Mansi - Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. Traditional Mansi subsistence was based on fishing, hunting, and gathering. The prevalence of a particular mode of subsistence was determined by the local availability of fish or game. Fishing predominated in downstream areas and hunting in upstream, but there were also seasonal variations and migrations. Many Mansi leave the forest for the waterways when the ice melts, usually in mid-April. Using deep, bag-shaped nets, simple dragnets, and various other kinds of nets made from hemp, as well as fish spears and fishing rods, they caught and preserved enough fish during the summer to satisfy their needs and enable them to sell surplus. Until the Russians imposed a fur tax the primary animal hunted by the Mansi for its fur was the squirrel. After the coming of the Russians emphasis shifted to the sable, which was the preferred form of tax payment. The Mansi hunted elks, wild reindeer, and bears for meat and fur, using arrows, spears, traps, and, beginning in the nineteenth century, guns. Elk hunting, although less common now because of the decline in the population of the species, begins in August. In the past the Mansi hunted elk by constructing extensive trap systems with fences, pits, and automatically triggered bows; these systems extended up to 64 kilometers. Today they maintain hunting cabins as way stations and travel by river in the autumn to stock them with provisions.

Hunting and trapping of furbearing animals is still common, especially of muskrats and squirrels. Mansi hunters typically use three or four dogs, when snow conditions permit in the fall and early winter, to find and flush squirrels and sables, which they then shoot with rifles. They also use traps with dried mushrooms as bait to catch squirrels. Muskrat are trapped by first locating their lodges and observing their travel routes to their feeding grounds. Traps similar in construction to the "muzzle" traps the Mansi use to catch fish are then set, without bait, along the route or at the feeding grounds, and camouflaged with turf. Long sticks are attached to the bottom of the traps with wires to mark their location and to serve as anchors to prevent the muskrat from moving off. In the winter sable are caught in log traps about 1 cubic meter in size, which often contain internal traps for security. Mansi hunters also use the common Siberian technique of encircling the sable's den with a huge net. One hunter then flushes the animal while the other stands prepared with a rifle to shoot it before it can escape from the net.

Since collectivization some Mansi have raised horses, sheep, and poultry, and in a few northern groups reindeer keeping has continued to constitute a significant portion of their economic activity. Hunting and fishing are carried out in collectivized production brigades whose activities also include sheepherding, fur farming, dairy farming, and, in the southern regions, some agriculture. The Mansi have recently been affected by the economic development of western Siberia, which has created employment in lumbering and mining and which has resulted in a general demographic shift toward population centers.

Trade. Although exchange and trade relations between the Ob-Ugrians and other groups existed from earliest times, they became regularized with Russians after first contact with Novgorod merchants in the eleventh century. In regular trade with Russians, the Mansi sought metal objects, weapons and ammunition (in earlier days sword blades and armor), fabric, yarn, thread, ready-made clothes, dresses, decorations, beads, flour or bread, tea, sugar, salt, wine, matches, tobacco, and tin or silver products that the Mansi used in cult rituals. They exported mainly fur and fish.

Industrial Arts. Much of the traditional productive activity of the Mansi was associated with hunting, fishing, transportation, and the making of shelter and clothing. Domestic activities included the working of skins and furs, wood, and bones; some Mansi on the Ob and its tributaries had knowledge of weaving. The Mansi household had on hand slivers of wood that were used as all-purpose cleaning and wiping implements. They were made mostly from rose-willow and birch and were used to wipe dishes and wash the face and hands.

Division of Labor. The primary division of labor was in the area of household chores. Women hunted with men in times of necessity and continue to do so today, but hunting, house building, construction of means of transport, and working in wood and bone were primarily men's activities. Women traditionally worked hides and furs and made thread, clothing, and utensils from birch bark. Men and women fished together, sometimes bringing children along.

Land Tenure. Whereas the whole patrilineal kindred had use of family lands, ownership was controlled by the genealogical core of the group, which consisted only of blood relatives. At the end of the nineteenth century individual families became land owners and land was transmitted by inheritance only to members of the family. During the Soviet period the land was in the hands of the state.