Extremely pleasant and informative book on lost land of Tuva
When I was a kid in the 1950s I collected stamps and had quite a few from a mysterious litExtremely pleasant and informative book on lost land of Tuva
When I was a kid in the 1950s I collected stamps and had quite a few from a mysterious little land called "Tannu Tuva". It always intrigued me because though I could find it on the old globe we had at home (made before the USSR swallowed the unfortunate Tuvans in 1944)I never heard the slightest news from there, nor did I ever hear of anyone going or coming from that little red country sandwiched between the yellow Soviet Union and green Mongolia. Time passed. A lot of time. Fast forward in fact, forty years. One day I saw a new book advertised--TUVA OR BUST. I could scarcely believe that somebody else in America remembered that hapless little country that once issued diamond and triangle stamps with yaks, camels, archers, and horsemen on them. Yet, they had it at our local bookstore. I bought it and read it as soon as I got home. What a treat ! I had never heard of Richard Feynman, not being a physics aficionado, but he turned out to be a great character. I enjoyed reading about his years-long efforts with Ralph Leighton to get to Tuva. They went through all kinds of trouble and interesting side voyages. For me, reading the book was only a beginning. I listened to the plastic disc of Tuvan throat singing that came with the book, and subsequently bought tapes and attended Tuvan concerts by the group Huun Huur Tu in Boston. I also became a "Friend of Tuva". You can find their website on the net. I drove around with my 'Tuva or Bust' bumper sticker for many years and had a few more interesting encounters because of that. All of this stemmed from reading this delightful book on a faraway, unknown country and two people's adventures trying to get there. A very pleasurable experience....more
one of the few translated works of Soviet anthropology
For centuries, Tuva languished unknown to the outside world. It became an independent country foone of the few translated works of Soviet anthropology
For centuries, Tuva languished unknown to the outside world. It became an independent country for about 25 years, until the Soviet Union swallowed it up in 1944. Before that, as a remote part of the Manchu or Mongol Empires, it had hardly impinged on the world's consciousness. Since 1991, it has been a (remote) part of Russia. If you want to read about Tuva in English, you really have a choice of four books. First, Ralph Leighton's "Tuva or Bust", second, Otto Manchen-Helfen's account of his trip in 1929, third, Theodore Levin's book on Tuva and its music, "Where Rivers and Mountains Sing", and fourth, the book under review here, NOMADS OF SOUTH SIBERIA, written in Russian in 1972 and published in English eight years later as part of a well-respected Cambridge University anthropology series. Of the four, this one is the most difficult to read because of two reasons. First, because it is an extremely detailed work of economic anthropology full of local terms, arcane details on herding, crafts, tools, hunting, and seasonal migrations, to name just a few topics. It is a painstakingly researched essay written with skill and patience. The second reason it is difficult is that the life of a Soviet anthropologist was frought with pitfalls. You couldn't say certain things; on the other hand you HAD to say certain other things. Therefore, you have to read between the lines to some extent.
I have given the book four stars because of the impressive research and assembly of data, not for readability. Vainshtein ties in his work to work among similar groups in Siberia and Central Asia (Nenets, Evenk, Kirghiz, Kazakh, Altaians, Oirot, Kalmyk, Mongols of various kinds). He tries to develop some ideas about origins of reindeer herding, about nomad life in general, nomads' relation to agriculture and craft production. It's a very thoughtful book, but definitely only for experts. Though he quotes Marx, Engels, and Lenin, he does not evince the slightest knowledge of any Western anthropologist writing on any topic. I believe such references would have been dangerous, if not for his life, at least for his career. Or maybe the books were unavailable to him. Though Vainshtein lived among the Tuvans, knew their language, and had many informants, Tuvans do not come through as people at all--they have almost no voice. It is all about their "system of production", down to whips, number of sheep and goats, saddles, fish traps, summer encampments, and collection of lily bulbs. A Soviet framework is placed on his data---questions about whether nomads can be considered `feudal' or not, whether exploitation existed, whether capitalism had begun or not, stem from this framework. Such Soviet phrases as "higher cultural level" may turn you off. Are the peoples of the world arranged along some Darwinian ladder ? This is really 19th century sociology.
What is most indicative of the political reality behind this narrowly-excellent work is that although Vainshtein spent at least 20 years getting to know the Tuvans, his book deals exclusively with the times before Tuva became part of the Soviet Union. He constantly refers to a 1931 census and conditions around the turn of the 20th century. He does not talk about his own impressions or experiences at all because he is an honest man. If he reported on what he saw in Tuva in the Fifties and Sixties, and it did not mirror the official Soviet line (Progress), he could have jeopardized his career. If he didn't tell the truth he would have lost his credibility. On the very last page (in a chapter called "Social Relations" that did not appear in the Russian edition), he states that everything he writes about has become "part of history" because Tuva has been transformed. He quotes that well-known anthropologist, V.I Lenin, once more, and then says that "an extremely successful transition from nomadic to settled forms of life" has taken place. It would be interesting to know how true this is. That a transformation took place is without doubt, the whole world has changed immensely---its success may be open to question. I wish we could read a later work by Vainshtein, a memoir, an extension of the present work, a revision. Does it exist ? I have no idea. This work is a guarded attempt to share a huge wealth of data gathered over many years....more
Some parents take a lot of photos of their kids. But some people have---in their later years---just a handful of Rare Glimpse of Throat Singer Country
Some parents take a lot of photos of their kids. But some people have---in their later years---just a handful of faded photos of odd moments, maybe totally unrepresentative of their lives, but nevertheless the only preserved picture of themselves way back when. Tuva is a country like that. Hardly anyone outside Russia ever wrote about it, there are only a few extant pictures, few foreigners ever even saw it in its days of independence (1921-1944) With considerable difficulty, and only because he was teaching ethnology and sociology at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow at the time, the author managed to get to Tuva and become the only Westerner to write a book about that small, "independent" republic before the end of Communism. Tuva, north of Mongolia but south of the Sayan Mountains of Siberia, issued a great series of postage stamps back in the 1930s. The Ethnographics Press and the Friends of Tuva re-published this book in 1992, illustrated with black and white copies of many of those stamps, and with a forward by the author's wife who still lived in California. They also included Manchen-Helfen's report to the Moscow authorities---quite different from the tone of the book (but then, he liked living !) The book also contains a report, 60 years later, by the Leighton brothers, of their own trip to Tuva.
Good thing Otto Manchen-Helfen had a sense of humor. It probably prevented him from swallowing everything told to him in Moscow and it helped him realize that Russian Communism often resembled nothing more than old Russian Colonialism. Tuva in 1929 still retained most of the culture developed over centuries under Uighur, Kyrgyz, Mongol, Chinese, and Manchu rule. Most people lived as nomads and hunters, following the dictates of lamas and shamans. Roads, railways, and airports remained a distant dream. Urban subtleties remained few on the ground. The Russians had assumed control. Tuva, unfortunately, was anything but independent. It was the second Russian satellite after Mongolia. Russians controlled policy; the Tuvan government imitated Moscow in everything as far as possible. While Mongolia eventually has become an independent country, Tuva with its small population remains a part of Russia. Manchen-Helfen wrote entertainingly, if not entirely accurately, about what he saw. If that remote part of the earth interests you, you cannot fail to read JOURNEY TO TUVA. Where do those throat-singers come from that tour on the "World Music" circuit ? You find out here, though they never get a mention in the book. If you need more, you might also get hold of S. Vainshtein's "Nomads of South Siberia" which is a far more academic work, but tells you somewhat less about what Tuva looked like....more
Before Ralph Leighton published "Tuva or Bust" thirty years ago, the literature on Tuva available in EnglishLinking throat singing to the land of Tuva
Before Ralph Leighton published "Tuva or Bust" thirty years ago, the literature on Tuva available in English was "a bit sparse". If you really persisted you might have turned up Vainshtain's "Nomads of South Siberia" for which the research was done in the 1930s. After Leighton's connection with that far off Russian republic (it "joined" the USSR in 1944), he and his friends got "Journey to Tuva" re-published as well, O. Manchen-Helfen's account of his rare visit to Tannu Tuva between the world wars. And until Theodore Levin brought out this volume, that was it. But starting with a surprise appearance in the Rose Bowl Parade of 1992, Tuvan singers rocketed from total obscurity to world fame. By now, some millions of people around the world have heard their music, even if everyone did not exactly know where Tuva might be. A number of groups have brought throat singing and other styles of Inner Asian music to auditoriums and seminars from California to Crete. Who are these guys? (and a few women too)
That's what this book is about. And it's a very good one. Levin explores the possible origins of Tuvan music, noting the tendency to mimic the sounds of nature that surround herders on the steppes and in the mountains of Tuva, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, and the Altai regions of Siberia. He draws a division between cultures which produce pitch-centered music (most) and timbre-centered music (Tuva). There are detailed sections on how much Tuvan musicians mimic nature or the sounds of animals and how they merge themselves into the sonic feelings of their surroundings. I found discussion of "spiritual landscape" very interesting. Tuvan music is also linked to shamanic practice. Since Tuva re-connected to the outside world in 1992, we've seen the rise of fake shamans, in it for fame and fortune, beguiling New Age groupies no end. Musicians tend to present the music they think audiences want to hear. Only a few resist the temptation to abandon traditional music culture. Yet, can you blame Tuvan musicians, who come from a poor country ravaged by alcoholism? They may feel close to their land and to their heritage, but the demands of music consumers lead them to commercialize their sounds. Music is one of Tuva's only exports. All these topics and more are dealt with in a very readable, interesting style (though some of the discussion of sound mimesis can be heavy). If some people say the book is academic, I would say that that is a positive quality in this case---you can learn a lot and think about many related topics. A great CD accompanies the book.
If you are at all interested in a remote part of the world and its music, if you would like to know more about Tuva, past and present, you need go no further....more
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