ETHNOGRAPHY OF ARCTIC EURASIA 207 



as it is, for example, with the Chukchi shamans. The spirits spoke an 

 unknown language, and in order to explain to us their speeches a 

 spirit translator also appeared who knew the demonic as well as the 

 Russian language. 



Having no shamans of their own, the Russians treat the shamans 

 of their native neighbors with special reverence, whether Lapp, 

 Samoyed, Ostyak, Chukchi, or Yakut. In northeastern Siberia I 

 used to meet priests who at one and the same time subjected the 

 native shamans to persecution and, in the case of illness, besought 

 them for the help of their demonic art. 



Social Organization 



In regard to social culture the polar Russians are distinguished 

 by the same evidence of two contributing elements and by the same 

 uniformity throughout its whole expanse. All social organization is 

 extremely backward, in fact has not emerged from eighteenth-century 

 conditions. The officials sent from the south bring with them the 

 nineteenth-century pre-reform epoch of Gogol. But toward the 

 east we find, together with eighteenth-century customs, those of the 

 seventeenth century and the primitive conditions of the epoch when 

 the country was first peopled. In the courts very effective though 

 not severe tortures are still used. In regions of sparse population, 

 when, under the former regime, the governor unexpectedly passed by, 

 Russian women and girls fled into the tundra the same as the natives. 



Russian marriage customs have fused with the native customs. 

 On the lower Kolyma almost all Russian families are tied by the 

 chains of group marriage with the neighboring reindeer Chukchis. 

 Woman's purity is not appreciated and, in fact, may be said not to 

 exist at all in the whole extent of the Russian Arctic. 



Conclusion 



Such, briefly, are the new ethnographical problems in the polar 

 regions both regarding polar culture in general and regarding the 

 conditions of life in polar Eurasia. 



Only an attentive study of the enormous material scattered 

 throughout the extensive polar regions, studied according to a general 

 plan systematically worked out by the comparative method, can 

 give scientific answers to the most important questions, many of 

 which have only just been raised. 



