Prof. B Prajakta D Mahendra Ovhal

Phulpagar

Plagiarized Image Detection System based on CBIR

Keywords: Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), Red Green Blue model (RGB), Global Color Histogram (GCH), Local Color Histogram (LCH), Cyan

Plagiarism detection is a well known phenomenon in the academic arena. Copying other people is considered as a serious offence that needs to be checked. For this many plagiarism detection systems are available. Many of such plagiarism systems do not include figures and diagrams for checking. They simply discard them which results in look holes that people can take advantage of. In short people can plagiarize diagrams and figures easily without the current plagiarism system detecting it. So there is a need to develop a system that will detect plagiarism in diagrams and figures as well. The main goal of this system is to develop an image plagiarism system which will be primarily based in CBIR. This system will focuses on image detection. There will be a database consisting of images. The user will give an image as input. The features of input image will be extracted and it will be compared with the features of the images present in database. The one which are most matching will be retrieved. The output image which is retrieved from database will be the similar image of the input image.

INTRODUCTION

Plagiarism is nothing but using somebody's work without notifying or without giving them any credit. Plagiarism has become an important issue because of internet. Wide source of knowledge is available on internet today, because of which sharing of ideas and technology has become very easy, but due to this worldwide access people tend to copy someone's genuine work and necessary credit is not given to the actual researcher which is quite inappropriate. Plagiarism can be seen in many fields like research papers, art gallery, definitions etc. There are many plagiarism detection systems available for e.g, Plagiarisma.net, Viper, PlagScan etc which focus of plagiarism of text. When any research paper is being scanned by plagiarism detection system they scan the textual part but when any image is encountered it simply discards that image which is inappropriate because an image can also be plagiarized. Architecture of flow diagram of a project can be plagiarized, any snapshot of someone's result can also be plagiarized and so on. Hence there is a need to develop image plagiarism detection system.

Basics Of Image And Image Processing

Image Processing

Image processing is used to solve identification problems, such as in forensic medicine or in creating weather maps from satellite pictures. It deals with images in bitmapped graphics format that have been scanned in or captured with digital cameras. It can also be referred as improvement, such as refining a picture.

Image Retrieval

Image Retrieval has become a very active research topic, with two major research communities, database management and computer vision. One is text-based and another is visual-based. Text-based image retrieval involves annotating the image with keywords, and use text-based database management systems (DBMS) to retrieve the images. In text-based image retrieval system, keywords of semantic information are attached to the images. CBIR is an automatic process to search relevant images based on user input. A typical CBIR process first extracts the image features and store them efficiently. Then it compares with images from the database and returns the results. Feature extraction and similarity measure are very dependent on the features used. In each feature, there would be more than one representation. Among these representations, histogram is the most commonly used technique to describe features.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Arrish, et al. [START_REF] Arrish | Shape-Based Plagiarism Detection for Flowchart Figures in Texts[END_REF] in February 2014, published a paper in which they have developed a image plagarism detection system which works for flow chart images only. Here they are mostly concentrating on shape feature. Firstly there is a query image which is given as input, then preprocessing is performed on it like thinning. removing connected lines and removing text. Further they are detecting edges by using Canny edge detection technique, after this to detect shape they are using Chain code. Finally cosine similarity comparison is done and results are displayed.

Bhattacharjee, et al. [START_REF] Bhattacharjee | Plagiarism Detection by Identifying the Equations[END_REF] published a paper in which they have developed a plagarism detection system for equations. In this firstly they are extracting each line from document. In each line they are checking the presence of "=" symbol. If an "=" symbol is encountered that means some equation is present, then it converts that equation line image to character by using character recognition they those generated characters are matched to equations from database and finally results are displayed.

Ait-Aoudia, et al. [START_REF] Ait-Aoudia | Yet Another Content Based Image Retrieval system[END_REF] published a paper in which they have developed a image retrieval system. In the beginning a query image is given as a input. Its features such as color, shape and point of interest are calculated; in which for color feature extraction they have used HSV color space, for texture feature extraction they are using contrast, energy and entropy, and for point of interest feature they are using Harris detector. Comparison is done and finally result is displayed.

Chaudhari, et al. [START_REF] Chaudhari | Content Based Image Retrieval Using Color and Shape Features[END_REF] published a paper in which they have developed a image retrieval system. In this paper they have developed an image retrieval system in which a query image is given as input, its features like color and shape is extracted. For color they are using Color Coherence Vector, for shape they are using mass, centroid and dispersion. Finally Euclidean distance is used for similarity measure.

Sakhare, et al. [START_REF] Swati | Design of Feature Extraction in Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) using Color and Texture[END_REF] published a paper in which they have developed a image retrieval system in which they have concentrated on two features color and texture. For color feature extraction they are using RGB color madel. For similarity measure they are using Euclidian distance.

SCENARIOS FOR IMAGE PLAGIARISM

An image can be plagiarized by doing some minute changes in it so that the plagiarism test will not be able to detect it easily. Following are some scenarios that can be considered while plagiarizing an image:

Rotating an image.

An image can be plagiarized by rotating it by some angle. If such rotation is performed then in plagiarism check it will be treated as two different images which is actually inappropriate.

Changing background color of an image.

An image can be plagiarized by simply changing its background. In this way those images will be treated as totally different images and it will easy pass the plagiarism test.

Changing size of image.

An image can be plagiarized by changing its size, which when compared with original image having a standard size will differ totally. Hence plagiarism test will fail here.

Shearing an image.

An image can be plagiarized by shearing it, which when compared with original image will differ totally. Hence plagiarism test will fail here.

Proposed System

The main goal is to develop a Plagarized image detector System that if based on feature extraction techniques. It focuses on all kind of images like flowchart, snapshots, tables, graphs etc. The database contains images stored in a single folder. The retrieval system works by comparing query image with the images present in database. Proposed System is designed in such a way that the problems mentioned in section three is resolved properly. Following figure shows the architecture of proposed system. In the architecture image is preprocessed in which image is enhanced in such a way that the time and space required for processing is reduced. In preprocessing image is threshold so that object in image is clearly visible then its boundary is detected and cropping of image is done, after cropping, image is resized. Then feature extraction is done which include color feature, shape feature and greyscale feature. After that comparison of images is performed through Euclidean distance and final image matching result is performed.

Architecture

Following is the flow of proposed system.

Image to verify

For threshold value estimation Iterative algorithm is used which is as follows:

1. Select an initial estimate for global threshold, T. Steps of thresholding an image is as follows: 1) Check each element in image array.

2) Compare it with threshold value.

3) If element value is less than threshold value then store zero at that location in array. 4) If element value is greater than threshold value store one at that location in array.

Boundary Detection

In this after threshoding an image its boundary has to be detected so that further processing can be done on it. The points at which image brightness changes sharply are typically organized into a set of curved line segments termed boundaries.

There are many methods for edge detection, out of which few are listed below: a) Sobel Operator b) Perwitt Operator c) Laplacian of Gaussian d) Canny Edge Detection Advantages of Sobel Operator are Simplicity, Detection of edges and their orientations but disadvantage is sensitivity to noise and Inaccuracy. Advantages of Perwitt Operator is simplicity, Detection of edges and their orientations and disadvantage is sensitivity to noise and Inaccuracy. Advantage of Laplacian of Gaussian is finding the correct places of edges, Testing wider area around the pixel and its disadvantage is malfunctioning at the corners, curves and where the gray level intensity function varies. Not finding the orientation of edge because of using the Laplacian filter. Advantage of Canny Edge detector is using probability for finding error rate, localization and response, improving signal to noise ratio, better detection especially in noise conditions. Disadvantage is complex computations, false zero crossing, time consuming. For boundary detection we are following an algorithm as follows:

Cropping

After an image's boundary is found out, original input image is taken and the boundary extracted image is subtracted from original input image. By doing so, we will get an image with only shape present. Other than boundary of shape everything else is discarded. The main purpose of cropping is to make image smaller and compact so that if we consider overall system performance then processing time required will be less.

Segmentation

After an image's boundary is found out, original input image is taken and that boundary extracted image is subtracted from original input image. By doing so, we will get an image with only shape present. Other than boundary of shape everything else is discarded. The main purpose of cropping is to make image smaller and compact so that if we consider overall system performance then processing time required will be less. In Non-contextual techniques ignores the relationships that exists between features in an image, pixels are simply grouped together on the basis of some global attribute, such as grey level. In Contextual techniques, additionally exploit the relationships between image features. Thus, a contextual technique might group together pixels that have similar grey levels and are close to one another.

Feature Extraction

Image is best represented by its features. The following features are used to extract from an image.

a. Color Feature Extraction

Color feature extraction has to be done in two ways, defining color space and color descriptors. A color is represented using color space and it is described using color descriptors. In Color space represents color of an image. Many color spaces are available like RGB color space, HSV color space, HSB color space, CMYK color space etc. When we consider RGB color space it is an additive color space i.e. new colors are made by adding two primary colors from R,G,B. It is widely used and mostly in computer displays. Then next one is HSV color space. It is mainly used in Computer Graphics. It represents more colors than RGB. Then next is HSB, it represents color same as how humans do. CMYK color model is basically used in printers. In proposed system we are using HSV color space.

b. Shape Feature Extraction

Shape is the characteristic surface configuration that outlines an object giving it a definite distinctive form. It is a fairly well-defined concept. Shape extraction techniques are Mass, Centroid, Mean, Variance, Aspect ratio, Circularity, Moment invariants etc. A histogram H for a given image is defined as a Vector, where i represents a color in the histogram, h[i] is the number of pixels in color i in that image, and N is the number of bins in the histogram, i.e., the number of colors in the adopted color model.

Comparison

Features of the database and the query images are extracted and the distance between them are obtained by the Euclidean distance which is given as

Ranking and Result

When comparison is done the image which is matching accurately will be displayed first. The images which are partially matching will be displayed and finally images which are less matching will be displayed. In this way images are ranked according to matching criteria and then displayed in such fashion.

Mathematical Model

Mathematical Model for proposed approach is as follows: Let S be a system where,

PARAMETERS USED FOR EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS

The performance of retrieval of the system can be measured in terms of its recall and precision. Recall measures the ability of the system to retrieve all the models that are relevant, while precision measures the ability of the system to retrieve only the models that are relevant. It has been reported that the histogram gives the best performance through recall and precision value They are defined as:

Where, A represent number of relevant images that are retrieved, B, number of irrelevant items and the C, number of relevant items those were not retrieved. The number of relevant items retrieved is the number of the returned images that are similar to the query image in this case. The total number of items retrieved is the number of images that are returned by the search engine.

The average precision for the images that belongs to the qth category (Aq) has been computed by: A) Experimental Results Shown in graph given in Figure 8 and Figure 9, where the red bar represents proposed approach and the blue bar represents the existing approach. The existing approach does not contain the extra step which is nothing but the preprocessing steps in it. The graph shows precision and recall values for existing and proposed approach. By observing all values in detail we can come to a conclusion that the precision and recall values of proposed approach gives slightly better performance than the existingsystem. In the Figure 9, graph of time required for system to fetch result is mentioned. From the graph we can see that average time required for proposed system is better as compared to existing system.

Conclusion

People easily plagiarizes images because many plagiarism detectors are based on text plagiarism detection, they simply discard images from the file. There is very less research in this area. In this project, a system will be developed to retrieve images having certain characteristics based on the given input image. Some research has been performed on flowchart image but we are planning to develop a plagiarism system which will be applicable for all kind of images. For attaining accurate results, features such as color and greyscaling will be used. To improve the accuracy of system Iterative thresholding and some important preprocessing is done which will improve the accuracy of system. By including the extra steps i.e, the preprocessing steps there has been 30%-40% decrease in the processing time of existing system.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Different Scenarios For Image Plagiarism.

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Flow of Proposed System.2. Segment the image using T. Two groups of pixels will be produced G1 consisting of all pixels with intensity values greater T and G2 consisting of all pixels with intensity values less than or equal to T 3. Compute the average intensity values m1 and m2 for the pixels in G1 and G2,

I

   input image Igs  greyscaled image Ith threshold image Ibd Boundary detection of image Icr cropped image Irz resized image Ife feature extraction Isim similarity of images R result

Figure 3 .

 3 Figure 3. Sample query images.

Figure 4 .

 4 Figure 4. Sample query Images. Above are the images listed which are used as query images. An image can get plagiarized by altering it to some extent. Some alteration are given in this Fig 4. And Fig 5. (a)Firstly an exact image is used. (b) Color is changed of query image. (c) Border is given to the query image. (d) Black and white image is used as query image. (e) An inverted image is used as query image. (f) Size of image is changed of query image.

Figure 5 .

 5 Figure 5. Graph showing precision values for color feature results.

Figure 6 .

 6 Figure 6. Graph showing recall values for color feature results.

Figure 7 .

 7 Figure 7. Graph showing precision values for shape feature results.

Figure 8 .

 8 Figure 8. . Graph showing recall values for shape feature results.

Figure 9 .

 9 Figure 9. Graph showing processing time difference between Existing and proposed approach.


Eva Toulouze (Tartu)

The Forest Nenets as a double language minority

The Forest Nenets are a small community living in Western Siberia, which has not been as thoroughly studied as the other native people in the same region. In spite of living in the first Siberian region to be colonised by the Russians as early as the 16 th century, the Forest Nenets have been identified as a specific group only in the middle of the 19 th century. It is true that, according to G. Verbov (1936 : 57), a group mentioned as "kunnaya samoyad'" in a source dated 1602 may refer to Forest Nenets. Nevertheless, this group is but one between several other groups of "samoyads" (old Russian name for the Nenets) and is not directly opposed to the Tundra Nenets. The first scholar to have recognised the Forest Nenets as a specific group in dual opposition to the Tundra Nenets is the Finnish linguist M.A. Castrén, who collected language and ethnographic data by the Forest Nenets in the 1840-ies. At the end of the 19 th century the Forest Nenets are newly discovered in Russia as a people called "nyah-samar-yah" which was considered to be unconnected to any other people of the region (Bartenev 1 1998 : 145-146). The confusion is cleared at the beginning of the first decade of the 20 th century, with the works of Patkanov (1911) and Zhitkov (1913 : 249-251); more reliable data about the Forest Nenets are due to the Finnish scholar Toivo Lehtisalo, who visited the Forest Nenets in 1914. The first comprehensive article about Forest Nenets culture as a whole is the abovementioned study published by Verbov in 1936. Afterwards there has been some systematic research about Forest Nenets language (grammatical sketches by Verbov 1957, Sammallahti 1974[START_REF] Pusztay | Pusztay János -Die Pur-Mundart des Waldjurakischen: grammatikalischer Abriss aufgrund der Materialen von T. V. Lehtisalo-Studia Uralo-Altaica 23 -Szeged 1984 Sammallahti 1974 -Sammallahti Pekka -Material from Forest Nenets. -Castrenianumin toimitteita 2[END_REF]; there has also been occasional research by Russian ethnographers, who have been dealing with problems of ethnical history and some questions of material and spiritual culture. Because of the scarceness of data about Forest Nenets, I shall start my paper with a general presentation of this people, and only afterwards concentrate on the linguistic issue.

Two main reasons may explain the Forest Nenets marginality.

First of all, they occupy the remotest areas in Central Western Siberia, the rivers' high streams, between lakes and bogs, the most difficult to reach, so the Forest Nenets have succeeded to remain isolated until the last decades [START_REF] Gemuyev ; Гемуев | Формы брака и свадебная обрядность у лесных ненцев" -Традиционные обряды и исскусство русского и коренных народов Сибири[END_REF]: 32, Golovnyev 1995 : 56). Toivo Lehtisalo, who visited the Lyamin region in 1914, reports suggestively how complicated it was to reach their centres (Lehtisalo 1959 : 139-141). Even nowadays some Forest Nenets groups, for example those living in the vicinity of lake Num-To, are connected to the rest of the world only by a helicopter flight once a week. For centuries the only contact of Russians with the Forest Nenets was the latter yearly visit to the local fairs (in Obdorsk or Surgut), where they brought reindeer skins for exchange in order to get the "Russian" products they needed. But even these contacts have not led for a long time to their identification as a distinct group. The fact is the Forest Nenets are very closely connected to another Nenets group, the Tundra Nenets, that occupy huge territories from the Kola to the Taymyr Peninsulas both European zones and in Siberia. They were the first people of the North the Russians met in their earlier expansion eastwards. So confusion with the Tundra Nenets has been the second reason explaining the Forest Nenets late discovery: all the Nenets were treated indifferently and called Samoyeds.

Still, besides some commun points, there are some peculiar Forest Nenets features in language as well as culture overall. Although linguistic analysis shows clearly the closeness of Tundra and Forest Nenets languagesthat have been treated as two dialects of the same languege by Lehtisalo in his extensive dictionary (Lehtisalo 1956)this closeness is not evident for the speakers themselves, for divergent phonetic evolution has led to a situation where there can be no real mutual understanding between the two groups. Therefore linguists as Johanna Laakso (http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/sugl/oppimat/sgrjohd/sip.htm) and Tapani Salminen (http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/ling.html) use to present Forest and Tundra Nenets as two separate languages. Moreover, the difference in ecological contexttaiga versus tundraexplains that the husbandry model of both groups is significantly different. Thus we are justified in treating Forest Nenets as a distinct community. But this is still not a generalised approach.

Presently the Forest Nenets live in two administrative units, the Yamalo-Nenets and the Khanty-Mansiysk autonomous regions. If in the 1920-ies administrative authorities refered to the Forest Nenets in statisticsthere were in 1926 1129 Forest Nenets (Homich 1995 : 23)nowadays they do not distinguish them anymore from the Tundra Nenets. This means that nobody knows assertively the size of the Forest Nenets population: some groups live in contact areas with Tundra Nenets, and both populations are treated as a single people. There can be therefore only approximate data about the number of Forest Nenets nowadays: scholars mention figures between 1000 2 and 2000 3 . The only reliable statistic data we have are the figures for Khanty-Mansiysk autonomous region, for practically all the Nenets living in this region are Forest Nenets: 1970Nenets: 1979Nenets: 1989 940 1003 1144 (Homich 1995 : 22-23, data from the last official census in USSR).

The Forest Nenets occupy nowadays three main regions in Western Siberia: the higher flow of the Kazym River, the area of the Num-to sacred lake 4 , the higher flow of the Agan River (a northern tributary of the Ob) with its 2 1300, according to http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=YRK, about 1000 for Golovnyev (1995 : 71). 3 This last figure is given by http://www.suri.ee/uralic.html as well as by the UNESCO (http://odur.let.rug.nl/~bergmann/russia/languages/nenets.htm#number). 4 We know that at the beginning of the 20 th century Forest Nenets occupied also the high stream of the Lyamin and its tributaries. According to oral information, after the village of Darko-Gorshkovski was closed in the 1960-ies, many Forest Nenets from the Lyamin migrated to the Num-To area. In 1972, there were on the Lyamin river 16 Nenets families (45 persons) (Vasiljev 1985 : 81-82). There are certainly still some isolated Forest Nenets in the forest tundra of this basin.

tributaries Amputa and Vatyogan and the higher stream of the Pur, which is divided into two branches whose names refer to Forest Nenets clans: the

The Agan Nenets' ethnical contacts

The actual Nenets population of the Agan Nenets is mixed: one branch, the Ayvaseda and the Yusi clans 7 , may be considered as early inhabitants of the Agan basin. The other clans represented in this group nowadays, the Tyot and the Vella clans, are known to have migrated to the high streams of the Vatyogan and Amputa Rivers in the 1930 from the northern areas around the village of Khalesovoy and perhaps from the region of Num-To 8 . This late migration is still present in the Nenets' consciousness for all the newcomers were registered by soviet authorities under the surname of Ayvaseda 9 , although the people themselves perfectly know that they actually belong to the Tyot or to the Vella clans.

5 Cf. www.forestnenets.info. 6 Oral information. 7 The main social institution of the Forest Nenets until the soviet era, and even in its first decades (Obshchestvennyi 1970 : 203) was the exogamic clan, which has been loosing pertinence as main organiser of social life, but is still very much present in the conscience of the people: surnames are still clan names, and if not in discourse, in practice exogamy is still very much practiced. 8 Oral information by Yuri Vella. 9 The reason of this error are not entirely elucidated: according to Ogryzko, the rich Ayvaseda presented the poorer newcomers as their kins in order to dissimulate the fact they used their labour force (Ogryzko 1998 : 171). According to Yuri Vella's oral information, the Vellas migrated from Num-To in order to avoid the repression following the Kazym uprising (Leete 2002).

As I have mentioned, during the tsarist period the Nenets had but occasional contacts with the Russian administration and the town's population.

Because of their living far from the centres, most of the administrative relations of the Forest Nenets were dealt through mediators. The main mediators belonged usually to another Siberian people living in the same areas, the Khanty10 . The eastern branch of the Agan Khantys used to live on the river's medium and lower stream; they had thus more contacts with the Russian administration, more people among them spoke Russian. We can thus argue that until the first decades of the Soviet period, the Forest Nenets had but very rare, occasional contacts with the Russians. In 1936 G. Verbov, who viisted among others also the Agan Nenets, asserts that he has met no Forest Nenets speaking Russian (Verbov 1936 : 66). But the contacts with the Surgut Khantys were already most developed, both southwards, with the Agan Khantys (the families of Sardakov, Aypin, Kazamkin) and westwards, with the Khantys living in the basin of the Tromyogan, and occupying the higher flows of this river and its tributaries. These early contacts are proved both by linguistic influence and by the fact that tradition has fixed marriage rules between the Nenets and the Khanty clans, establishing a kind of interethnic exogamy, which was still active at the end of the 1930 (Verbov 1936 : 68-69).

The Soviet period changed radically the context of the Forest Nenets' life.

If during the first decades the ruler's concerns were to strengthen their own positions, from the 1930-ies on their ambition was to rule effectively the whole territory and to have a general system implemented everywhere (Toulouze 1998 : 154). This is the period where the first schools were opened and the collectivisation launched. Surely in these remote regions this process could not be so rapidly achieved as in Central Russia, and it took some decades to ensure a total control of the population in different types of collective farms. But the creation of these unities and the general trends in Soviet policy led to the concentration of all the natives into villages: in the Agan region, the new centre was Varyogan, where since 1937 there was a boarding school for the natives. If men where usually working for the collective farm in the taiga (as hunters or reindeer herders), women and children lived most of their lives in the village. As a matter of fact, Varyogan was a mixed village, where most of the population was is either Nenets or Khanty. Surely the new way of life has encouraged mixed marriages, bringing Khantys and Nenets ever more together.

Last but not least, the main difference between the Agan Nenets and the others groups of Forest Nenets is due to the peculiar economical developments in this area in the last few decades. The Agan Nenets occupy territories where since the mid-1960-ies huge oilfields have been discovered, whose exploitation has given Russia its main oil production and therefore currency resources. Oil industry has done what neither the tsarist colonisation neither the Soviet power had been able to do: to really occupy the Siberian taiga and hold it under thorough control. Oil industry has induced also an extensive migration of oil workers coming from all over the former Soviet Union. The demographic balance has thus been altered, and the native peoples have been reduced to a very small percentage of the overall population. New cities have been founded on former reindeer pastures to accommodate the newcomers. This group is far from being ethnically homogenous, but I shall overlook here its inner ethnical subdivision: the immigrants' attitude in regard to the native people does not differ in essentials, they have all left their home region for a precise goalthe improving of their material lifeand they all have Russian as a common tongue interfacing with the rest of the world. This new element is a key factor in the native's life as well as in language issues.

The Agan Nenets between the Khantys and the Russians

I come now to the linguistic issues, which are most directly connected with the demographic factor. The fact is that the Forest Nenetsalthough we have no precise data about how much they actually are, are clearly a minority both in regard to the newcomers as in regard to the Khantys. This numerical dimension was certainly of secondary importance when people lived scattered in the taiga. Certainly, at the beginning, native languages were also supposed to be used, but Russian soon became dominant: although for the responsabiles of education 11 Mihail Sardakov, according to our experience, had a good understanding of Nenetsas we could notice by his way of following and commenting a Nenets tale told by an old Nenetsbut did not use to speak it: in intercourse with his Nenets friends, he too used Khanty. 12 This fact was already noticed half a century ago by N. Tereshchenko (Tereshchenko 1959 : 100) policy in the first decade of soviet rule school had to be based on native languages, the lack of teachers did not allow its actual application (Toulouze 1999 : 64). All the dimensions of modern life, both with its material and mental aspects, have been conceptualised through Russian. Other languages spoken by Russia's more numerous nationalities have tried to develop their means to express modernity, but these attempts have been cruelly repressed since the early 1930-ies 13 ; the languages of the peoples of the North were very far from being adapted, and no attempt at all was made to achieve this adaptation: actually written languages started to spread only since 1934, when the political climate was more and more tense, more and more totalitarian. Thus all the contacts with the outer world were and are made through Russian. The knowledge of Russian is a compulsory element to get along with the world.

As in all the Soviet Union, there has been external pressure by the State's policy to make the nationalities adopt Russian as everyday language in substitution to the vernacular starting from the late 1950-ies, when native languages ceased to be taught at school. There has also been an objective pressure in favour of Russian due to the inaptitude of the actual idioms to express modernity, as new notions were much easier to be mentioned in Russian. And in addition there has been a subjective acceptation of these trends in the private sphere: the families have given up speaking their own language to their children. In the case of mixed marriages, the choice of Russian was even more evident, because of the above mentioned situation: both parents did not know both languages, and usually they preferred to guarantee their children an easier future by adopting Russian since the beginning. There has thus been a generation gap in the transmission of the language, for the Nenets between 40 and 60 years of age have omitted to transmit it to their children, who have nothing to transmit to theirs. 13 As by the Finno-Ugric peoples of Central Russia, whose attempt to develop their own languages according to their own internal rules and using their own lexical bases were considered since 1932 as the expression of anti-soviet and nationalist positions and severely repressed.

Thus, at the beginning of the 21 st century, no child in the Agan region has Nenets as family tongue; no child begins school speaking Nenetsso that the lessons in "mother tongue", reincluded since the 1980-ies in the programs as one of the subjects, are led as a matter of fact as lessons in a "foreign tongue". But if English as a foreign language benefits of high prestige, Nenets is felt by the younger pupils to be of no use at all, which complicates considerably the teacher's task from the psychological point of view. The youngest Nenets native speaker in the Agan region is a reindeer herder aged 27, who lives mostly in the tundra. The Khanty have resisted better: most of Khanty children starting school speak both Khanty and Russian. There has been no generation gap in Khanty language transmission. As we see, there is in the Agan region a three-degree hierarchy in spoken languages: on the higher step, Russian, spoken by everybody; on the middle step, Khanty, not spoken by Russians and by younger Nenets generations, but spoken par the Khantys and by the elder Nenets; and on the lower step Nenets, known only by the elder Nenets generation 14 .

The language issue in the life and self-image of the Agan's Nenets

How do the people themselves refer to their language and the position of their language? I would characterise the Nenets' attitude towards the linguistic double minority issue as conscious and indifferent.

The Nenets are conscious of the linguistic trends they have been submitted to. They are perfectly aware of what has been lost and they are able to explain how and why. During our fieldwork with the Estonian linguist Kaur Mägi, we recorded Nenets speech from ten persons among whom the younger was 45 years old. Some of our informants were very assured about the preciseness of the information they provided: these were people whose life was mainly 14 It is true that 1989 figures for the whole Khanty-Mansiysk autonomous region indicate that 647 Nenets (out of 1144) consider Nenets as their mother tongue (Homich 1995 : 311). But this statistic includes the Num-To region, where Nenets is actually the main communication language, and does not take into account the younger generations.

connected with the taiga and with traditional skills. I may mention a couple that lives at the moment in the taiga. The man ( 49) is half Nenets half Khanty, but clearly his Nenets father's influence predominated, as his mother, a Khanty, suffered of a mental disease and died when her son was still a kid. Our informant's father has always lived with reindeer in the taiga; he has a good knowledge of Nenets oral tradition that he has transmitted to his son; after having lived for some years mainly in Varyogan, our informant went back in the last decade to live at some kilometers' distance from his father's camp. His wife is a pure Nenets, whose father quitted in the early 1950-ies the collective farm and has not been seen in Varyogan afterwards. His friends have built him a hut, but he still prefers to live in a conic tent. Often her husband refers to her as an authority in Nenets. Nevertheless, although these persons speak Nenets among them, they have not transmitted the knowledge of the language to their daughter, who is at the moment 21 years old.

Still most of our informants were dubitative about their own language skills and proposed us to turn to the one person "knowing well Nenets"considered as an authority on these questions, the only educated Nenets from the village, the reindeer herder and poet Yuri Vella, our main informant. They consider that except Yuri Vella, all the Nenets in Varyogan have forgotten their language. This is clearly an exaggeration, for most of them still remember songs or tales and are able to talk to one another in Nenets. Nevertheless they considered the language they used as poor and limited, perhaps even erroneous, probably compared to what their remembrances may have been.

On this topic I had a significant conversation with Yuri Vella. When I asked him how a Nenets proverb quoted by him in Russian would sound in Nenets, he answered me after a small pause: "I can't find it now. Since Auli's death I haven't spoken Nenets". Auli was his elder neighbour and friend, a good singer and storyteller. I observed to Yuri that he had just spoken by phone in Nenets with his mother. But Yuri rejected this assertion: "This was not real Nenets. It was a commonplace language, which has nothing to do with our rich and expressive poetical tongue" 15 . This reaction illustrates the attitude nowadays Nenets have towards their language: what they possess is not a value, for they have lost the essentials, the core of what the language should be. What they know seems to be but a shadow of what Nenets has been.

Still the Nenets are in some way proud of their language. Both Khantys and Nenets in Varyogan are positive in asserting that Nenets is much more difficult than Khanty. One Nenets informant even doubted of our capacityof anybody's capacity -of learning Nenets. The assurance of having an exclusive language is conforting, for it gives psychological value to what they still have and to their culture as a whole, and is a practical means to explain the fact that practically no Khanty knows this language. Still there are also other reasons to this phenomenon. The most important is that Nenets has no practical function in social life. When I asked Yuri Vella's wife, a Khanty, whether she didn't find necessary to know her husbands mother tongue, she answered, "Wherefore?" True enough, her husband speaks good Khanty, so when they want to share private information they may use her language. This practical attitude is clearly inspired from the pattern dominating the whole society, for in the Soviet Union Russians did usually not make any effort to learn the languages of the regions they lived in, considering that Russian was enough to ensure communication. So the Russian attitude towards local languages is reproduced by Khantys, who expect Nenets to know their language 16 , but do not make any effort for reciprocity.

This kind of attitude has led to a sort of allover indifference towards the language, which is shared by the Nenets themselves. They have not tried to react to the general trend. In some way, the Agan Nenets have clearly sacrificed their spiritual culture as far as it is connected with language. Storytelling, which is 15 He has expressed this same idea in the preface to one of his collections of poems: "We, the Forest Nenets, we used to sing many stories, tales, laments and songs, we performed them with a popular melody or as intonational recited poetry (as for instance conversations with gods). The colloquial language is used in everyday life, it is poor, it has no colour, no taste, no smell, you don't feel either colder either warmer. You cannot tell a tale or sing a song in the colloquial language, and a common conversation about wood, food or money pollutes the artistic language" (Vella 1996 : 5). 16 When 19 years old Yuri addressed his wife's mother to ask her daughter's hand, the old Khanty woman obliged him to do this in Khanty, pretending not to understand any other language.

an interactive activity, requiring comments, questions, exclamations, has lost ground, for it seldom happens in that region that only Nenets would gather without the presence of Khantys. The latter automatically will induce the use of Khanty or Russian as a language of communication. Riddles remain very much alive, and they are popular among the children, but they are nowadays mostly told in Russian. The loss of the language affects even more radically the musical culture, for Nenets do not know instrumental music and their singing is most thoroughly connected to the language [START_REF] Ojamaa | De quelques orientations nouvelles de la musique traditionnelle nénetse[END_REF]. The gap between Nenets traditional music and European music is so deep, that it is difficult to imagine traditional songs sung in Russian. Moreover, the spiritual side of Nenets worldview is deeply affected: prayers during sacrifices are performed in Nenets by the elder generation, but the younger shall not be able to continue this tradition.

We could have the impression that indifference towards the language means indifference towards the survival of Nenets' identity in the Agan region.

Nevertheless it is not so. The fact is that language does not, in the Nenets' understanding, play a key role in the community's survival. The fact is that the Russians' presence in the heart of the taiga affects the possibilities for the group to survive even physically.

When we examine the place of language in the demands of the Associations defending the peoples of the North, we are surprised to observe that it is practically absent. The priorities are elsewhere: they are in the preservation of land, in the possibility of living in the traditional way.

The main concern of the Varyogan Nenets is a material one: how to live in villages where there are no jobs (or no jobs for them), and where alcoholism is rapidly degrading the health of younger and elder people? But how to live in the taigawhere pollution has spoiled the rivers and the fish, the presence of human beings has chased away the game and the pastures have been occupied by oil industry? This is the concern of most Nenets. In the last decade, some of them have chosen, as legislation has given them the opportunity 17 , to live most of their time in their traditional kinship territories, and to try to save reindeer herding.

Others have sold their rights to oil industry in order to get compensations allowing them to live in Varyogan without having to look for work. The most conscious of the Nenets are terrified by this encouragement to idleness and parasitism, and feel that this is the real murder of their people. Some Nenets are tragically divided between the desire of preserving nature and the need for money. There is no place for the language concern, when the main issue is physical survival: thinking of it is a luxury the Agan Nenets have given up long ago.

Yuri Vella shares this deep feeling. He tried in the early 1990-ies, to use language as an instrument for revitalising his people and he published a periodical paper in Nenets. The initiative, as a matter of fact, was not his, but his uncle's, Leonid (Lyahu) Ayvaseda, but Yuri continued it after his uncle's death and produced 8 numbers of Tilhivsama (Our life). He was the unique author writing in the paper, making the page sample and drawing manually the special Nenets letters. Thus, he invented an orthograph for Forest Nenets and even introduced a "reform" in this orthograph by introducing some new letters. He tried to diversify the texts presented: news from the Nenets community, poems, riddles, translations and linguistic explanations. But this experience did not last long: Yuri discovered that only very few persons readed his paper, and gave up any attempt connected to the language. Nevertheless at the end of the 1990, probably under the influence of his foreign contacts 18 , and discovering that foreigners had not the same contempt for the Nenets language that he was used to at home, he took over again the language issue. In his last collection of poems 19 there are three poems presented in Nenets and the titles of the 17 In 1992, the local parliament of the autonomous region inhabited by the Agan Forest Nenets (Khanty-Mansiysk autonomous region) has given the natives the use of their traditional lands, providing that the subsoil resources remain property of the State. 18 Yuri Vella is well known as a poet and a fighter for the right of his people in Russia as well as abroad: he has personal contacts with German, Estonian, French and Finnish researchers, has been invited to Budapest, Helsinki, San Francisco and Tartu. 19 This is a bilingual collection with Russian texts and their French translation by myself. The three Nenets poems are presented without any translation.

illustrations are also given in Nenets (Vella 2001). I have participated myselt at a writers' meeting, where Yuri Vella chosed to read his Nenets poems to an audience where there was no other Forest Nenets. But his new concern for the language is thoroughly integrated to his other, more political tasks. Yuri Vella's present project is to write a toponymic dictionary of the Agan basin. He intends to show how places considered to be inhabited and empty have always been integrated to the native's life, have names and have been used as pastures or hunting areas by specific clans. He hopes to give thus factual information that may be used in future by natives in order to prove their rights to land property. This attempt to reconstruct a kind of geography of the native's life is meant in three languages: Russian, Khanty and Nenets. Yuri wants to introduce the three possible names of rivers, lakes, bogs and places in general, commenting each one in the original language, without translation into the other idioms. This dictionary is at the moment but a project, only some pages have been written.

But I consider the linguistic approach very interesting. The information Yuri wants to deliver is not for curiosity and language is not put there for the sake of mere symbolical proclamation, but as a means of communication inside the ethnic group, to be used by it and by all those who are ready to make the effort to learn it. Yuri Vella thinks that by presenting his language (as well as Khanty) as selfsufficient, he may give an impulse to reality and help evolutions on this way.

Still he is quite alone on this mental position. The most active of the Nenets seem to think that if they succeed in maintaning alive some kind of life in the taiga, if they succeed in saving reindeer herding as a main form of traditional husbandry in their region, the main goal is achieved. The Agan Nenets have lost their language and do not see any means of getting it back. In half a century, nobody will speak it any more. But this does not mean that they have abandoned their values and their identity: they are only preparing to express them in a different way.

  Pyakopur and the Ayvasedapur. My observations are based on my fieldwork in the Agan area, where I spent five months between 1999 and 2000. From the linguistic point of view, the Agan Nenets are in a specific position, very different from what Kaur Mägi has experienced in Num-To 5 (2001) and Tapani Salminen in the Pur region (1998 6 ), as I will show further on. In order to understand the linguistic situation in that region, I must present first the ethnical situation in the Agan region and the Nenets' ethnical contacts.

  But it is very clearly felt when they form a community gathered in the village, and even more since the development of oil industry, for the foundation of new towns, as Radužnyj in 1984 on the middle stream, right on the pastures of the Kazamkin clan's reindeers, has chased Khanty families from their lands and led them to settle in Varyogan, increasing thus the number of Khantys.This minority position has led to a clear domination of Khanty among the native tongues. It is interesting to notice that this seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon: in 1985, Vasilyev, according to whom the Agan Nenets were 45 families (150 persons) and the Khantys represented 51 families (250 persons), maintains that "the local Khanty know Nenets in a minor degree", and that "both ethnic groups have preserved the main features of their traditional culture, the consciousness of their identity and their mother tongue"(Vasilyev 1985 : 82).Nowadays, anyhow, the situation has radically changed. Two factors prove this subordinate position of Forest Nenets compared to Khanty: on one hand the fact that there is no Khanty speaking or understanding well Nenets (the last, an old man called Mihail Sardakov 11 , died during our last expedition in September 2000); on the other hand, if a native language is preserved in mixed marriages, it is as a rule Khanty. All the Nenets who still know their mother tongue are also skilled in Khanty 12 . This stronger position of Khanty compared to Nenets appears clearly in the resistance to russification. The domination of Russian is a corollary to the domination of the Russians. It has been a direct consequence of the people's gathering into villages, with school and other institutions functioning in Russian.

Viktor Bartenev (1864-1921) was a democratic Russian activist, who spent 4 years in exile in the North of the Tobolsk region. His book was written in 1896.

This function of mediators is well illustratedalthough this example concerns another river, the Lyamin -by Toivo Lehtisalo's experience in 1914: as he was looking for the Nenets, he had to rely on the help of Khanty guides, who led him up to the Nenets camps(Lehtisalo 1959 : 138- 140).


Kaur Mägi and Eva Toulouze On Forest Nenets Shaman Songs

Very little has been written about Forest Nenets shamanism and beliefs in general. Few data have been collected at the beginning of the 20 th century. More extensive research has unfortunately been started only in the Post-Soviet period:

systematic persecution against shamans1 since the early 1930-ies and the subsequent penetration of materialistic beliefs, transmitted by all the institutional levels of society (school, army, collective and state farms system) have led indeed to very deep changes in the Forest Nenets' worldview and beliefs 2 . Shamanic practice has been particularly affected by these event: we have no reports about the present existence of performing shamans, either in our own extensive fieldwork in two Forest

Nenets areasthe Agan river and the lake Num-to -, or in any literature about this people. While questioned, informants use to mention concrete people who were shamans and are now deceased, but add that nowadays there are no real shamans.

In the Agan river basin, we have been told about living or lately deceased Khanty shamans 3 , but remembrances of Nenets shamans are much older and faded 4 . This is certainly not enough to pretend that shamans do not exist at all in the Forest Nenets areas 5 , but it allows us undoubtedly to suggest that even if shaman practice may still be found, it is but marginal.

The goal of this article is to sum up our present knowledge about Forest Nenets shamanism and to organise these data around concrete texts of shamanic and ritual songs collected in 2000. The 20. century published material does not present any text connected with shamanic practice, although published texts certainly do not cover the whole of collected data. An interesting article presenting Forest Nenets dream songs, which are actually connected with shamanic practice, has been published in 2001 by Jarkko Niemi [START_REF] Niemi | Dream Songs of the Forest Nenets" -Shamanhood, Symbolism and Epic[END_REF]. Our texts are certainly not spectacular, neither have they been recorded during real shamanic practice. But we have nothing better to start from.

It must nonetheless be mentioned that if Forest Nenets data are very poor, this is not the case for Tundra Nenets material. Tundra Nenets shamanism has been thoroughly studied 6 and there is no lack of illustrative texts and historical background [START_REF] Hoppál | Shamanhood among the Nenets" -Studies on Mythology and Uralic Shamanism[END_REF]. The Forest Nenets are undoubtedly thoroughly connected with the Tundra Nenets, like two branches of the same people 7

. Is this enough to consider that Tundra Nenets data about shamanism are valid also for Forest Nenets? Toivo Lehtisalo comments both Tundra and Forest Nenets information about beliefs in the same study without structural distinction [START_REF] Lehtisalo ; Lehtisalo | Entwurf einer Mythologie der Jurak-Samoyeden -MSFou 53[END_REF]. L. Homich, in her basic monograph about the Nenets, dedicates more than 15 pages to Nenets shamanism, but without mentioning the Forest Nenets at all (Homich 1995 : 230-246). In a former study, she noticed that the few data available about Forest Nenets correspond to what is known about the Tundra Nenets (Homič 1972 : 208).

We would like to be more prudent. The first reason is that despite the closeness of Tundra and Forest Nenets cultures, there are many fields in which analogy may not be applied. The differences between the languages are of such importance than contemporary scholars chose to treat them as separate languages and not as dialects, although their common origin is easy to identify. The Forest Nenets way of life differs considerably from the Tundra Nenets' because of the different character of their ecosystem. As far as we know, the folklore of the Forest Nenets presents some particular features and some peculiar developments (Mägi, Toulouze 2002); the Forest Nenets are aware of having borrowed the Tundra Nenets 6 Also from the point of view of textual analysis: the metric of Tundra Nenets shaman songs has been thoroughly analysed by Hajdú (Hajdú 1978). 7 Forest Nenets distinguish the other peoples by specific terms. The term used for Russians is êusa, which is also used for other "western" people, except the Komis, who are called £%sma; it may be supposed that the term kaoei, used nowadays for the Khantys, referred formerly also to other non-Nenets peoples: Selkups are called for example tðsam kaoei. But Tundra Nenets are not kaoei: they are called òiëô-ê, "people of the other country".

folklore items (narratives and songs), they mention the fact, and true enough it happens that the name of some characters are very clearly of Tundra Nenets origin.

Direct analogies do not work automatically in other cultural areas. Therefore we shall not consider as an understatement that both forms have been thoroughly identical.

We shall start from the existant Forest Nenets materials, comparing them to the very few indications from the past and only in a second stage with what we know about other peoples.

About Forest Nenets shamanism in the first decades of the 20 th century

The main researcher on Forest Nenets in the 20 th century is undoubtedly Toivo Lehtisalo. The Finnish scholar spent some time in 1914 in the Forest Nenets area, where he recorded not only the comparatively few folklore texts we find in his collection (Lehtisalo 1947 : 70-72, 79-86, 101-104, 132-147, 343-344, 406-420, 546-548, 604-607) but also a huge amount of linguistic data which are to be found in his extensive Nenets dictionary, which includes Forest Nenets as well as Tundra Nenets lexical forms [START_REF] Lehtisalo | Lexica Societatis Fenno-Ugricae[END_REF]). One of his main informants was a man from the Ngahany clan called Kallyat, whom he met in summer 1914 (Lehtisalo 1947 : X). As far as we know, Kallyat was already an old man when he got acquainted the Finnish linguist and agreed to answer his questions and practically to teach him his tongue.

Lehtisalo learned very much from Kallyat: many examples from his dictionary have been heard from him and many of the data included in his Nenets Mythology [START_REF] Lehtisalo ; Lehtisalo | Entwurf einer Mythologie der Jurak-Samoyeden -MSFou 53[END_REF] have the same source. Kallyat was a shaman and he considered Lehtisalo as a shaman as well, i.e. as a collegue; we know that Lehtisalo could have been initiated to his shamanic knowledge. But Kallyat required 50 roubles, asserting that it is not allowed to teach shamanic knowledge for free; Lehtisalo considered that he was not allowed to spend in this way the money given him as a scholarship, but he managed to gather nonetheless some information, by convincing Kallyat that if he would just speak Russian, the Nenets gods would not understand (Lehtisalo 1959 : 154).

This data are extensively referred to in Lehtisalo's Nenets mythology. In this study, a whole chapter is dedicated to what the Finnish researcher calls "the enchanters" (Die Zauberer, Lehtisalo 1924 : 145 and following), where he mentions Forest as well as Tundra Nenets shamans. According to the Forest Nenets, the shaman is the one who knows the origin of things (Lehtisalo 1924 : 165).

There is another fairly unknown researcher who had the opportunity of participate to a shamanic seance: Raisa Mitusova, after a previous pilot expedition [START_REF] Mitusova | далеком севере. (Экспедиция в Надымский край и на р. Тром-Юган)[END_REF], spent one year among the Agan Forest Nenets and she dedicated an article to her experience [START_REF] Mitusova | Год среди лесного народа[END_REF]. Unfortunately, as Homich notices, her article is nowadays a "bibliographic rarity". We have nevertheless some excerpts in Homich's article dedicated to the Forest Nenets [START_REF] Homich ; Хомич | Некоторые особенности хозяйства и культуры лесных ненцев" -Охотники, собиратели[END_REF]): the Russian ethnographer quotes entirely the parts describing the shamanic seance (Homich 1972 : 209-210). As Mitusova reports, her arrival was followed by a seance whose aim was to ask the spirits whether she was to be accepted or rejected. The shaman was an elder man, rather shabby, whom she had by chance given presents at her first meeting with the elder. During the seance, the spirits informed the shaman that Mitusova was a great healer, and this approval simplified considerably her work during her sojourn in Siberia. We shall present later more in detail some elements of this seance.

Anyhow, this is all we have to insert present data into an historical perspective.

About Kallyat and his songs

At the beginning of the 20 th century, Kallyat was probably quite well known as a shaman. Nowadays Nenets tell legends about him. We asked one of his descendants, who is also a member of the Ngahany clan, to tell us who Kallyat was. He looked to the other side of the fireplace: there was a cedar looking like a man who holds a bottle in his hand.

Kallyat went back home and told the others what had happened to him.

Later on, his kinsmen looked after the place where he had camped and they saw that the grass was trampled as if two men had been there. And there was also the cedar looking like a man. Kallyat lived further on. Before this event, he hadn"t felt any shaman powers. After this, he became a shaman. During his life, he had three wifes, and all of them died. These were the three misfortunes forecasted by the stranger.

The man who had visited Kallyat was probably some kind of forest spirit, but nobody knows wether he was good or bad" 8 .

The way Kallyat became a shaman reminds closely the experience of the two Khanty shamans mentioned by Ágnes Kerezsi: "Both of them were chosed as shamans in most ordinary conditions, while they were hunting or during a longer trip, while there were no other persons around, when they were alone in the nature.

When they talk about this event, they describe the nature around them and the weather and the hunting circumstances most realistically. Both confirmed that they did not expect the appearance of the supernatural being and there were no sign announcing it" (Kerezsi 1995 : 40). It is interesting to notice the stronger similarity of this story with the Khanty shaman's ones, while Tundra Nenets data seem to emphasize hereditary transmission of shamanic power and earlier appearance of signs from childhood (Homich 1981 : 8-9).

After Kallyat becamp a shaman, he had the opportunity of competing with other shamans:

"Once Kallyat was in a town. He drank and met a Khanty shaman. It was probably a Khanty from the Kazym River. The Khanty said: "Let us compete to see which of us is the stronger shaman. Kallyat answered: "I have no great power, just a little bit". The Khanty took seven knives; he heated them on the fire and plunged six of them into his throat. But he didn"t manage to plunge the last one. Kallyat heated also seven knives on the fire and plunged them all into his throat. So Kallyat was the winner".

The shaman plunging knives in his flesh is a recurrent theme in literature about the Nenets, starting from Richard Johnson's report in the XVIe century (Hoppál 2000 : 116). The following report is from our fieldwork in the Agan region in 2000 9 .

The Nenets Awahylu (50) (whose father Vahalyuma was saved as a child by a shaman) remembers having seen in his childhood a man plunging a knife into his flesh and pulling it out without any visible wound. He commented further on that this was a common way for weaker shamans to show their abilities. Homich's comment is somehow different, as she asserts that this kind of practice was characteristic not of weak, but of the strongest of shamans (Homich 1981 : 13).

There are still some interesting episodes from Kallyat's life, and some of them are connected with songs.

"Once in summer Kallyat was again looking for something to do. Once he saw a stork and its young woming towards him. He asked them: "How long will youn live in this world?" The stork answered: "We shall live as long as the sons of this place"s gods, as long as the sons of this place"s heavens will". This is his song, he sang it while he flew away with the grebes.

Songs accompany thus two of the main episodes of Kallyat's life. The interpretation of these songs is ambiguous: as a matter of fact they may be interpreted in two different ways. Tatva considers them as shaman songs: the stork and the grebe are at this point the spirits helping the shaman. In the grebe song's texts, the birds call Kallyat to come with them, to become one of them, to identify him to them by acquiring of some of their attributes. We may notice that the original number of the grebes is six, "only six" as emphasized in the text, which means, as seven is a positive and often sacred number, that one more is needed. And the one who completes the set is the shaman.

Nevertheless, other interpretations are possible. Most of shaman songs may be characterised as personal songs 11 as well: they are not spread on a regional basis, they are not used by other people practising the same craft, they are thoroughly individual. Each shaman has his or her own songs. The specific characteristic of the shaman's personal song is its function during the shamanic performance. "Each spirit lives in a specific place and the ways leading to them are also different. Therefore, according to Kallyat, the enchanters have different songs depending on the spirit they want to summon. Also the god of the heaven has his song. Forest Nenets shamans do not address more than one spirit at a time, because they may be mixed up and that would not do any good" (Lehtisalo 1924 : 161).

11 Personal songs are one of the main "genres" in Nenets musical tradition (as well as by other small peoples of Siberia) : each person has a personal tune which usually while consuing alcohol he or she performs with words adapted to the circumstance. The words may vary, the tune is directly connectid with its « owner » (Mägi, Ojamaa 2002: 178, Toulouze 2002 : 94).

Kallyat's songs may also be interpreted as more trivial personal songs.

According to Tatva, his intercourse with Lehtisalo was not one-sided: if the latter learned a lot about Forest Nenets culture and language by listening to Kallyat, the latter was also curious of the Finn's country, of it's culture and way of life. According to an oral report, he used to tell the other Nenets what he had heard from Lehtisalo about Finland and the West in the form of a mental travel as a migrating bird. These songs could also be the introduction to this kind of tales. It is also to be noticed that flying as a bird is a recurrent theme in Forest Nenets worldview: we have collected in the Agan region the remembrance about an elder man, who disappeared for two months. When he came back, he explained that he had gone to the Pur River region under the guise of a grebe 12 .

Still these songs do not have all the features of personal songs. Their text presents the action from an external point of view: the person used is the third, not the first. They do not have either some features characterising the shaman song, which, according to Helimski, is allocutive and not narrative (Helimski 1989 : 247),

And their contents are not very ordinary, either as a shaman song 13 either as a personal song: the birds are not presented explicitly as helping spirits, there is no reference at all to the "other world", the scope of the trip in the grebe's song is.totally absent.

Finally Tatva reports a legend about the last years of Kallyat's life:

"Kallyat got old. At that time, there was another shaman, from the Nichu clan. He was a shaman with an evil power. Kallyat was a shaman with a positiv The same kind of fight between shamans, with the use of invisible selfshooting arrows, is mentioned by Kerezsi as common by the Eastern Khantys (Kerezsi 1995 : 48).

About the fly agaric songs and their functions

Fly agaric use is often mentioned in connection with Siberian shamanism.

The consumption of fly agaric is supposed to help the shaman getting into the necessary trance, during which he communicates with the spirits and gets answers to his questions. This is how Munkácsi presents Vogul data about fly agaric: "To achieve the ecstatic state necessary for the shaman to begin his shamanic activity, Vogul shamans generally use Amanita muscaria "fly agaric'. (…) The mushroom produces shamanic ecstasy and enhances the performances of the shaman (…)

There are male and female varieties, which are used by men and women, respectively." (Munkácsi 14 1995 : 181). Fly agaric has certainly been used also by the Forest Nenets. We have collected the texts of three fly agaric songs, and shall present hereafter two of these "vipi"-songs. The name of this mushroom in Nenets is « vipi », and this word is abundantly repeated throughout the songs.

But how did the Forest Nenets use fly agaric and who dit it? Was it indeed an attribute of the shaman practice?

According to one tradition the shaman used to sing these songs during the performance, standing on one leg and imitating thus the external aspect of the mushroom 15 . Maret Saar assertsbut without mentioning any sourcethat by the Forets Nenets only "sacral persons" used fly agaric (Saar 1990 : 503). As the other shaman's songs, « vipi »-songs as well are personal songs: each of them is connected to the concrete name of a concrete person.

Still we have contradictory information about the use of fly agaric: on the one hand, we may assume that fly agaric was a common accessory of Forest Nenets shamanic practice as in their neighbour's. Tatva connects it expressedly to Khanty shamanism. In specialised literature, we find confirmation of his assertion. Barkalaja comments the use of fly agaric by the Khantys, observing that if wrongly used, it may bring no results or be dangerous, even mortal, to its user (Barkalaja 1996 : 100). He mentions a shamanic seance in 1994 during which one shaman used fly agaric, but without any results. He commented that "the mushroom's spirit might possess someone else" (Barkalaja 1998 : 62). On the eastern Khanty river of Vasyugan, there is a special category of shamans using fly agaric in order to have visions about the future (Lukina 1978 : 118). Anyhow shamans not using fly agaric were considered as more powerful than those who did (Barkalaja 1996 : 101).

The main arguments in favour of this hypotheses are both Lehtisalo's and Mitusova's reports. . He started by beating softly the drum. The blows got stronger and stronger. And Payata started to sing. He called his spirit-protector, in order to get assistance from him in his fight against the illness sent by the evil spirits. His way "to the other worlds" was apparently hard, the shaman sweated profusedly. He stood up and started walking around the fire, beating the drum with all his strength. His eyes were closed; dribble appeared at the corner of his mouth, all his body was shaken.

All the men started to shout "Ou ! Ou ! Ou !". This shout, the strikes on the drum, the jungling of the bells mixed in a deafening noise. For a long time Payata jumped around the fire. The people sitting in the tchum chased the evil spirits away by shouting "Ou ! Ou ! Ou !", in order to protect the soul of the shaman. Finally the shaman collapsed with a groan beating himself in a nerve crisis. The other Nenets lifted him seven times on the fire while one of the men went on beating the drum. When they put him back at his place, Payata regained consciousness and continued the séance" (Homich 1972 : 209).

On the other hand, Tatva has expresed two contradictory opinions:

according to one of them 18 , "vipi" was connected with shamanic practice by the Khantys, but not by the Nenets. Everybody could eat fly agaric and get "drugged", but the visions given by the mushroom did not allow the consumer to help anybody else: he could get messages for him, see events of his own future, but did not get revelations about somebody else's illness or the way to solve it. This was the peculiar function of the proficient shaman, who did not need this means to get into trance and to communicate with the spirits. This opinion is interesting: as Tatva is a younger man, who most probably did not have personal experience of shamanic practice, it may reflect a certain development in Forest Nenets shamanism. This possibility is mentioned also by Saar: the Estonian mycologist mentiones the individual or collective use of fly agaric in order to obtain "a pleasant psychic state" (Saar 1990 : 513). True enough, she does not explicitely mention to what ethnic group this information refers, but we may assume it concerns the Khantys, for her field work was achieved by the Yugan Khantys.

Somehow his assertion in confirmed by another informant, the Nenets poet Yuri Vella, who comments thus the use of fly agaric: "The fly agaric song is sung when fly agaric is eaten. That is done when a person feels the need to attain 17 Russian word for the conic tent in Western and Central Siberia.

the condition occasioned by the use of fly agaric. This need is felt when someone falls ill and the shaman is not nearby, yet it is necessary to perform supernatural procedures. Anyone can do this to a certain extent, by the way, even without fly agaric, if he is able to concentrate. Fly agaric helps a person to concentrate more quickly and effectively on his/her inner self" [START_REF] Mägi | Toulouze Eva -Discovering Siberia : Songs of the Forest Nenets. Songs of the Finno-Ugric peoples 1 -Estonian Literary Museum[END_REF].

According to this assertion, fly agaric is used when "the shaman is not nearby", therefore we can assume that it is not an attribute of the shamans, but of lower categories, who have not the necessary spiritual strength to concentrate by their own means 19

. As a matter of fact, Mitusova does not give any indication of the category Payata belonged to either of his strength. We cannot exclude that the Nenets she visited had no stronger shaman. But they had to face an unknown problem, the coming of a Russian ethnographer who intended to sojourn with them; and they had to find a proper answer. This is of course merely a hypothesis allowing conciliating Mitusova's account of fly agaric use with other data concerning the Nenets as a whole and the Forest Nenets in particular.

As a matter of fact Homich does not mention at all fly agarics in her global presentation of Nenets shamanism (Homich 1995 : 230-246). It is interesting to mention that also other scholars presenting Nenets shamanism omit to mention the use of this mushroom (Basilov 1997). This is to be emphasised, because during the Soviet period all kind of materialistic explanations about shamanism were most welcome (as Bogoraz-Tan's pathological explanations, Bogoraz 1910). Nevertheless, Homich assumes that fly agaric could play a certain role, although it was not common among the Nenets: "There are interesting data showing that Forest Nenets shamans used stimulating means, the fly agaric (...) As far as the Nenets, and especially the Tundra Nenets, are concerned, the use of fly agaric was not typical.

They did not use either alcoholic beverages before the seances" (Homich 1981 : 29-30). Probably the Forest Nenets data she quotes (without precise indications) are no more than the above-mentioned report by Mitusova. Anyhow, in the same article, Homich explains the shaman's trance not by the use of hallucinogen mushrooms, but

18 Oral information to Kaur Mägi, Num-to, October 2001. 19 This deduction corresponds to Mircea Eliade assertion about the use of fly agaric by the Uralic peoples of Central Russia and of Siberia as a "vulgar substitute for "pure" trance" (Eliade 1974 : 401). Maret Saar also mentions this principle and emphasises that shamans using fly agaric where less respected than those who did not need the help of the mushroom: this information comes from oral information gived by the Russian scholar Simchenko (Saar 1990 : 504).

by other reasons: "The shaman's ecstasy was due to a complex set of factors:

special training and teaching, a system of representations acquired from childhood, the development of fantasy, the conditions of the seance etc." (Homich 1981 : 38).

Thus, we must consider the use of fly agaric by the Nenets shamans as marginal. Anyhow, as soon as 1981, Homich explains the shaman's trance not by the use of hallucinogen mushroom, but by other reasons : "The shaman's ecstasy was due to a complex set of factors : special training and teaching, a system of representations acquired from childhood, the development of fantasy, the conditions of the seance etc." (Homich 1981 : 38). Lar, who does not either mention the use of fly agaric, emphasises the importance of the drum as a means of communication with the spirits (Lar 1994 : 99).

Homich, following Mitusova, observes that Forest Nenets shamanism differs considerably from Khanty's shamanism on one basic point: as by the Tundra Nenets, "not everybody was able to be a shaman" (Homich 1972 : 210). Although we have no data about how shamans learned their skills (Homich 1972 : 209), "[Forest Nenets] shamans were distinguished by different steps of skills (Mitusova met also "small" shamans, who had very low authority)" (Homich 1972 : 210) : besides the categories of "good" and "evil" shamans, many authors mention the existence of "strong" and "weak" shamans (Homich 1981 : 13). This gradation of shamans according to their power may explain Tatva's assertion: only "smaller" shamans used fly agaric, strong shamans able to cure and to predict did not need this means to fulfil their tasks. We find a possible confirmation of this hypothesis in Hajdù's observation, that readers of dreams were the lowest category of shamans: the basic word for shamans (TN/ tðìibe, FN/ tƁôioea) was not used for them, they were called jütt¦sðmm¦ òieïïeä (Nj) "Zauberer, der nur aus dem Traur wahrsagt" or jütt%rtaï òieïïeä (Nj) The first interesting feature is that the owner of this song, as well as Myty in another one, call for seven fly agaric "girls". Lehtisalo mentioned already the fly agaric spirit as beeing human-shaped 20 but he did not mention the gender of the spirits. According to Tatva, the mushroom spirits are usually young females. In our third "vipi"-song, the spirit is the "mother of fly-agarics". The second interesting element is the number of the mushroomsseven in both songs coming from Numto, while in the third song the number is not explicit.

Allyu's song reminds of some particulars in Lehtisalo's report, as the running of the spirits in a precise direction, or the question about the origin of the mushrooms. Wa may alse mention the importance of fire in this song, while standing in the fire is, according to Tatva, a recurrent theme in "vipi"-songs. Anyhow the contents of this song show that most probably Allyu was a shaman, whose song is directly connectif with shamanic practice.

Anyhow, the active practice of shamanism, as mentioned previously, seems to be by the Forest Nenets deprived of present reality. This appears well in the evolution of some songs connected to the fly agaric. We have a good example in our repertoire with a "vipi"-song being performed nowadays as humorous song: the performer imitates an old shaman, who used to fell asleep some times during the performance of his song. Yuri Vella has repeatedly performed this imitation in front of us, adding though that he did not see the old shaman himself, but had seen him imitated by another Nenets. This shows already some distance between the performer in 1999 and 2000 and its model.

Mother of fly agaric…/sigh, snoring/ Mother of fly agaric, I here present my mother's song. Mother of fly agaric, I here present my mother's song. Carrying my children, carrying them (holding hands) here I climb under the tent's cloth... /snoring/ So that my children may see one day, day, I will take them out, out (=save them).

On one foot, foot, I begin to sing. /Speech/ Tomorrow, tomorrow I can see /speech, snoring / Well, then he apparently fell asleep again.

We tried to sum up what we know about Forest Nenets shamanism in connection with songs and we must recognise that the existent material is quite thin.

Anyway, from the quantitative point of view, we have at our disposal three « vipi »songs and two quite questionable shaman songs. As we have come to the conclusion that probably the use of fly agaric, though well-known and existent, was not a norm in proper shamanic practice, we may assume that more persons that real powerful shamans were addicted to fly-agaric consumption and performed these songs, explaining thus that these have been transmitted more easily than true shaman songs. The two possible shaman songs we presented seem, compared with the examples we have from Tundra Nenets shaman songs (Homich 1981 : 39-41;Lehtisalo 1924 : 167), much more simple and fragmentary : if they were really performed by Kallyat during a shamanic seance, they were probably much longer and detailed. Anyhow they have been preserved upon a form that allows a functional shift and permits them to be received nowadays as personal songs.

  Lehtisalo's comments about fly agaric use concern the Forest Nenets as he got information from Kallyat. According to him, Forest Nenets shamans knew the use of fly agaric. They used it dried and washed. Only those were allowed to eat them who knew the origin of the plant. Those who did not see correctly the spirits of the mushroom may die or go mad. Usually shamans ate two and a half agarics. The shaman saw a number of human-shaped spirits corresponding to the number of mushrooms. Half a mushroom represents half a spirit. They start to run, following the sun on its way from sunset to sunrise and the shaman runs after them. He could not keep pace but the half spirit runned more slowly and looked constantly behind as if waiting for his other half 16 . All is dark and the shaman does not see anything. The spirits disclosed what the shaman wanted to know during this journey(Lehtisalo 1924 : 165).Mitusova describes the seance she attended in 1928: "On his clothes, Payata [the shaman] put on a long white calico shirt that reached his knees. He sat down and started to chew tobacco with bits of fly agaric. At the same time other Nenets brought the drum and started to warm it. It seemed to be an ordinary Nenets drum -rather big, and the strut used by the shaman to hold it supported chains to which small bells were suspended. The shaman's face reddened, his eyes became vague. He sipped some water, probably in order to strengthen the effect of the fly agaric, but perhaps only to quench his thirst. Because of the fire, it was very warm in the tchum 17

  Mitusova's example comes from the Agan river, where Forest Nenets are clearly a minority population and certainly were particularly such when Mitusova visited them, as most of the Forest Nenets migrations either from the Pur region or from Num-to took place in the 1930-ies. Many authors have presented descriptions of Tundra Nenets shamanic seances, most of them from the 1920-1930 (for example Yevladov 1992 : 122-126) and in none fly agarics are mentioned. We may explain the presence of fly agaric by the Forest Nenets by Khanty influence, as Khanty are dominant in the Agan area. Probably geographical factors are also essential, as the availability of the fly agaric, which is mostly a forest mushroom.

kaóat kðëikðt-k%naws Kallyat's grebe song (Tatva)

  Kallyat said: "Yes, it seems that you will live long indeed, I think I should come with you." People do not say that Kallyat went with the stork, we just don"t know whether he went or not. " "The once again, I don"t know whether it happened before or after the meeting with the stork, in the autumn Kallyat met six grebes. The grebes asked him: "Will you come with us? You could very well come, but you have bad clothes. They are not waterproof. We have good clothes, given by the heavenly father". Kallyat

	Kaëu ìðtmaj kÐpaj malta malta	The stork walked, threw his leather malitsa
	òumta wƁtƁł ûiµt mУata	taking his child by the hand. into the water,
	Kaëu taëam ma Êaoehaëata	The stork said: cast it in.
	ôuñi numuç òu kaµtał kaçmaj	"The child of these heavenly beings, [Into the water it] fell, and floated.
	ôuñi kähuç òu łiçwimt%£ä kaóat paêaçaj	the child of these gods, Kallyat flapped his wings as the
	p%jtu£ kaôitu£	their noses, their nails seventh.
	HusƁł kƁn ìupaç ìahaçna	when they end, In a warm lands
	Maj kðn£aj Kaóat ìðt%ëa	we will die, Kallyat goes,
	Tajna kðn£aj Kaóat mant%	then we will die." Kallyat says...
	ôiñi kaóat kaëu£-Ôi	That is Kallyat's stork song. That's all.
	k%naws
	threw his malitsa
	Maµtëi maµtëi paìaê	Only six, only six grebes,
	paìaê paìaê	grebes, grebes,
	waµptu£ mƁnłtuç mƁnłtuç	Say, beginning to speak:
	Kaóat tžíŽn	"Kallyat, come and be the
	łiçwimt%£ä	seventh!
	òƁnanaç òƁnanaç tžíŽn	Come, come with us!"	The stork started
	Maµtëi paìaê singing: waµptu£ mƁnłtuç	Only three grebes start to speak, saying:
	tohomaç tƀmſn £%펳iç	"If only you would come with us,
	kaóat kaëu£-k%naws £aiëa pan%ížt hƁ£uëŽn£aç	Kallyat's stork song (Tatva) your clothes are rotting.
	maòaç num òłanaç	Our clothes,
	kaóat mant% TƁm% pan%ížnaç	Kallyat says: given by heaven, by our father
	ŁƁìaµt íiëiwsuta ûiµkðt ûiµkðt man%ëa	"How much longer will you live." repel water,
	h¦£uêta niç £aç	they are not rotted."
	Kaóat ôiki wƁta namtał	Kallyat, hearing this talk

10

into the water and it remained there, floating on the surface. Kallyat flew away with the grebes to warmer countries where he spent the winter. He came back in the spring. His relatives had found nothing but his malitsa, they didn"t know whether he was dead or alive. In the spring Kallyat showed up.

"

  Zauberer, der nur aus dem Traur wahrsagt", according toLehtisalo's dictionary (Hajdú 1960 : 59). It is interesting to notice, though Hajdú does not comment this fact, that the linguistic forms presented by him come from the Forest Nenets area and are clearly Forest Nenets dialectal forms. The translation is also not absolutely correct, for òła£/ òła in Forest Nenets does not mean "sorcerer", but just "person, human being". Therefore this expression is quite simple.But in October 2000, in a conversation with Yuri Vella recorded in Tartu's Literary Museum, Tatva commented his performance of fly agaric songs expressing a contradictory position. When answering to Yuri Vella's question about the number of mushrooms to be eaten, he asserted that occasionnally people ate three agarics, but seven (as in the songs he performed) was the maximum they could eat. Only the strongest shamans were able to ingest up to ten. The matter is that to each musheroom corresponds one spirit. If you call many spirits, it is much more difficult to control them, they may mislead you and even cause your death. This assertion seems to indicate that Forest Nenets shamans, and even the strongest ones, did really use fly agarics. But this does not mean that this use was regular or compulsury. Further on, we do not know the real reason of fly agaric use, as nothing is said about that nor in the songs neither in the comments.

	£%ëi ôaha£	Go farther in that direction.
	paìiëðêaç
	Kuñi£am%häna	Another time he says:
	mant%
	íiwsuµta pžìan	"The infants that remained after
		us,
	£ałµkiç tuêaç	children, add wood to your fire."
	oeaµta£Ɓta
	łeçew ûŽpi-òe	Seven fly agaric girls
	tun pakaêíat	climbed into the fire.
	aóÐê haçmaj	Al'u was able,
	oeemałi tun nžêìat	he stood in the fire without his
		boots,
	tuhuna taêa£a	dances in the fire.
	tuµta tu£ òiòa	Above a burning fire
	łeçew ûŽpi-òe	seven fly agaric girls
	ìohoêkuçòiçiw	bewilder him.
	tajna mant%, m$	Then he says, well:
	£am% ìðëahana	"Some day
	taëam mant£ðtaç	you will say:
	£upuna £ałµkiç	Infants,
	òiëimaç taêłƁł	our grandfather was like that."
	In our collection we have recorded three fly agaric songs: two of them
	come from the Num-to region and one from the Agan basin. One of them -
	presented below -belongs to Allyu Vylla (Num-to), but we do not know for sure
	whether he was considered as a shaman or not. Another song's owner is Myty Pyak
	(Num-to) who was a shaman, as well as Yancha (Agan). But they had not the
	reputation of being strong shamans.
	w$çla aóu ûŽpi-k%naws	Allyu Vylla's fly agaric song (Tatva)
	Łeçew ûŽpi-òe	Seven fly agaric girls,
	łeçew ûŽpi-òe	seven fly agaric girls,
	£%ëi ôaha£	go farther in that direction!
	paìiëðêaç
	ôoêaj taìa	I have a belt,
	łihiêôiç íƁtm%	forged by the šihilhča,
	òahaê £¦su£oµta	It has three joins.
	ôoêaj tada£a	I have a belt.
	łeçew ûŽpi-òe	Seven fly agaric girls,
	ìðêaç kuna	where is your land.
	łihiêôiç íƁtm%	Made by the šihilhča.

There are many references about the ideological war against shamanism (Suslov 1931 is one of the most complete articles on the subject) and knowledge about repressions in Western Siberia. Nevertheless few authors give more concrete information about the latter than Sokolova (Sokolova 1992 : 147).

This article deals in particular with Forest Nenets culture. These phenomena are of course not specific to the Forest Nenets: all the so-called small peoples of Siberia have more or less gone through the same historical evolution and deep changes have been noticed anywhere. Many studies have been dedicated to these items, but this is the first attempt to sum up what we know about Forest Nenets shamanic tradition.

As, in the Trom-yugan region, Ivan Stepanovich Sopochin (deceased in the early 1990-ies), and his kinsman Leonid Mikhailovich Sopochin, born in 1954[START_REF] Kerezsi | Особенности восточно-хантыйского шаманизма в наши дни[END_REF]

40).4 We have been told about a shaman who was called Yancha: he was the father of Pavel Yanchevich Ayvaseda, who died in the mid 1990-ies. There is thus a generation gap between Khanty and Nenets shamans in the Agan region.5 We have no concrete experience at the moment about the third great Forest Nenets area, the upper course of the Pur river.

This and the following legends have been referred by Tatva in Yuri Vella"s winter camp on the river Tyuytyakha (ion the Agan region), on October 10., 2000.

Referred during his visit to Yuri Vella"s winter camp on the Tyuytyakha River, onOctober, 16. 2000.

Malitsa: a typical men"s cloth like a long anorak worn with a belt.

Tatina, village of Varyogan (Agan region), September 2. 2000.

If comparing to Tundra Nenets material.

Munkácsi"s data about the Voguls have been collected during his fieldwork in Siberia in 1888-1889.

Oral information by Triinu Ojamaa.

In this report there is a theme reminding us of the above-mentioned grebe song: it is the shaman seen as completing the spirit"s groupsix grebes + 1, half a spirit waiting for his other half running after him.

So did Barkalaja about the Khanty fly agaric spirits, who were somehow similar to little men with sharp heads(Barkalaja 1996 : 100).

The quotations are from the booklet of the CD.