Mansi Shchekurya wind-calling flying board

вōт вōвнэ товлыӈ пāрт / vot vovne tovlyng part

Source term: wind-calling flying board / rotating aerophone 412.21

вōт вōвнэ товлыӈ пāрт (vot vovne tovlyng part), Mansi: "wind-calling flying board" — the rotating plank spun to raise or change the wind.

Etymology. Mansi вōт "wind" + вōвнэ "calling" + товлыӈ "flying" + пāрт "board": "wind-calling flying board." вōт is cognate with Khanty вот, as in vot vokhty, "to ask for wind."

Among the Mansi of the Ob basin, a thin rotating plank was once a shaman's instrument, spun to summon or change the wind and sounded at the Bear Games, the great Ob-Ugric bear feast. Its very name preserves the lost purpose: the ethnographer I. A. Bogdanov recorded it as a "board that calls wind by rotating," which Galina Soldatova renders more precisely as вōт вōвнэ товлыӈ пāрт, "wind-calling flying board." The board stands apart from the children's whirled disc buzzers (Mansi пыгалтоп, ларгалтап; Khanty щовкан) that survive alongside it; by the time Soldatova's team photographed an example at Shchekurya village in 1987, it too had dwindled into a child's toy. The memory of its power lingered among the Khanty: when Soldatova played the instrument's sound at a conference, the ethnographer T. A. Moldanov warned that the weather would now turn windy and that an incantation for fair weather would have to be spoken.

По словам В. Шесталова, она использовалась как шаманский инструмент для изменения погоды и на медвежьих игрищах.

According to V. Shestalov, it was used as a shaman's instrument for changing the weather and at the Bear Games.

Soldatova 2019, Traditsionnaya kul'tura 20(4):51–52 (citing Shestalov 2013:74)

Particulars

Object

A thin plank spun on a cord; distinct from the two-hole children's toy buzzers it survived alongside.

Function

Former magical and shamanic instrument for changing the weather; also used at the Bear Games.