Rituals of Gender Identity: Markers of Siberian Khanty Ethnicity, Status, and Belief

Abstract

Siberian Khanty (Ostiak) menstrual taboos and related rituals of birth, naming, and marriage are analyzed, in order to explore cross‐cultural theories of menstrual restriction, gender stratification, and female conservatism. Emphasis is placed on Mary Douglas's idea that conflicting norms of male dominance and female independence can encourage pollution beliefs. The importance of ancestresses, female shamans, and postmenopausal women in Khanty ritual indicates that there is no male monopoly on concepts of culture, power, the sacred and the “public.” Khanty ideas about women, changing with Russian influence, are discussed in terms of slowly shifting definitions of “self and ethnicity. Data result from 13 months in the Soviet Union, including a summer ethnographic expedition to the Northern Ob River . [symbolic anthropology, pollution beliefs, gender stratification, ethnicity, Siberian Khanty (Ostiak)]