Shors - Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. When first contacted by Russians, the Shors were found mining local coal and iron deposits and smelting and forging iron implements. The implements, made for their own use and to barter or sell to the nomadic pastoral peoples to the south, consisted of hoes, armor (helmets and breastplates), swords, pikes, and spears. Some Shors also practiced pastoralism, although at that early time only the southern Shors practiced agriculture—raising wheat, barley, and, for cloth and edible seeds, hemp.

The imposition of the czarist government in the eighteenth century eventually caused the manufacture of iron goods to cease because technologically superior Russian spades, plows, and axes replaced the indigenous tools. As the iron trade waned in the period of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Shors increased their fur-hunting activities, which later became their chief occupation. They were also subject to a tax, which they were forced to pay in furs. The animals most sought were the sable, squirrel, weasel, otter, fox, ermine, and lynx. The Shors hunted with the bow and arrow until the eighteenth century, when they adopted the gun (for which they made their own bullets). Sables were caught with special nets placed near the exits of their burrows or were smoked out. Otters were caught with nets in rivers or shot when coming to an air hole in the ice in the winter. Ermines, weasels, foxes, hare, and other animals were snared. In time the most valuable furbearers were overhunted, and the sable disappeared altogether from the region; the Shors turned to hunting squirrels. For meat they hunted reindeer, marais, wild goats, bears, badgers, wolverines, black grouse, partridge, and musk deer. They used bows and arrows, guns, dogs, wooden traps, pitfalls, enclosures, and automatic arrow-firing traps ( aya ). Marals were sometimes lured with special cedar-wood musical pipes ( pyrgy ) .

Fish were taken with weir, hook, cast seine, spear, bow and arrow, noose, and net. One type of net had holes of various sizes so that several different types of fish might be caught at one time. Women and children sometimes caught fish with their hands or with sacks.

Agriculture continued in the nineteenth century, with the Russian wood-and-iron plow replacing the hoe. Farm land was cleared by fire and ax, although 33.7 percent of all Shor households in 1900 farmed no land at all, and 20.3 percent farmed only a tiny amount of land. The principal crops in the north were wheat and oats, in the south barley. Animal husbandry was also little practiced; in the late nineteenth century many villages had no cattle and their inhabitants had never tasted milk. In 1899, 10 percent of all Shor households had no horses, and 19 percent had no cattle.

During the period of Russian domination, the Shors supplemented their income by selling some of their fish, dairy products, and cedar nuts in the market town of Kuznetsk. Cedar nuts were collected by knocking down the cones with long poles or by using boys to climb the trees. Some cones were gathered from the ground, but rodents often got the nuts first. The cones were then grated, sieved, and winnowed for their nuts. The Shors built upon their knowledge of gathering wild honey when they adopted the practice of beekeeping from the Russians; they are reportedly excellent beekeepers who sell much of the honey they produce. By the middle of the nineteenth century some apiaries had 1,000 hives.

At the turn of the twentieth century the wealthier northern Shors generally wore clothing of homespun and factory-made cloth and sheepskin. The poorer southern Shors wore homespun hemp clothing because they kept few livestock and there were not many wild animals left to hunt. With the exception of the women's shirt-dress, men and women wore virtually identical clothing: trousers, shirt, and coat.

Transportation was usually by foot except in the deep snow, when Shors used skis of cherry, willow, or birch backed with animal hide. Snow with a crust called for the use of unbacked pine skis. Sleds were also used for hunting.

There are two basic Shor staple foods: buckwheat groats, which are eaten boiled with milk, fish, or meat, and wheat-flour porridge, which is accompanied by tea, milk, honey, butter, or sour cream.

Soviet influence has emphasized the creation of large (collective) farms, and on those farms the raising of livestock. Although most of the farmland produces wheat, oats, and barley, much is now devoted to raising hay for fodder. In the factories workers produce machinery and process gold, and aluminum. Many of the Shors work in the coal mines. Only a small number work hunting furs.

Industrial Arts. Until the nineteenth century Shors smelted powdered ore in covered cavities in the clay floors of their houses, using small coals and hand bellows. Wood was used to make skis, benches, dugout boats, and utensils. Birch bark was made into containers and utensils. Some Shors made pottery. Nets were made from wild nettle and hemp. Animal hides were processed but not tanned. Hemp was woven into clothing using a crude loom that was stretched between two stakes pounded into the ground; the loom included a thread board, a warp divider, a beater, and a wooden stick that served as a shuttle. Horn was made into handles, gunpowder measures, knives, harness rings, and cartridge cases.

Trade. Trade and communication were extremely difficult until recent decades. The mountainous terrain and rocky rivers made travel by path or water difficult; paths could accommodate horses but were entirely unimproved, and boats had to be towed from the shore.

Before the Russians contacted them, the Shors traded iron goods with pastoral peoples to the south for horses, felt, wool, and other pastoral products. In ancient times some of their iron wares, particularly weapons and armor, were taken in tribute by the Mongol and Turkic empires, for whom the Shors were a major supplier. The czarist government, imposed on the Shors in the eighteenth century, forbade contact between Shors and the pastoral nomads, and that trade ceased. On the other hand, the increased trade with the Russians in the nineteenth century led to the creation of a group of middlemen—trading partners known as tanysh (lit., "friend" or "acquaintance"). These men advanced hunting supplies and other kinds of goods to hunters on credit against their future production of furs, transported their fur taxes (at a profit), and sold the hunters' furs to outside buyers (also at a profit).

Division of Labor. Traditionally, men hunted and fished, and women wove cloth and engaged in domestic work.

Land Tenure. Every seok, and later every töl (extended family), had exclusive possessory rights to an area of taiga that had well-known boundaries. If caught, trespassers would lose their catch, their hunting camp would be destroyed, and there was the possibility of further punishment, including beatings. The seok could, however, extend rights to members of other seoks to hunt on their lands, though they did this mostly on behalf of seoks with whom they had intermarried.

Kinship. Much of Shor social organization and the political and legal systems can be understood through a description of their clan and family structure. The clan, or seok (also written, söök , a Turkic word meaning "bone"), was patrilineal, exogamous, independent, and situated at some distance from other clans; the inhabitants of a village consisted of the members of a clan and their wives. Each clan furthermore held its own territory, which it defended from trespassers. Hunting lands were held in common by the members of the clan, as were agricultural lands. Families were able to cultivate any lands that were unoccupied, and the products of the land went to the individual family, whether extended or nuclear, that raised the crops. Each clan had its own political structure and many had their own courts. During times of czarist control, the village was led by a pashtyk, or headman, who was an intermediary with the federal government. He helped control the fur-hunting practices, since it was the seok as a whole that was responsible for paying the fur tax.

In some areas the clan appears to have been replaced as an organizing unit by the patrilineal extended family of two or three generations, perhaps as a result of increased reliance on trade, which may have favored private rather than group ownership. This family, known as a töl, was especially common among the southern Shors. The members of the töl also held hunting and agricultural property in common, in much the same manner as did the seok.

By the end of the nineteenth century, seoks and töls had begun to break up, probably as a result of the cash market system, into economically independent nuclear families; married sons, rather than contributing what they made to the clan or extended family, kept it for the benefit of their own wives and children. The Soviet government, however, maintained the töl as an administrative and census unit.