Mari Men and Women as Bearers of the Mari Language and Identity

N.Glukhova, V.Glukhov

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At present, without the possibility of sustaining family life at a decent level young Mari men go to the building sites of Moscow, Kazan, Nizhnii Novgorod, to the Northern regions of Russia where they are recruited as workers in the gas and oil industries. Thus, men's role in the development of the Mari languages consists - partly - in their changing the lexical layer with borrowed words from Russian as at a certain age they represent the most mobile part of the village population and mix more with the Russian-speaking population. Educators in kindergartens, the Mari language school teachers, are mainly women. They know the Mari languages best of all.

As is well known, language is represented in two forms - oral and written. The countryside population still prefers to use an oral channel for getting or exchanging information - radio, television, and direct interpersonal communication. Language, no doubt, helps identify oneself closely with a person or group. But the term "ethnic consciousness" implies a vast circle of other notions including not only identification but also certain ideas of typical national features (ethnic stereotypes), historic past, culture, traditions, behavioral norms, living in a certain territory under certain geographic and climatic conditions.

Language, material and spiritual culture has been better preserved in Mari El than in any other Finno-Ugric Republic in the Russian Federation due to another factor determining the identity of the nation - the way of life, which influences psychological features of the national character, people's tradition and traditional culture (61.6%). The ancestors of the Mari were people of a forest culture. Local forest dwellers (5.000-3.000 B.C.) in the Neolithic era, especially when metal came into general use, changed their way of life and along with hunting and gathering started farming and animal husbandry. The Mari were good hunters, runners and warriors. In the 15th and 16thcenturies partly because of a swampy territory, in a forest zone, partly due to lack of roads, different sub-ethnic groups already lived in different natural-geographical zones and therefore had their own specialization in economy (Sanukov, 2002:5-8). Where the lands were barren people went hunting, fishing and gathering, later they traveled to find different kinds of seasonal work. The traditional types of occupation in other places were farming and animal husbandry (Molotova, 2000:181-191). As has already been mentioned the Mari still live mainly in the countryside. This fact has historical roots. After the 16th century (following hundreds of years of war with Rus') the Mari were not allowed to settle in towns nor to use metal in their work. By the end of the 19thcentury and the beginning of the 20ththe Mari were a people with an incomplete, or underdeveloped social structure, remaining mainly a peasant nation (Chuzayev, 2000:110), characterized by rustic, or rural mentality. This type of mentality is aimed at supporting its steady structure, its stability. Life is ordered by natural rhythms and agrarian labor, ancient customs, which seem to always exist. A man here does not expect a rapid change of events; the hunt for variety in life and sensations, typical of life in towns, is alien to him (Shkuratov, 1994:110-116). The majority of psycho-cultural peculiarities of the agrarian Mari civilization of the period were based on two important factors. It was an ecological community, sunk into nature, reproducing its rhythm. It was a social environment of direct, personal communication where people knew each other face to face and spent their lives in familiar surroundings. With these features the Mari entered the 20th century.

Social and political processes among the Mari, as well as among other Finno-Ugric nations in Russia during the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. developed very slowly. The starting point ofthe destruction of a patriarchal mode of life, the introduction of commodity-money relations, leading to the emergence of a bourgeois social structure refer only to the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Basically it had no serious impact on the Mari community.

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