“Guileless Indigenes and Hidden Passion. Descriptions of Ob-Ugrians and Samoyeds through the Centuries”

This monograph is aimed for discussing the views of the character
of the Khanty, Mansi and Nenets by authors of different periods.
Changes of general ideas about the inhabitants of the Arctic has had
a remarkable, albeit often concealed, roie in the development of the
research on northern peoples. The author examines the image of
northern peoples beginning from ancient Greek and Roman accounts
of peoples, medieval sources, modern travel journals and ends up
with the analyses of contemporary scholarly writings. The book is an
attempt to explore the general background of ideas and the scientific
methodology that frames changes in this knowledge about the peoples
of the North. The theoretical framework of this monograph is related
to the dialogue between modern theories of identity and the historical
modes of description. Conceptualisation of northern peoples have
been affected by period-specific dominant modes of thinking about
culture and appropriate ways to present ones viewpoints.
Art Leete is the Professor of Ethnology at the University of Tartu.
He has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork among the Khanty,
Mansi, Nenets and Komi people in Siberia and Russian North since the
early 1990S. He has studied different aspects of historical-ethnographic
descriptions of the Arctic and the twentieth centurys social, political
and religious change among the northern peoples.

FF Communications 306