Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2022 number

The work objective is to characterize the image of the ferret in the Buryat traditional culture. Its novelty is determined by the lack of research on this topic in Russian ethnography. The study is based on written and field sources and carried out with a structural-semiotic and comparative methods. The paper’s first section provides a general description of the ferret image in the Buryat traditional culture. It shows this animal’s place in the folk zooclassification, reveals its utilitarian use. Lexical data from languages of Buryat and northern Inner Asia peoples indicate the general Mongolian origin of the Buryat names of the ferret. The article pays attention to the edibility criterion of this animal; notes that the Buryat vocabulary and folklore reflect the ferret’s main biological characteristics. The work’s second section examines the ferret image in the Buryat folklore and rituals. There is an interchangeability of the images of the ferret and Siberian weasel in the Buryat epic. The ferret is associated with the motif of werewolf, which manifests itself in the plot of the cultural hero’s successive reincarnation into different representatives of the marten family. In general, a predominantly negative connotation of this predatory animal is revealed in the Buryat vocabulary and folklore. This animal’s positive connotation, its sacralization can be traced in the Buryat traditional shamanic rituals. Ferret fetishes are credited with a function of a shaman’s assistant spirit, a guide to other worlds. In the Buryat family ritual they act as a talisman for family members, primarily for children, they are also endowed with a therapeutic function. The author concludes that the ferret image has an ambiguous characteristics in the traditional Buryat culture.