From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the Mansi people. If you are looking for their language, see Mansi language.

Mansi (obsolete: Voguls) are an endangered indigenous people living in Khantia-Mansia, an autonomous okrug within Tyumen Oblast in Russia. In Khantia-Mansia, the Khanty and Mansi languages have co-official status with Russian.

The Mansi have been in contact with the Russian state at least since the 16th century when most of Western Siberia was brought under Russian control by Ermak. Due to their higher exposure to Russian and Soviet control, they are generally more assimilated than their Northern neighbours, the Khanty.

In the 1960s, exploitation of the rich oil deposits of Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug began, causing the Soviet Union's largest internal migration wave since the Second World War. This led to a dramatic marginalisation of the Mansi and Khanty who today constitute slightly more than one percent of the district's population. At the same time their homeland has been massively devastated by thirty years of oil extraction.

As for most other Northern indigenous peoples of Russia, the Soviet state ordered the creation of a "national literature" for the Mansi people which consisted mostly of works hailing the enlightenment and progress brought to the Mansi by Lenin's revolution. The most prominent Mansi representative of this genre was the writer Yuvan Shestalov, who after the breakup of the Soviet Union converted to shamanism. Since then he claims that the Mansi are in fact the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, a claim hardly shared by anyone else.

Together with the Khanty people, the Mansi are politically represented by the Association to Save Yugra, an organisation founded during the Perestroika of the late 1980s. This organisation was among the first regional indigenous associations in Russia.

The Mansi language is of the Ugrian branch of the Finno-Ugric family of languages.

Anthropologically, the Mansi are short with high cheekbones and slit eyes, and their eyes and hair are dark.

• The Mansis
• Dr Gabor Szekely's 1st visit to the Mansis
• Dr Gabor Szekely's 2nd visit to the Mansis

This Russia-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.