Mansi

The 8,500 Mansi (1989 census), formerly called Voguls, live predominantly in the Hanti-Mansi Autonomous Region (Okrug), in the swampy basin of the Ob river. Their language belongs to the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric family. It has little mutual intelligibility with the related Hanti language, farther northeast, and essentially none with Magyar (Hungarian). Most Mansi have Asian features. One of the most distinctive features of Mansi (and Hanti) culture is an elaborate bear funeral ceremony, honoring the slain beast.

The Mansi historical homeland straddled the middle Urals, southwest of their present location on the Konda River. They offered spirited resistance to Russian encroachment during the 1400s, highlighted by prince Asyka's counterattack in 1455. The Russians destroyed the last major Mansi principality, Konda, in 1591. Within one generation, Moscow ignored whatever capitulation treaties had been signed. As settlers poured into the best Mansi agricultural lands, the Mansi were soon reduced to a small hunting and fishing population. By 1750 most were forced to accept the outer trappings of Greek Orthodoxy, while practicing animism in secret. Russian traders reduced people unfamiliar with the notion of money and prices to loan slavery that lasted for generations.

When the Ostiako-Vogul National Okrug District - the present Hanti-Mansi Autonomous Oblast - was created in 1930, the indigenous population was already down to 19 percent of the total population. By 1989, the population had dropped to 1.4 percent, due first to a massive influx of deportees and then to free labor, after discovery of oil during the 1950s. The curse of Arctic oil impacted the natives, who were crudely dispossessed, as well as the fragile ecosystem. Gas torching and oil spills became routine.

Post-Soviet liberalization enabled the Hanti and Mansi to organize Spasenie Ugry (Salvation of Yugria, the land of Ugrians) that gave voice to indigenous and ecological concerns. Thirty-seven percent of the Mansi population (and few young people) spoke Mansi in the early 1990s. A weekly newspaper, Luima Serikos, had a circulation of 240 in 1995. Novels on Mansi topics by Yuvan Sestalov (b. 1937) have many readers in Russia.

Bibliography

Forsyth, James. (1992). A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia's North Asian Colony, 1581 - 1990. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Taagepera, Rein. (1999). The Finno-Ugric Republics and the Russian State. London: Hurst.

—REIN TAAGEPERA

The noun has 2 meanings:

Meaning #1: a member of a nomadic people of the northern Ural mountains
  Synonym: Vogul

Meaning #2: the Ugric language (related to Hungarian) spoken by the Vogul people
  Synonym: Vogul

This article is about the Mansi people. For their language, see Mansi language. For the town in Burma, see Mansi, Burma.

Mansi

Total population
11432 (rising - it was 8,500 in 1989)
Regions with significant populations
Russia
Languages
Russian, Mansi
Religion
Shamanism, Russian Orthodoxy

Mansi (obsolete: Voguls) are an endangered indigenous people living in Khantia-Mansia, an autonomous okrug within Tyumen Oblast in Russia. In Khantia-Mansia, the Khanty and Mansi languages have co-official status with Russian.

The Mansi have been in contact with the Russian state at least since the 16th century when most of Western Siberia was brought under Russian control by Ermak. Due to their higher exposure to Russian and Soviet control, they are generally more assimilated than their Northern neighbours, the Khanty.

In the 1960s, exploitation of the rich oil deposits of Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug began, causing the Soviet Union's largest internal migration wave since the Second World War. This led to a dramatic marginalisation of the Mansi and Khanty who today constitute slightly more than one percent of the district's population. At the same time their homeland has been massively devastated^{[citation needed]} by thirty years of oil extraction.

As for most other Northern indigenous peoples of Russia, the Soviet state ordered the creation of a "national literature" for the Mansi people which consisted mostly of works hailing the enlightenment and progress brought to the Mansi by Lenin's revolution. The most prominent Mansi representative of this genre was the writer Yuvan Shestalov, who after the breakup of the Soviet Union converted to shamanism. Since then he claims that the Mansi are in fact the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, a claim hardly shared by anyone else.

Together with the Khanty people, the Mansi are politically represented by the Association to Save Yugra, an organisation founded during the Perestroika of the late 1980s. This organisation was among the first regional indigenous associations in Russia.

Mansi population according to 2002 census [1]

	Total	Men	Women
Total	11,432	5,167	6,265
Tyumen Oblast	10,561	4,786	5,775
*Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug	9,894	4,510	5,384
Sverdlovsk Oblast	259	130	129
Komi Republic	11	8	3

The Mansi language is of the Ugrian branch of the Finno-Ugric family of languages.

External links

• The Mansis
• Dr Gabor Szekely's 1st visit to the Mansis
• Dr Gabor Szekely's 2nd visit to the Mansis

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