Mansi

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This article is about the Mansi people. If you are looking for their language, see Mansi language.

Mansi


Total population
11432 (rising - it was 8500 in 1989)
Regions with significant populations
Russia
Language
Russian, Mansi
Religion
Shamanism, Russian Orthodoxy

Mansi (obsolete: Voguls) are an endangered indigenous people living in Khantia-Mansia, an autonomous okrug within Tyumen Oblast in Russia. In Khantia-Mansia, the Khanty and Mansi languages have co-official status with Russian.

The Mansi have been in contact with the Russian state at least since the 16th century when most of Western Siberia was brought under Russian control by Ermak. Due to their higher exposure to Russian and Soviet control, they are generally more assimilated than their Northern neighbours, the Khanty.

In the 1960s, exploitation of the rich oil deposits of Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug began, causing the Soviet Union's largest internal migration wave since the Second World War. This led to a dramatic marginalisation of the Mansi and Khanty who today constitute slightly more than one percent of the district's population. At the same time their homeland has been massively devastated by thirty years of oil extraction.

As for most other Northern indigenous peoples of Russia, the Soviet state ordered the creation of a "national literature" for the Mansi people which consisted mostly of works hailing the enlightenment and progress brought to the Mansi by Lenin's revolution. The most prominent Mansi representative of this genre was the writer Yuvan Shestalov, who after the breakup of the Soviet Union converted to shamanism. Since then he claims that the Mansi are in fact the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, a claim hardly shared by anyone else.

Together with the Khanty people, the Mansi are politically represented by the Association to Save Yugra, an organisation founded during the Perestroika of the late 1980s. This organisation was among the first regional indigenous associations in Russia.

Mansi population according to 2002 census[1]
	Total	Men	Women
Total	11,432	5,167	6,265
Tyumen Oblast	10,561	4,786	5,775
*Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug	9,894	4,510	5,384
Sverdlovsk Oblast	259	130	129
Komi Republic	11	8	3

The Mansi language is of the Ugrian branch of the Finno-Ugric family of languages.

Anthropologically the Mansi belong to the Uralic race. They are short, they have high cheekbones and slit eyes and their eyes and hair are dark. In comparison with the other Finno-Ugric peoples, the Mansi exhibit significantly more Mongoloid characteristics. These characteristics are more evident in the southern Mansi.