E-mail: dobzhanskaya@list.ru Tel.: +7 (4112) 34-44-60
4, Ordzhonikidze str., Yakutsk, 677000, Russian Federation
DSc in Arts, Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Studies and Art; Professor, Department of Art History, Arctic State Institute of Culture and Arts
n this article, the types of acoustic behavior conditioned by gender roles are considered for the first time, based on the example of Nganasan culture. The juxtaposition of gendered male roles (as a hunter and breadwinner) and female ones (as homemaker and mistress of the house) is vividly embodied in sound images. Men’s clothing does not contain resonant metal (such as little bells): since men are hunters, sounds would betray their presence to animals. Women’s clothing, in contrast, is abundantly adorned with metal parts for functional, ritual and aesthetic purposes.
The author examines in detail the metal pendants on women’s clothing. As noise-making objects, they represent various types of sonic instruments from the class of idiophones called “self-sounding” (that includes colliding plates and tubes of various shapes, large and small bells). Among these are: bells with tongues on festive clothes (under ornamented vertical stripes of hensu); metal ornaments in the form of crescents suspended on the chest in a vertical row; tube-pendants on clothes; cone-shaped tubes decorating women’s clothing, and put on children’s clothes as a protective charm; and rings with tubes strung on them on a women’s jumpsuit.
The sounding pendants that jangle on a female reindeer’s harness contain several items of special
design, with rings threaded into holes and suspended noise-makers that sound loudly when the team moves. On festive clothes and harnesses, the number of sounding pendants is significantly greater than on everyday ones. Metal pendants are an obligatory part of women’s clothing whose type and abundance reflects a woman’s social status and reflects the wealth of the family. The sound of metal noise-making objects also serves as a talisman that performs a protective function.
The results of this article are important for studying the soundscape of the Arctic from the point of view of interdisciplinary research.
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Dobzhanskaya O. E. (2023) Muzhskoe i zhenskoe v zvuchashchem landshafte Arktiki: komplekty podvesok na traditsionnoi odezhde nganasan [Male and Female in the Soundscape of the Arctic: Pendants on Traditional Nganasan Clothing]. Traditsionnaya kul’tura. 2023. Vol. 24. No. 1. Pp. 21–30. In Russian.