7th July 2005: Our thoughts go with with friends and families of the victims of London's outrage earlier today

28th March 2005: Hotel with reindeer-parking area opened in Russia's Far North:

A hotel for reindeer-breeders was opened in the town of Nadym, the Far North of Russia. The hotel has a very distinctive feature: it is outfitted with a parking area for reindeer, which is one of the most popular transportation means in Russian northern territories. The parking area can also be used for snowmobiles that modern Russian northern residents use to visit their friends, for instance.

The hotel for reindeer-breeders can accommodate over 30 guests in two-room suites. Hotel rooms are equipped with showers, rooms to dry outer clothes in and kitchens with all necessary utensils and appliances.

Hotel owners believe that they will have a lot of clients in the near future: the city is to hold traditional sports competitions, the Trud newspaper wrote.

It is worth mentioning that there are about 3,000 representatives of native northern nations living in the Nadym region. A lot of those people make their living with the help of deer-breeding.


Source: www.keralanext.com

28th March 2005: Finnish firm must not turn reindeer forests to pulp

Finland's largest paper company has been urged by environmentalists to defend the reindeer forests of Arctic Lapland and the Sami reindeer herders whose livelihood depends on them.



Both the people and reindeer native to the Sami forests in northern Finland are suffering as a result of unsustainable logging practices

A report was presented to Finnish firm Storna Enso at their annual general meeting of investors by Greenpeace, along with a shareholder resolution requesting that the company's purchase of timber from Metashallitus: "shall not be procured from specific restricted forest areas in the Lapp peoples' native locality in Inari that are considered especially valuable for reindeer herding as reindeer grazing forest areas".

The resolution was presented by two Sami Lapp natives from Inari in northern Finland.

"Reindeer herding is the basis of traditional Sami culture, but the Finnish state has ignored the rights of Sami people for decades by continuing to prioritise logging over reindeer herding," Inari local Janne Saijets stated. "Our reindeer forests have been sold out for pulp production - enough is enough!"

After establishing a forest rescue station in one of the threatened reindeer forests, Greenpeace asked Stora Enso customers to help convince the company to stop buying from forest areas used for reindeer herding to produce their paper.

The Xerox Corporation recently informed Greenpeace that its copy paper products would no longer contain fibres from the Sami reindeer forests - international campaigner for Greenpeace Phil Aikman stated that it was now time for the Finnish paper firm to follow suit.

"Stora Enso has become under increasing pressure to finally end its role in supporting this conflict in the Sami homeland," he said. "It is time for the company to listen to their customers and defend the reindeer forests rather than turning them to pulp."

However, deputy CEO at Stora Enso, Bjorn Hagglund said that the company was deeply concerned about the socio-economic implications of their activities in the north of Finland, adding that discussions with local Sami people should go underway soon to find a solution to suit everyone involved.

"We need to find a balance between forestry and reindeer herding," Mr Hagglund said. "Local people are the best experts of their own conditions, therefore the solutions are best found on a regional level."

But he added that he felt local bio-diversity had already been secured in the area, due to the exceptionally high number of protected areas.

By Jane Kettle




Source: www.edie.net

26th March 2005: Fur flies over bunny theory

By SIMON BEVILACQUA
27mar05
IT'S official -- the Easter bunny story is not true.

The fable about the magical rabbit who brings eggs on Easter Sunday is a fabrication.

Academics have scoured medieval history and found the story is based on a lie.

They blame a meddling medieval monk for mucking up pagan history.

The mischievous monk literally made up a Saxon goddess who many today erroneously believe is the basis of the Easter bunny story.

University of Tasmania academic Elizabeth Freeman said German academics had searched extensively for clues to Easter tradition.

"They found it's all wrong," Dr Freeman, an expert on medieval history, said.

The commonly believed story about the Easter bunny, as the magical companion of the Saxon goddess Ostara, is repeated in books, poems and extensively on websites.

That fallacious story says the Easter bunny's roots are buried in the mythology of Germanic Saxon tribes.

The Saxons, in the first centuries after the death of Jesus, are said to have celebrated the arrival of the pagan goddess Ostara.

The Sun King, according to the story, would journey across the sky in his chariot bringing an end to winter.

Ostara, a beautiful spring maiden, then came to earth with a basket of coloured eggs.

The goddess, helped by a magical rabbit, brought new life to dying plants and flowers by hiding eggs under them.

When the Saxons moved into Britain in the fifth century, they took their pagan ways with them.

Ostara then evolved into the Anglo-Saxon Oestre, goddess of dawn and spring.

When Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity and started to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, they combined the religious traditions.

The pagan Oestre celebration became today's Easter.

So when modern-day parents hid coloured eggs under plants in the garden for their children, it was widely thought they had been unwittingly re-enacting the ancient pagan myth of Ostara and her rabbit. But this is all wrong, according to modern academic thought.

Dr Freeman said research shows the Ostara and Oestre story is fundamentally flawed.

The goddess did not exist.

The earliest reference to goddess Ostara or Oestre is by a celebrated medieval intellectual -- the monk known as the "venerable Bede".

Working in north-east England in 730AD, Bede wrote a book about calculating time. Bede identified a pagan spring celebration called Eosturmonath. He said this celebration got its name from a pagan goddess called Oestre for whom they had a feast.

But when modern-day researchers scoured the history books they could find no prior reference to the goddess.

Researchers found many references to the spring celebration Eosturmonath but absolutely no mention of the goddess Bede reckoned the feast was named after. They suspect Bede fabricated the pagan goddess to suit his purposes.

"He has definitely made up that goddess," Dr Freeman said. "Bede is the first one to mention it. German academics have found no evidence of the spring goddess Oestre anywhere else before Bede."

Dr Freeman said Bede, who had been a monk since he was seven years old, was revered in an era where very few people were educated.

"Bede was extremely influential and his view has survived until the last 50 years when scholarship developed to the level it could show he was wrong," she said.

Dr Freeman said Bede and his contemporaries constantly sought to find moral meaning for words and often made up definitions to suit their moral outlook.

So if the Saxon goddess Oestre did not exist, what about her magical bunny? Where did he come from?

"I really have no idea," Dr Freeman said.

The Easter bunny, it seems, is as mysterious to historians as he is elusive to children.

Catching a glimpse of the rabbit who leaves chocolate eggs is easier than pinning down the origins of the mythical creature.

Dr Freeman suggested the tradition was a jumbled version of many ancient beliefs.

She said pagan Britons, who lived in the isles before the Saxons arrived and are commonly portrayed as the traditional dark-haired Celts, revered sacred hares.

She considers these sacred hares may be the kernel of the Easter bunny story.

Baltic pagans and other cultures used eggs in rituals of rebirth and renewel.

Eggs decorated with colours or gilt have been a symbol of life since the ancient Greeks.

The egg appears in many pagan and early history stories, including the birth of the Sun-Bird, hatched from the World Egg. In some pagan stories heaven and earth were thought to have been formed from two halves of an egg.

Easter eggs evolved through the 18th and 19th centuries with hollow cardboard Easter eggs filled with Easter gifts and sumptuously decorated.

Decadent Faberge Eggs, made for the Czar's of Russia by Carl Faberge, were encrusted with jewels.

The first chocolate Easter eggs appeared in Germany and France in the early 1800s.

Dr Freeman said she suspected the combination of the imagery to create our modern Easter occurred some time in the 19th century.



Source: The Mercury (Australia)

26th March 2005: REINDEER PEOPLE: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia by Piers Vitebsky (book review)

Siberia covers a third of the northern hemisphere, and represents Europe’s own back garden of tribal cultures, and yet to most Westerners it is the least known part of the entire globe. The reason for this is political: its control by repressive Russian regimes has prevented visitors from moving freely in it until the 1990s.



Piers Vitebsky is one of a tiny number of British experts on the region and an internationally renowned anthropologist. This book is the record of successive visits that he has made over the past 17 years to live with members of a native people called the Eveny in the Verkhoyansk Mountains in the far north-east. Like his earlier work, it shows him to be both an excellent scholar and a gifted writer, with a feeling for landscape and character and a knack for metaphor and allusion.

The people whom he describes lead one of the last nomadic existences on earth — herding reindeer between seasonal pastures — in the coldest inhabited portion of its surface.

Like most traditional anthropologists, he is recording a vanishing way of life, but not in this case the aboriginal one, which — in so far as it had survived at all — was finally destroyed by Stalinism a long lifetime ago. The lifestyle that he has watched disappear was imposed by the Soviet system of collective farming and enforced cultural re-education, which was brutal, oppressive and restrictive but guaranteed the basic necessities of life. Since the 1990s it has been replaced by an embryonic free market economy that reproduces most of the vices of Russian communism while failing to guarantee the basic commodities. The individuals whose fortunes he chronicles and analyses with such care and compassion are therefore habituated to a battle for survival in a world in which nature is powerful, dangerous and unpredictable, and human authorities manifest much the same qualities.

Much of the book is inevitably tinged with tragedy. This is true on a general scale, as natives to whom their land is a giant temple, teeming with spirits, interact with representatives of a government to whom it is a giant meat-producing factory. It is true also on an individual level, and many of the individuals to whom Vitebsky introduces his readers are dead by the last chapter of his story, often violently. He closes with the possibility that both the Eveny and their distinctive existence are doomed to disappear.

This is not, however, his own projection of their future, and the darker hues of his account are always balanced. The terrain in which they operate is harsh and perilous but also fabulously beautiful, and his talent for description brings this out at each stage. The people themselves are — at least in some cases — not passive victims of change but canny and adaptable opportunists, who may yet take advantage of the new Russia to regain many of the most valued aspects of their pre-Soviet way of life with further benefits from modernity. They already ride reindeer with names such as Sancho Panza and Bill Clinton, and sit in their tents in the evening discussing whether a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs or reading about the Incas.

Like all the finest anthropology, this book entertains readers with descriptions of an alien culture, only to imbue them with a deeper sense of common humanity.


Source: The Times (UK)