Abstract
In this chapter, the author discusses her fieldwork in Western Pamir between the 1950s and the 1970s, examining the issues she encountered in collecting and processing unknown materials reflecting the worldview of various ethnic groups, particularly of the Yazghulami community. The methodology employed involves living in the local community, recording not only language data but also its ethnographic and cultural background, so that language material both illuminates and is illuminated by its anthropological context. To implement this approach, a considerable task consists in collaborating with language consultants to collect and analyze data on religious beliefs, rituals and customs, and their reflection in language; for this, researchers require thorough preparation, including knowledge of cultural anthropology and ethnology. The author highlights key findings resulting from this methodology, including interrelations within the traditional Pamir extended family, as well as some local particularities in kinship terminology and principles of naming, including forms of address and the naming of children. She also analyzes Pamir people’s worldview incorporating successive layers of spiritual culture: rituals and ceremonies; stories and popular beliefs about supernatural beings and local superstitions; and more traditional folkloric texts that explain the origin of many images and correlated words and phraseology.
Translated from Russian by L.R. Dodykhudoeva.
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Notes
- 1.
Some similarities in the treatment of Iranian kinship in this area can be seen in the Dravidian kinship system (Dousset 2011).
- 2.
One characteristic situation was when the story of a woman was interrupted by the arrival of a teacher. He told her: “All this is nonsense!” and turned to the author: “Why are you writing down stupid women’s talk?” Another such situation arose when, during the publication of the legend about dragons, an editor asked the author to replace the word “mullah” with the word “magician”, to give the legend an image of a magic fairy tale, and thus avoid problems with the censor.
- 3.
In the Yazghulami language, an ancient category of gender is transformed based on the principle of semantic classes: the masculine gender contains names of male humans and inanimate things, while the feminine gender contains names of female humans and all animals, independently of their sex; the same rule mostly works for references to male and female supernatural creatures.
- 4.
With regard to the preservation by Scythians of old beliefs in diws, their attitude to them as deities, and the rejection of Zoroastrianism, see (Abaev 1990: 42–43). Partially this “Scythian” attitude to the diw is reflected in the understanding of the image of diw described in the text of “Igor’s tale” (Russian “Slovo o polku Igoreve” (Edelman 2005: 539), where there is also information on Central Asian beliefs in diws).
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Edelman, J.I. (2021). Documenting the Vocabulary of Worldview and Systems of Belief (from the Experience of Fieldwork in Western Pamir). In: Agranat, T.B., Dodykhudoeva, L.R. (eds) Strategies for Knowledge Elicitation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79341-8_11
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