What is it about?
Wildmen in Central Asia are part of the folklore, and they can be divided into two main lines: one is closer to Tibetan and Chinese beliefs, and the other closer to Iranian and Indian folklore. Observations of both male and female human-like creatures like Mongolian almas, or Kazak and Kyrgyz kiik adam abound throughout Central Asia, especially in times of social or political crises. The article discusses wildmen stories from emic, etic and mixed perspectives, cryptozoological research on Central Asian and Siberian wildmen and animal men, and their “relatives” outside the region, in the Caucasus and Volga-Ural region.
Featured Image
Photo by Patrick Schneider on Unsplash
Why is it important?
From an ethnological or folkloric point of view, Central Asian wildmen are a wandering myth, which also in their hominid form easily fit into local knowledge systems. Yet, the local ecological knowledge “databases,” their character and contents account for the inclusion of wildmen among animals in the area, as well as for regional variations. Almas used to be a demon or devil among the Mongols, clearly a part of the folklore, but the dialogue with Russian and other foreign visitors has changed it into a creature with certain internationally distributed hominid characteristics. It is important to ask questions about when and why certain cryptozoological figures appear, and how they and their psychological effects on a community are perceived by the local people.
Perspectives
Time has turned traditional knowledge into mythology – but if we look at figures like wildmen not only from a folkloric or cryptozoological perspective, but also from an ethnobiological, we can see that they have been part of the local ecological knowledge in many regions in Eurasia. The stories are now told to children mostly, but these figures played important roles in the rural or pastoral communities, both socially and psychologically, in many different ways. Looking at them from various perspectives, we can move beyond the question “are they real?”.
Dr. Sabira Ståhlberg
Independent Scholar
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Wildmen in Central Asia, Anthropos, January 2017, Nomos Verlag,
DOI: 10.5771/0257-9774-2017-1-51.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
