous retrouver nombreux!

Dmitriy Oparin (dimaoparin@hotmail.com), Virginie Vaté (virginie.vate-klein@cnrs.fr).

--------------

Siberian Studies Seminar / Séminaire d’études sibériennes 2024-2025 Un mercredi par mois de 14h à 16h Campus Condorcet - 14 cours des Humanités, 93322 Aubervilliers Bâtiment de recherche nord, salle 5.001 Métro Front Populaire (Ligne 12) ou RER B La Plaine – Stade de France

Vous munir d’une pièce d’identité pour obtenir un badge au comptoir, au rez-de-chaussée du bâtiment Nord, afin de pouvoir accéder aux étages, en cas de difficultés, appeler + 33 6 51 10 30 04 

 Pour y assister en ligne : https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84470929391?pwd=6OOTRYiybqsJm0NHLidsZ8Hxk9jmwA.1