ALTAY IN VOLODYMYR HZHYTSKYI’S TRAVELOGUE: RELIGIOUS WORLDVIEWS AND SHAMANIC PRACTICES
Keywords:
Volodymyr Hzhytskyi, Altai, shamanism, cosmology, religious worldview, travelogue, contact zone, anthropology of religion, postcolonial discourseAbstract
This article explores Volodymyr Hzhytskyi’s 1928 travelogue “Altai” as both a literary text and a valuable ethnographic source for the study of indigenous religious worldviews in Central Asia. The author examines how the narrative conveys cosmological representations of the Altai peoples, including the figures of Ulgen and Erlik, the cult of household spirits, the sacralized space of the yurt, and ritual practices such as shamanic ritual. Attention is drawn to the author’s position as a Ukrainian intellectual writing within the Soviet colonial discourse of the 1920s, while simultaneously demonstrating an empathetic engagement with non-European religious traditions rather than reducing them to ethnographic “exoticism”. The article applies the concepts of Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone” and James Clifford’s “witness-observer” to show how Volodymyr Hzhytskyi’s narrative becomes a space of intercultural encounter and translation, where literary form functions as a medium of anthropological knowledge. The stylistic and rhetorical strategies of Volodymyr Hzhytskyi are analyzed as instruments for representing the dynamics of shamanic rituals and cosmological imagination. In conclusion, the article argues that “Altai” should be considered not only as a work of Ukrainian travel writing but also as an important document in the history of the anthropology of religion. It provides rare evidence of shamanic practices recorded in Ukrainian literature of the interwar period and demonstrates the potential of literary genres to contribute to the representation and interpretation of indigenous cosmologies.
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