VOLUME I: Society and Creativity (358 pp., ill.)
East of the Kama River, in Bashkortostan, the Eastern Udmurts stand apart from other Udmurt communities: they have historically resisted both Christianisation and Islamisation, preserving a deeply rooted animist religion and a resilient language. Despite their exceptional cultural continuity, these communities have remained little known outside the Russian-language scholarly tradition.
This first volume offers a richly illustrated portrait of Eastern Udmurt society and cultural expression, drawing on collaborative fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2024 by a team from the University of Tartu and Udmurt scholars Nikolai Anisimov, Ranus Sadikov, Tatiana Vladykina, and Irina Pchelovodova. The chapters cover historical change and schooling, the contemporary language situation, literature and poetry, folklore and singing traditions, festivities, mythology, and present-day healing practices. The volume closes by reflecting on fieldwork as a collective experience and on film as both research method and ethnographic record.
5 maps, 91 figures, mostly in colour.
VOLUME II: Animist Rituals (504 pp., ill.)
The second volume turns to the living sacrificial ritual tradition of the Eastern Udmurts — from major collective ceremonies where prayers are addressed to the sky god Inmar, to family rites that bind households, ancestors, and place. Drawing on the long-term fieldwork, the chapters follow the annual cycle of rituals, examine sacred sites and the organisation of ritual groups, and trace Soviet-era disruptions alongside the revitalisation that has gathered pace since the 1990s. Special attention is given to sacrificial priests (vös’as’), whose portraits give a face and a name to ritual knowledge, and to ritual speech: prayers and petitionary incantations (kuris’kon), their structure, and their gradual shift from oral performance toward written forms. The volume shows how ritual knowledge is transmitted across generations and how a living tradition persists through both disruption and renewal.
2 maps, 178 figures, mostly in colour.
