The Finno-Ugric battle for language and culture quietly continues
Bill Bonde ('Soli Deo Gloria')
IF YOU want to embarrass a Finn, and infuriate a Russian, raise your
vodka glass to “Suuri Suomi—Uraliin asti!”. That means “Greater
Finland—to the Urals and beyond”. It sounds fanciful, even potty. But it
used to be real geopolitics. In the dying days of the Tsarist empire, a
swathe of Russia bubbled with nationalist agitation among minorities,
many with ethnic ties to Finland.
The Finns themselves got away for good. Their ethnic kinsfolk—the Komi,
Mari, Udmurts and the like—managed it only briefly. In 1917-18 there was
a big country in the middle of Russia called Idel-Ural (literally,
“Volga-Ural”) which united the Finno-Ugric (the “Ugric” because of
distant cousinship with Hungary) and Turkic peoples in those areas. When
it was crushed by the Bolsheviks in late 1918, its refugee foreign
minister, Sadrí Maqsudí Arsal, got a warm welcome first in Finland and
then Estonia.
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In Russian nightmares at least, that spectre now looms again. According
to Vladislav Surkov, an adviser to Vladimir Putin, there is a
“premeditated system of operations” by Finland, Estonia and the European
Union to fan discontent. The more nationalist papers have steamy stories
of westerners plotting Russia's destruction. After Mr Putin said
recently that foreign-financed groups should be subject to strict
scrutiny by the Russian security agencies, a website with close ties to
officialdom, news12.ru, said that pro-Mari pressure groups would now be
investigated further (the site also accused “Estonian nationalists” of
stoking riots in Paris).
Yet the Finno-Ugric axis in world politics seems more like a curiosity
than a conspiracy. Although the Finns and Estonians are close (their
languages are as similar as Italian and Spanish), ties with Hungary are
mainly sentimental. Common linguistic roots are extremely distant. A
Finno-Ugric joke tells of migrating tribal forebears finding a signpost
on the steppe reading: “To civilisation”. Those that could not read it
went north and became Finns. Those that could went to central Europe and
became Hungarians. (Finns tell the story the other way round.)
Today the connection looks flimsy. Philologists' labours have identified
some 200 words with common roots in all three main Finno-Ugric tongues.
Fully 55 of these concern fishing, and a further 15 are about reindeer;
only three are about commerce. An Estonian philologist, Mall Hellam,
came up with just one mutually comprehensible sentence: “the living fish
swims in water.”*
Hungary's involvement in the Finno-Ugric movement is the most low-key.
The country's left-of-centre government has good relations with Russia,
and no desire to get involved in what it sees as the squabbles of its
Russophobic northern cousins. But the hard-pressed Finno-Ugric
minorities in central Russian regions like Mari-El, Komi and Udmurtia
are more concerned. To them, Estonia, with its regained statehood, is a
miracle, and Finland an enviable superpower. For the minority
Finno-Ugric languages of Russia are dying, spoken mainly by old people
in the countryside and a handful of intellectuals. There are few books,
newspapers, radio or TV programmes and little mother-tongue education.
It is Russian that signifies culture and civilisation; the local lingo,
for many, is useless peasant gobbledegook.
That would have been Estonia's fate too, had the Soviet Union not
collapsed in 1991. Estonians were well on the way to becoming a minority
in their own country thanks to the migration of Russian-speakers from
elsewhere in the empire; the use of Russian in education was growing
fast.
For ardent Finno-Ugric activists, Russian linguistic chauvinism is part
of something worse. An appeal from the Foundation for the Salvation of
the Erzya Language described the position of its people, who mainly live
in the central Russian republic of Mordovia, as “critical and even
hopeless” because of the Russocentrism of the education system and
public broadcasting. “Imperial aggression” had led to a sharp drop in
the ethnic population, it said, accusing the local and federal
authorities of “genocide”.
Strong stuff—but it is true that many of Russia's 100-odd minority
tongues are dying out. Shor, for example, a language in southern Russia
with Turkic and Finnic roots, is spoken by only 10,000 people, mainly
elderly. A book of poems by Gennady Kostochakov, one of a handful of
Shor academic specialists, is entitled “I am the last Shor poet”. Even
that is enviable by some standards. The Votian language, a close
relative of Estonian, is spoken by just 20 people in a couple of
villages in north-western Russia.
Speaking of tongues
Sitting in a Hungarian restaurant in bustling Tallinn, Andres Heinapuu,
a top Estonian Finno-Ugrist (who learnt Votian in five days), gives a
depressing description of apathetic, hostile or ignorant officialdom in
the Russian provinces. Only in Mari-El did the authorities make an
effort to create bilingualism in the early post-Soviet years, and now
even that has gone into reverse. The republic's rulers have purged
ethnic Mari officials and sharply cut Mari-language media and education.
Mari activists have suffered beatings, and one suspicious death.
Worse, the Finno-Ugric minorities are not as robust as their Turkic
counterparts, Mr Heinapuu says. “The Finno-Ugric character is
different—we are used to running away”. Whereas the Turkic minorities'
identity in places such as Tatarstan is bolstered by Islam, the
Finno-Ugrics' tradition—and sometimes current practice—is pagan. Mari-El
and Udmurtia are probably the only places in Europe where shamanism
(nature-worship) is still an authentic, organised religion, with
weddings celebrated in sacred groves.
So what to do? Barring a collapse of the Russian state, any idea of
Estonian-style independence seems hopeless: in every one of the
Finno-Ugric bits of Russia, the Indo-Europeans are a majority. In
Mordovia, for example, the Erzyas and their ethnic cousins, the Mokshas,
together make up less than a third of the population.
Reuters A “suur kala” (big fish) in any language
So the main task is survival. Mr Heinapuu and his colleagues try to
bolster their kinsfolk's language and culture and highlight Russian
chauvinism. The first is difficult. In the two-room world headquarters
of the Finno-Ugric movement in Tallinn, Mr Heinapuu proudly shows a
shelf of newly published poetry in Mari and other languages. It is a
drop in the ocean. “What we really need is the ‘Da Vinci Code’ in
Udmurt,” a colleague ruefully complains.
A more promising idea is to bring students from the Finno-Ugric bits of
Russia to study in Estonia. That initiative, the Kindred Peoples'
Programme, began in 1999. It was meant to create expertise, expose
students to western society, and boost morale.
It hasn't worked out like that, though. Half the 100-odd students
decided to stay. “These were the first towns they had ever lived in.
They adapted too well, and those that went back had problems with
Russian life,” says Mr Heinapuu. Now the focus has shifted to graduate
education. And the money involved in the student programme is tiny: just
3m Estonian kroons ($230,000). Rich Finland gives only a bit more,
Hungary almost nothing.
That leaves the one area where the Finno-Ugric movement can claim some
success: propaganda initiatives by politicians and activists. In May
this year the European Parliament voted to condemn the authorities in
Mari-El.
That got the Russian authorities riled. So did an academic conference in
August held in the Mari capital, Yoshkar-Ola. The president of Mari-El,
a bombastic Kremlin loyalist, Leonid Markelov, was confronted, seemingly
for the first time, with the fact that some outsiders—including
ambassadors and politicians from the Finno-Ugric countries, plus a bunch
of academics—found his rural subjects' odd customs and strange speech
rather interesting.
The conference also highlighted the launch of a new Mari-language radio
station, which—crucially—will include not just the folk-music and poetry
beloved by cultural conservationists, but also modern idioms such as rap
music in Mari.
It is possible to reverse language decline. Norway, for example, has
poured money into supporting the culture and language of its northern
Sami peoples. There is no sign of that in Russia, where the authorities
approach minority languages with neglect and suspicion. When Tatarstan,
the core of the old Idel-Ural, tried to reintroduce the Latin alphabet
in which the local Turkic language is most logically written, this was
banned by the Kremlin.
It is hard to match the modest protests by a loose movement consisting
mainly of concerned philologists and ethnographers with the allergic
reaction they prompt. The Finno-Ugrists' aim is to halt their kinsfolk's
extinction, not to break up Russia. Yet viewed through the lens of
Russia's uneasy relationship with its imperial history, the hostile
reaction is logical. The collapse of the Soviet Union—called a
“catastrophe” by Mr Putin—is still echoing today. In most of the former
empire, Russian language and culture are still in headlong retreat. In
the Caucasus, Azerbaijan has succeeded where Tatarstan failed, in
dropping the cyrillic alphabet. In Georgia, English is overtaking
Russian as the second language of the elite.
The involvement of Estonia adds extra aggravation. It is much disliked
by Russians for its economic success and strongly anti-Soviet take on
history, and for encouraging local Russians stranded by the Soviet
collapse to learn Estonian and apply for citizenship. To Mr Heinapuu and
his pals, the Russian ire they arouse is a backhanded compliment. But it
is yet more bad news for the people they are trying to help.
*Elav kala ujub vee all (Estonian). Elävä kala ui veden alla (Finnish).
Eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt (Hungarian).
Dilbert Firestorm
non-russian culture & language, but slowly. it does appear that the
russians accelerated the russification process.
pretty exenophobic if you ask me.
Alistair Gale
They don't like punk rock?
--
alistair
Dilbert Firestorm
no, only if its in russian :)
Blinky the Shark
> IF YOU want to embarrass a Finn, and infuriate a Russian, raise your
> vodka glass to “Suuri Suomi—Uraliin asti!”.
Hey, how'd they get my mantra?!
--
Blinky
Killfiling all posts from Google Groups
Details: http://blinkynet.net/comp/uip5.html
John Hatpin
>Bill Bonde ('Soli Deo Gloria') wrote:
>
>> IF YOU want to embarrass a Finn, and infuriate a Russian, raise your
>> vodka glass to “Suuri Suomi—Uraliin asti!”.
>
>Hey, how'd they get my mantra?!
A combination of your year of birth and your gender, although they
change it from time to time, so they'd probably want to know when the
guy/gal who gave you your mantra did their training, 'cos that's when
they'd have got the table of mantras they use.
I've confirmed that my mantra matches the table I found on the
internet.
You *were* talking about TM, right?
--
John Hatpin
Email (ROT-13): wsubcxva NG tznvy.pbz
Blinky the Shark
TM, Buddhism, Hinduism...whatever works for you. :)
John Hatpin
>John Hatpin wrote:
>
>> Blinky the Shark wrote:
>>
>>>Bill Bonde ('Soli Deo Gloria') wrote:
>>>
>>>> IF YOU want to embarrass a Finn, and infuriate a Russian, raise your
>>>> vodka glass to “Suuri Suomi—Uraliin asti!”.
>>>
>>>Hey, how'd they get my mantra?!
>>
>> A combination of your year of birth and your gender, although they
>> change it from time to time, so they'd probably want to know when the
>> guy/gal who gave you your mantra did their training, 'cos that's when
>> they'd have got the table of mantras they use.
>>
>> I've confirmed that my mantra matches the table I found on the
>> internet.
>>
>> You *were* talking about TM, right?
>
>TM, Buddhism, Hinduism...whatever works for you. :)
Ah, the TM mantra thing is a real bit of confidence trickstery. They
tell you that they've selected your mantra on your individual needs
and wishes and personal profile, and that you must never share it with
anyone, because that would destroy its individual power.
In fact, it's a nonsense, two-syllable word (as I say, entirely based
on your gender and year of birth from a table), and they mostly sound
pretty much alike anyway.
TM is mostly rip-off, but there is some powerful stuff in there. I
just wish there were more in the way of scientific examination of
meditation practices, their components and effects.
Meditation as taught by the TM guys is very easy to do, works almost
like a switch, and has a big effect on your feelings and thoughts.
Unfortunately, not all of that effect is beneficial.
Dover Beach
news:3kd5r1dnllrofk65b...@4ax.com:
>
> Meditation as taught by the TM guys is very easy to do, works almost
> like a switch, and has a big effect on your feelings and thoughts.
> Unfortunately, not all of that effect is beneficial.
Really? Could you say some more about that? I've never heard anyone say
that before. I'm familiar with Herbert Benson's _Relaxation Response_
books, which try to demystify meditation and make it simple for the
beginner to learn. He seems to think the benefits are all positive. I
was going to make (yet another) real effort to meditate every day
starting after the holidays, but now I'm wondering what the negative
effects might be.
--
Dover
John Hatpin
A few years ago, I returned to TM(TM) after a long hiatus, and
experienced negative effects from my first meditation.
I had great difficulty trying to relax during the meditation, and had
to terminate it early because I was becoming quite agitated. The
normal twitches, etc that I'd known before and accepted were, this
time, full-body jerks, and the whole experience was less than
pleasant. I gave up after perhaps 10 minutes of the 20-minute period
TM prescribes.
For a few days after, I found myself unusually irritable and angry,
with no particular cause. It settled down, but wasn't nice while it
was going on.
Through the internet, I contacted a TM support group for advice, and
several people there, including someone who used to be a TM
facilitator, advised me to give up the practice completely.
Specifically, the "de-stressing" that I'd been experiencing - taught
by the TM people as a natural and harmless side-effect of meditation -
had, apparently, been warned about previously.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said that the bodily jerks we experience during
meditation are the inner stresses being expunged from our minds,
manifesting themselves as physical symptoms. He likened it to bubbles
rising in a body of water; once the bubbles pop on the surface,
they're gone forever and the water becomes calm.
It's an enduring image, and very nice, but there seems to be a large
amount of doubt about its accuracy. In fact, I was horrified at some
of the tales people privately told me about TM practices, including
the negative effects of their no-frills methods of meditation. I'm
prepared to accept that the tales were perhaps fabrications, or even
just examples of bad meditation practices, but it was enough for me to
give up TM.
The forum seemed pretty much evenly divided between the pros and the
antis. The pros suggested going back to my facilitator to have my
meditation "checked" (basically, they talk you through the initial and
final stages); the antis - including the ex-TM facilitator - were
unequivocally against the whole TM movement, and advised me to stop
completely.
BTW, as a result of that exchange, I was contacted by a 17-year-old
woman who'd been brought up in, and was still living in, a TM retreat
set up in Skelmersdale in the North-West of England. Both her parents
were ardent TMers. She was going through hell in her life because of
this, and for a time I tried my best to provide her with support, but
after a few weeks the emails stopped abruptly. I suspect that she'd
finally had enough and walked out on the group, something she'd
planned for a long time - I hope that's true, and that she found a
better life.
This post may give a flavour of why I'm not satisfied that the TM
movement and its meditation techniques are as beneficial as claimed.
But, I have to say that the meditation methods they teach are simple
and extremely powerful. For a couple of years, they gave me a lot of
help and peace and energy and positivism. FWIW, I'd say that, if you
don't experience negative side-effects, the TM method is probably
worth using. It's just that no-one knows how it works, and sadly
there's pretty much no research into it.
The negative symptoms I experienced, BTW, passed off within a few
days, and were nothing more than an unpleasant state of mind.
However, I don't plan to practice TM again.
Sorry for the long post.
Dover Beach
Thanks for the background and description. My sister was really into
meditation for awhile, but she came to it from studying Theraveda
Buddhism (she even went to Nepal, among other places, to learn
technique). So that's a whole different thing from TM. I had no idea
there was so much controversy within TM.
--
Dover
John Hatpin
>John Hatpin <no...@nowhere.invalid> wrote in
>news:9jm6r19t3o1u5pl7q...@4ax.com:
[lots of stuff on negative experiences of TM]
>Thanks for the background and description. My sister was really into
>meditation for awhile, but she came to it from studying Theraveda
>Buddhism (she even went to Nepal, among other places, to learn
>technique). So that's a whole different thing from TM. I had no idea
>there was so much controversy within TM.
There seem to be many different ways of achieving a meditative state.
Some are visual - looking at a burning candle, or contemplating a
figure of Buddha, and so on; some are auditory, in which people chant
mantras together, the collective sound inducing the required state in
the people present.
With TM, a simple mantra is repeated silently, the eyes are closed,
and any thoughts are put aside without consideration. By that I mean,
if you suddenly find yourself worrying about the electricity bill, you
don't condemn the worry, you don't shut it out, you just decide for
yourself that now is not the time to think about it and continue the
meditation. You shouldn't be thinking about anything other than the
sound, the shape, the feeling of the mantra.
You're supposed to do this twice daily, for 20 minutes each time, once
in the morning when you're fully awake and once in the evening, at
least an hour before going to bed. You sit upright in a chair,
relaxed, with your arms at rest on your uncrossed legs. A quiet place
is best, but experienced TMers claim that they can do their meditation
anywhere: a busy airport, for example. I never tried doing it in
anything but a quiet, solitary environment. And it's important that
you're not interrupted during the meditation, so tell family members
to leave you alone.
An interesting problem with the technique is that you lose all sense
of time, so you're best having a clock within your field of view and
opening your eyes from time to time. Don't obsess about it, just be
aware that 20 minutes can seem like 20 seconds.
At the end of the meditation, give yourself five minutes to come back
to normality. Open your eyes, allow the thoughts back in, and again
become aware of your surroundings and situation.
There's more to it than that, but that's the kernel of the practice.
I found that, pretty much from the start, I could achieve a very deep
and lasting sense of well-being. The meditation itself (bear in mind
I'm excluding the problems I had later on) was extremely pleasant and
easy. Far, far easier than other types of meditation I'd tried
before.
There's a feeling of descent; a sense of returning to your real state,
during which you cast off conscious thought and simply exist. It's
quite a beautiful experience. After the meditation, I found myself
feeling more energetic, calm and positive, to quite a remarkable
degree that affected my whole life.
It's about time that someone funded research into meditation on a
scientific basis, to find out what happens to the brain and how best
it can be done. It's an astonishingly powerful phenomenon. I wish I
didn't have the doubts I now have about the TM method.