Anxious Ambiguities: Ritual Clowning and Sexual Humor in Siberian Bear Ceremonialism

ABSTRACT: Bear ceremonialism has been identified as a core cultural feature of circumpolar indigenous communities since Hallowell (1926). Ethnographies have usually described bear ceremonies as a ‘”script” of component events that provide a generalizable plan of enactment, but such strategies can never tell us how these individual components fulfill their functions. This article uses original video documentation to examine Siberian bear ceremonies as performances, focusing on the performance of a single element of the typical Eastern Khanty multi-day ceremony, the Yepykh skit. Singling out this particular component provides the first extended look at sexual humor in bear ceremonies, locating it in a broader ethnographic and historical context of ritual clowning and theoretical discussions of ritual clowning and the grotesque, while highlighting its distinctive character and significance for the eastern Khanty. Our analysis demonstrates how the Yepykh skit functions performatively, in both organizational and symbolic terms, to dramatize a vital but overlooked dimension of eastern Khanty bear ceremonialism, the necessarily uncomfortable linkage of sexual excess and hunting violence. The Yepykh skit helps to account for historical persistence of bear ceremonialism among the eastern Khanty by reaffirming the truth that the bear that kills and the bear that dies is the Bear that feeds us and perpetuates us as a Khanty community.