340,056 views
※ This video is part of <Documentary Prime - Traveling to Ural and Altai Part 3, The Soul of Southern Siberia, Tuva> broadcast on June 13, 2011. We meet the magnificent Ural Mountains, which are the border between East and West, the nature of the Altai Mountains, which are the origin of Asia and connect Siberia and Asia, and the people who live together in them. The land created humans. Humans developed the land, established life, and created culture and history. In the 17th century, it was a great empire that wanted to become the center of Europe, and through its eastward expansion policy, it expanded beyond the frozen Siberia to the Primorsky Krai and Sakhalin, a country that occupies 1/3 of the world's land area. 80% of the people are Slavs and 150 or so ethnic minorities live together, and it is a country with a world-class cultural heritage and spiritual home, Russia! Russia is a country with two faces in one body: Asia and Europe. A land where European and Eastern cultures coexist, and where the tundra, taiga, and grassland areas are diversely spread out! Russia, a land of extreme cold where temperatures range from -30 to 40 degrees Celsius, visits the Ural and Altai Mountains, and shares the power of Russia that unfolds in the snowy fields through the lives of the people who live together in this barren land. - In southern Siberia, Russia, there is a large mountain range called Sayan-Altai. This mountain range, which is familiar to us as Altai, encompasses Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China, and Tuva is an autonomous republic of Russia located to the east of Altai. This hidden land, geographically located in the center of Asia, is a place where tundra, taiga, wetlands, and deserts coexist, and where the original form of Siberian shamans who communicated with nature is well preserved. Tuva was a land that connected the Eurasian grassland and Asia, but at the same time, due to its rugged geographical conditions that make it difficult to access, it has remained a land that is not easily accessible to anyone. We meet people living in harmony with nature in Tuva and see how the vivid sounds of nature that city dwellers’ bodies and minds have long since forgotten are fully incorporated into the lives of the Tuvan people. ■ Jumen’s family waiting for spring in the winter pasture “Tototototo” “Jjijijijiji.” Even today, the sounds of calling goats and sheep echo in the small winter pasture surrounded by snowy mountains. Jumen, a fifteen-year-old middle school student in the city, helps his father drive a flock of 300 sheep up the hill on weekends. The sheep diligently search for grass that is not easily visible under the snow covering the hills. Jumen has to prevent the sheep from straying from the flock and becoming food for wolves, but Jumen’s ‘sheep calling’ does not cut through the air of the grassland as far as his father’s. It is a life in the dry winter pasture where sheep and goats, cows and horses, dogs and people have to share the little water, but the Jumen family knows how to overcome this hurdle they have to overcome every year. As winter comes to an end, lambs are born one by one on the ranch. Jumen's mother feeds the lambs that are dying from not being able to suckle their mother's milk and sings a lullaby that has been passed down from shepherds to shepherds in the distant past. Life in the winter pastures seems endlessly lonely, isolated from the mountains and without neighbors, but with hundreds of livestock as family, there is no time to feel lonely. Let's watch the days of the Jumen family, who play the sounds of nature with their bodies. ■ People who play the sounds of nature with their bodies 'Humei' Andrei, a humei player, leads his young students to an outdoor class on the frozen banks of the Yenisei River. Andrei teaches his students how to imitate the sounds of birds sitting on tree branches and crying, and how to feel and express the sounds of the winter wind. The students each try to extract the nature of winter Tuva from their bodies in their own ways. Andrei teaches that the sounds of nature are the sounds of the soul, and that true humei should come from the heart, not the throat. Tuvan vocal songs, humei, are world-famous. Humei, similar to Mongolian Humi, is an art that expresses the sounds of nature through the instrument of a human being. Humei is the essence of the animism of nomads that has continued since ancient times. The nomads of southern Siberia have been able to perceive the spirits of nature through the shapes and positions of objects as well as their sounds, and this eventually developed into an art of life in which humans imitate the sounds of wind, water, and animals. Tuvan Humei players begin Humei at a young age of six or seven. Through the lives of Humei player Andrei and his disciples, we encounter the sounds of Tuvan filled with nature. ■ Tuva, a land close to gods, a ladder between gods and humans 'Shaman' Andrei&